Kitchen Garden Forum

It's like trying to defrost a freezer, except you can't really apply lots of saucepans of boiling water to speed up the process unfortunately.!

My dad used to fill a massive metal Jerry can with boiling water every night and put it in our greenhouse at my childhood home to provide a little domestic comfort for scruffy old feral cst who used to seek refuge there on winter nights.. I don,t know whether it did much to raise the overall temperature in there though as a small broken window pane had to be left unrepaired for the cat to enter !

Mentioned earlier I feed Freddie the fox and his other half. They are reluctant to eat the dried food I put out in this snow. Which raises a question , Is the rest of Basildon feeding them, or is it the crap dried own brand food I have been buying from a well known supermarket.

Our boiler stopped working yesterday morning, looks like the condensate disposal pipe has decided to condense the water to ice.
Did the hot water thing, tried a chefs blow torch as well, copper pipe.
Notging, then when I was in the shower the boiler came back to life, for about half an hour.
Then died of the same cause!

BG are supposed to turn up on Monday, it might start working as the fitted arrives.
Thank heavens we have;

• a backup electric immersion heater
  Some fan heaters
  A wood burning stove and three to four cubic metres of dry logs,

Bad luck Peter. It always pays to have back up facilities, doesn,t it?
I,ve read of several cases renently where subscribers to the BG Homecare scheme have simply not been supplied with any service because of shortage of staff. One would think a large organisation like that would have some sort of backup scheme where customers are not left high snd dry without either support or refunds in not inexpensive subscriptions.
Hopefully an increase n temperatures on Sunday will bring an improvement in operating co ditions.

While it was still light my back garden looked like this.
It should all be gone in the morning.

Aargh, I,ve left it too late to take a photo of ours, even if I could figure out how to post it because the rain is now pouring down to wash all the snow away and the temperature is finally rising.
I haven't cast off my three indoor layers yet but I'm living in hope.

We've just driven back from Perth, still trying to snow at the moment up here.

Melting like fun now. The road has a reflective surface sheen and there is some rain too.
Like Primrose, I still have multiple layers on.

I went down today to fix the shed door, (break in & wind damage), thinking at least it will be another job done that needs doing since gales are forecast. Amazingly the soil had thawed already. Some of the plants aren't looking too happy yet but hopefully they will with the milder weather & looks like some sunshine mid week.

Today was a balmy 5C & not so much as a breeze but it did drizzle all day without stopping so only other job I could do was weed & water some things in the tunnel. I did contemplate starting the shed tidy but the first thing I moved revealed a big spider so gave that a miss until it is dry outside & I can throw everything outside with the handy hand thing to allow the spiders to run away. Probably straight under the shed & back into their spot!

The frost and snow has gone from the village, but not the hill tops, so the wind is biting cold, more snow forecast towards the end of the week, we might even get a white Christmas.

World of Chilies are selling a kit with grow lights that report ably do not consume load of electricity.

Finally got back to work today, after the frosts and snow!
I hadn’t got around to cutting all the Herbaceous plants down and this has been a real bonus, as it gave the plants some protection from the hard frosts…..

I left all the plants to give birds a feed and insects somewhere to try and hide, though the wind and frosts have knocked most of it down, whilst filling up the bird feeders I noticed the Snow Drops are already growing!

The Met Office is predicting 2023 will be the hottest year ever. (Generally up 1C). Think I might get some more shade nets, butts & dripper feeds if that is the case as the prices will rocket even more. Thinking it would not hurt to do some dowsing maybe?

Just realised, have KG skipped giving us a calendar this year?