Kitchen Garden Forum

Your wish is my command, Monika...

Glad the wind isn't blowing today, or it would seem rather chilly...draining the 2 stroke petrol out of my machines today, then running them until they empty the carbs...surprising how long jobs like that take!!

Well, contrary to my earlier posting... a bit of digging did go...our sandy soil wins again. 12' x 5' area turned over completing one section of garden as far as I can go until I lift some potatoes that got left in. actually I pulled a few out the other day and they were lovely still.

...and yes, machines...I really must unpack the s/h Ransomes Marquis 51 cutting cylinder unit that is still in its box in the front room...

C.

Thank you, OH!

I certainly could not have dug anything today, the ground stayed solidly frozen all day. But it was a grand day with plenty of sunshine for my 90 minute shopping walk, treading very carefully on the icy paths. Tomorrow's plan is to clear some old vegetation off the snowdrop patches to give them room to show off. Our primroses are fully out already. And the birds were very active today: as well as the usual blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits, bullfinches, house sparrows and chaffinches on the feeder, we also had a pair of nuthatches, a female siskin and a male reed bunting. The reed buntings breed on the moor not far from our house but they only come into the gardens in winter when the food runs out there.

I hang my head in shame, I haven't spent as much as half an hour outside today.
Instead I have been painting (decorating, I'm not an artist). It was gloss topcoat today.

I've started to clean up the strawberry plants, my feet got cold quickly from standing still, so I'll do it in shorter sessions!

There's some good frost on my digging this morning...proper cast iron hard.

C.

Cold, frosty and very beautiful here in deepest darkest Dorset this morning. With lots of moisture in the air yesterday and -3C overnight everything was covered in hoary ice crystals. And nobody told the radicchio that the NYE party is cancelled - it looked pretty in its frosty dress.

Lovely haw frost covering everything this morning here too, but we are still lacking the sunshine which was promised on the weather forecast.

Been fiddling about with some complicated wiring this morning, on my Wheel Horse 518h...seems to have electrical everything! It's stopped charging and t's being a nightmare to find...trouble is you can't see electric... And it's a bit chilly on ones fingers too...

Was a tad cold even down here, I was very tempted to do a bit of burning but too many down & although only a slight breeze it was coming from the wrong direction so I kept working on emptying the front compost bed to take off the chill. As the top was frozen I have created a pretty impressive cave & when it warms a bit & the top drops into it, it hopefully will show not much left of it so I can prep it for the new Rhubarb bed that will go there - or dig some more! :

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Bloody freezing here ,on top of it all my heating boiler threw a wobbler after going to the plot ( forgot to take a flask of hot water to de ice the chickens water ) I tried to fix it with the screams off my grandson as I dared enter his bedroom to get at the boiler by mid afternoon it was working , how did we cope when I was a young un getting out of bed then walking on Lino never gave it a second thought happy new year to everyone

My mum always tells me stories of walking across the Lino when it was freezing cold. She could also hear the spiders scuttling across it!

Happy new year everyone....seems a good one so far...

Happy New Year to one and all!
Let's hope the pricks let us have a better year, vaccinations should help too.
When did we last have so many consecutive frosty days? I don't have memories of stepping onto cold lino but I do remember waking up to frozen curtains.

retropants wrote:I've started to clean up the strawberry plants, my feet got cold quickly from standing still, so I'll do it in shorter sessions!

Reminds me of a fellow plot holder [I think he was Eastern European ] Used to run over his strawberry bed with the mower. Said he never had to buy fresh plants. He seemed to have a good crop each year.