In these uncertain times there is nothing more reassuring and life affirming than working in our gardens. All life is stirring and in my garden the birch bank is now thick with primroses and daffodils. In the vegetable garden I am picking the last of the kale and digging up stray carrots like so much lost treasure.

To make contact with the soil and grow vegetables and herbs is to answer a need that strikes deep within our very being. It connects us to the earth and to all those generations who have worked the land. My raised beds aren’t so very different from those that would have been familiar to our medieval ancestors for on velum scrolls and within the illuminated pages of ancient books men and women are working narrow raised beds. Beds that are filled not only with leeks and cabbages, onions and turnips but with herbs and roses because our modern ideas of companion planting, where flowers grow alongside vegetables to attract beneficial insects, have their roots firmly planted in the 12th century.

I have grown my vegetables and herbs in raised beds for 20 years ever since my younger son, Matthew created four raised beds out of half round timbers. Until that point my vegetable garden was simply one great bed with rows of vegetables set far apart so that I could hoe between them. This was the era of double digging and endless weeding where you began at one end and by the time you had come to the other the weeds had sprung up behind you.

Raised beds changed all that for they are narrow enough to reach into the middle without standing on the bed itself. Weeding takes a matter of minutes and the soil, being raised up and renewed with compost and well-rotted manure annually becomes that ideal of free draining but moisture retentive soil. Pictured here are Matt’s beds with the addition of four beds created in 2009 to take the excess soil from digging out the pond. They have served me very well over the years but nothing lasts for ever and my raised beds are in advanced old age.

It’s an opportunity not only to renew to but simplify and most importantly enlarge the paths that wind in and out from one bed to the other which, in practice were difficult to negotiate with a full wheelbarrow. The sweet chestnut fence has been rolled back and the beds dismantled to be replaced by four longer raised beds with a circular container echoing the circular Corten steel planter in the little yard.

There is no going back but will the new raised beds be in time for this planting season? I certainly hope so for there is still plenty of time before the sowing season gets into its stride. I can, for instance, sow peas and broad beans in pots and root trainers like runner beans and sweet corn which I sow later in the month. Salad crops can be sown in modules. There is time for in a month or two when the soil warms up then everything will catch up, it always does.