Kitchen Garden Forum

No snow, but a very hard frost here this morning.
Looks all very Christmas cardish.

I wonder if it will make any difference to the amount of pests and diseases next year?

its also one of them "pretty" mornings here as well, looks pretty through the window and will be pretty cold when i get outside.

Went to the allotment this morning to collect some vegetables. Everything is still under thick snow, now with an icy crust on top, but we were pleased to see just some pheasant tracks, no rabbit, deer or pigeon damage. We could only pick some sprouts and kale, the ground was far too frozen to dig up leeks, carrots and parsnips. But everything looked lovely in the bright sunshine!

Like with you, Catherine, the snow clearing and salting has been rather patchy here. Our road, with a steep slope, still has lots of very icy stretches on it. One of the footpaths (not a roadside pavement), the responsibility of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and used extensively, is absolutely lethal! It has 40 steps covered in packed ice and you have to hold on to the fence for grim life to get up and down them, particularly down!

Our colds are getting better, by the way, but we are still snorting and coughing. Good thing we can't pass on these sort of bugs via the computer!

Dear Monika So glad to hear you are feeling slightly better. Must be the echinacea. We have been walking out over Waddington and the paths have been lethal. Though the walk was brilliant. We called at our allotment yesterday and it was deep in snow but very slippy where the snow had melted and frozen again. This mornign the weather machine showed it had been down to minus 4 degrees in the night and there had been a very hard frost. Now it is only 3.5 deg. which is MILDER than we have had it recently We think that winter has arrived earlier that usual and I think that we will have a longer winter than we are used to because of it.