Kitchen Garden Forum

Rained all day here but the promised gales turned out to be nothing more than a stiff breeze. Reassuring really as there should be no damage down at lottie.

London third airport has been very quiet today.
M11 was shut for a while and the Stansted Express trains had problems near Broxbourne and Elsenham, plus the snow overwhelming the multiple grit applications put the kybosh on buses and coaches.
In other news the airport itself seems to have head trouble with the snow anyway!

My nice, new this year, netting over my cabbages now has several tears in it caused by several inches of snow settling on it.

That is annoying about your netting, Peter....

Steam train charter scheduled for trip from Slough to Stratford upon Avon was terminated early when it reached Reading due to points failure and adverse weather conditions





At home the netting over the chicken coop enclosure came down under weight of snow.
Removed it completely before it got to floor level and chickens became entangled in it.

Minus 4 in the greenhouse this morning.

Looks as if some of us are in for a severe frost tonight so, make sure any stored potatoes or other things that might be damaged by frost, are well covered and protected....

-7 here last night still no snow and blue skies but cold

Now that's what you call a proper frost, out there this morning!

If this is Early Winter what's deep mid-Winter going to be like? When was the last bit of proper Winter?

Only time will tell, Geoff....

Think how cold it would be without global warming, they seem to have stopped saying we should have been entering an ice age.

The met folk say it was 2010/11.
The coldest winter on record was in the winter of 1963, when it fell to -0.18 degrees. And, to cheer us up, they're forecasting a very cold winter this year.

Got up to Thunder, Lightening, hailstones (being dark thought it was heavy rain) when I could see out side everything was white.

After 1963, we did have a run of very cold and especially snowy winters in the mid and late 1970s here. We had a Landrover Defender then and were often the only people who safely got to work and on time. My OH spent his time collecting colleagues and taking them back home again. The coldest temperature I have experienced in the north of England was -11C but the coldest temperature in my life was -27C when every morning the condensation from our breath resulted in big lumps of ice INSIDE the bedroom windows ...... interesting. That was in 1947.

1980/81 winter I experienced the ice inside the windows thing.
We'd moved from a centrally heated wing of an Elizabeth an mansion to a 1950s/60s bungalow with an open fire in the living room.