Jess Gough

Jess Gough 🌽🐝🐓🦆🍏🪿🐖 🍅
Smallholding growing food & putting nature first
Bath, Somerset, UK, zone 8

18/01/2026

happysmallholding 💚

17/01/2026

Some ideas to organise your garden shed this winter 🤩🤓🌱

🌱 Fold and roll netting, tie it and then ADD A LABEL so you know what size it is when you come to reuse in the spring.
🌱 Screw castor wheels onto pallets to store heavy items, which will allow you to move them easily when you need to.
🌱 Photo storage boxes for seeds made seed organisation really easy.
🌱 I stack my pots in boxes to keep them altogether and save space.
🌱 I hang my gloves on a rope so that they dry out when wet and to keep pairs together.

07/01/2026

Happy solstice everyone! Here’s what I’m doing in the garden this winter:\n\n🌱 Mulching my beds. A mulch is a layer that you apply to the surface of the soil to help with moisture retention and retain weeds. Mulching with organic matter has the additional benefit of feeding the soil life, which in turn feeds my plants. A mulch of organic matter is anything natural that will break down so compost, woodchip, animal manure or even wool.\n\n🌱 Re-woodchipping my paths. A section of my vegetable garden has woodchip paths. These breakdown over time, which is great because they feed the soil life as they do so, but it does mean they need topping up every 1-2 years. I’m putting down a layer of cardboard first because I’ve been collecting it over the year and my paths were quite weedy so I wanted to add an additional barrier.\n\n🌱 Planting trees and hedging is my favourite job! Planting trees and hedging in winter is a good idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that bare root trees are available. These are trees which are dug up from the ground and delivered without any soil around their roots (as opposed to potted trees). This is the most cost effective way to buy trees but bare root trees are only available in the winter while the trees are dormant. It’s also better to plant trees in the winter as they have time to establish before the dry summer. This is the same for fruit bushes.\n\n🌱 Building structures. I never have time for making things in the summer so winter is an opportunity for this. In previous years we’ve made animal housing but this year, as there’s no plans for more animals anytime soon we’re going to be making some gates for the vegetable garden and plant supports with our willow.\n\n

16/12/2025

This is my last course on the smallholding in 2024! In collaboration with .

Here’s what we’ll cover:
🌱 Tour of the smallholding: bees, kitchen garden, essentials garden, ducks, chickens, orchard and coppice
🌱 Free time to explore the garden
🌱 How to set up a new growing space
🌱 How to plan for the growing year ahead
🌱 How to sow seeds & care for plants (practical seed sowing session)
🌱 Planting out
🌱 Soil & how to make compost
🌱 Companion planting
🌱 Managing pest damage
🌱 Harvesting
🌱 Preserving harvests

🌻 Sunday 6th October, 10am-5pm
🍓West Somerset, near Bridgwater
🍋To book, head to and click the link in their bio or comment “tell me more” and we’ll share the link with you there!

10/12/2025

Give these flowers a head start for next year by sowing them now.

Hardy annuals are plants that flower and die all in one year, and most importantly, can survive frost.

You can direct them sow now and they will establish and overwinter quite happily outside. Come spring they’ll grow really quickly and flower very early.

Flowers you can sow now include borage, nigella, cerinthe, cornflowers and poppies. I’ll be sowing sweet peas too this autumn, towards the end of October/early November (video coming soon). These flowers are great for pollinators too, and getting them to flower early provides a vital nectar & pollen source for insects.

To sow, sprinkle the seeds onto the surface of the soil (roughly 1 seed for every square 20cm). Rake them in lightly or brush over little bit of soil with your hands. Water them in.

Note if we have a really hard frost you may lose some plants, but generally they should make it to spring 😊🌱💚

08/12/2025

Follow these tips to keep your tomatoes in tip top condition! You can tomatoes that have split, they just won’t keep as well and the flavour isn’t quite as intense due to the higher water content. Just check for mould before eating 🌱

07/12/2025

happy_smallholding Village 💚

06/12/2025

Happysmallholding 💚

02/12/2025

A tidy garden shed is a tidy mind 😅

How do you keep your gardening paraphernalia organised? Here are my favourite garden shed organisation hacks. You probably have a lot of the things I use in your shed already!

🌱 I keep my pots in crates, rather than stacking them loosely. I find this helps keep pots of the same size together which makes it much easier to find the pots I’m looking for.
🌱 I make tool hooks with old planks of wood and screws or nails. To do this I place the tools where I want them to sit on the wood, and fix in place loosely with screws or nails so I can easily remove and replace the tool.
🌱 I have a piece of rope hanging up in my shed and I hang my gloves on here with clothes pegs. This helps soggy gloves to dry out, and it keeps pairs together 🙌.

01/12/2025

Making a bird box is a great way of using up those offcuts of wood that are too small for anything else. This is a really fun activity, especially for a rainy day! If doing this with kids make sure they are supervised at all times 💚🌱

Here’s some more information on how I built my bird box. The Wildlife Trusts and RSPB have some great information on their websites too 🤗

🪺 Equipment 🪺

🌱 Wood offcuts
🌱 Screws or nails
🌱 Hammer (if using nails)
🌱 Drill
🌱 Saw
🌱 Ruler
🌱 Pencil

🪺 Box Dimensions 🪺

You don’t need to follow precise measurements - just build your box to suit the materials you have available. The offcuts I had determined the final dimensions of my box, and there was a little trial and error when cutting too 🤭 I’ve put my measurements below to give an idea but birds really aren’t fussy so work with what you have! I wrapped the front, back and sides around the bottom piece of wood.

Sides: 17cm front, 29cm back, 14.5cm bottom, 2cm thick
Front: 17cm tall, 16.5cm wide, 2.4cm thick
Roof: 24cm long, 16.5cm wide, 2.4cm thick
Bottom: 12cm wide, 14.5cm deep
Back: 43cm tall, 19.5cm wide

🪺 Hole openings 🪺

Having the right hole size is really important for attracting birds & keeping them safe.

🌱 25mm for blue t**s
🌱 28mm for great t**s
🌱 38mm for sparrows
🌱 Robins prefer an open fronted box, so the front panel should be shorter than the sides to create a slot entrance at the top.

🪺 Where to site a bird box 🪺

Generally bird boxes shouldn’t be too close to each other to avoid competition, with the exception of sparrows who like their nests to be close to one another. Put your nest box in a quiet spot where it won’t be subject to too much human disturbance.

Heights:

🌱 2-4 metres blue t**s
🌱 4-6 metres great t**s
🌱 Under the eaves of a house for sparrows
🌱 Robins like to be nestled in the undergrowth, so site robin nest boxes about a 1m off the ground with plenty of cover from plants.

🌱 You can add some rubber, felt or something else waterproof along the top of the nesting box where the roof joins the back. This will help to keep the box watertight and last for longer.

Address

Green Lane
Bath
BA27TL

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