Kitchen Garden Forum

Since it is snowing very heavily out there at there moment, i thought it was time for the new topic.
It's meant to be turning to rain in a little while, so the snow should soon go.

Definitely Winter this morning. Frozen hail on the car and the Lake District mountains are white over.

Fine sunny morning here. More like early spring

Trust you, Alan...... it is bright now, but the wind has a real wintery nip to it.

Dusting of wet snow when we woke up, rapidly succeeded by cold rain with strong blustery wind.

Certainly wintery, so I bought some new gloves this week past.
Must, must get up to the 'lottie soon. Jerusalem Artichokes to lift; needless to say there is always lots of tidying up to do.

oldherbaceous wrote:Trust you, Alan...... it is bright now, but the wind has a real wintery nip to it.

Spoke too soon! Lovely crisp, bright morng, but now it's turned to sleet/hail showers

One good thing. Our fridge is overcrowded at the moment but as it's only 2 degrees outside and temperature falling, some of the items in plastic bottles like milk can be safely be stored outside !

We have had that much rain over the last two weeks it's impossible to do anything down the plot, even the chickens are starting to quack

It's all white out there again this morning, but today it's frost and not snow.

Saturday was bright but cold with strong northerly wind bringing salty sand with it that sticks to everything, the ferry went out though. I wouldn't fancy that journey yesterday, I thought most ferries had cancelled.

I'm having more logs delivered today, I already burnt £150 worth just doing the early morning and evening fire. I'm buying local logs, softwood, it burns quickly though that can be convenient for getting a fire started quickly then pop some home cut sycamore on. Sycamore burns nicely.

Quite a lot of wood for burning is being sourced from eastern EU countries which is no bad thing though the mark-up the dealers are asking might cripple the market once everyone had their fussy out of burning wood. Very time consuming to produce ready for burning, to be honest it's cheaper at the moment to burn oil for heating.

We don't need to burn wood any more than anyone though we do have the storage space for wood we can dry ourselves and having an option in an area where the electricity supply often fails is sensible.

We even have a standby power source so we can use the internet if the electricity goes down, some years I consider buying a generator because we loose power so often.

We didn't get any snow, just a sprinkling of hail though the Preselli Hills are white.

Dull, overcast and damp but no snow the sky is a dirty grey colour we had rain in the night it's cold and miserable seems to be like this a lot of late

First mild frost this morning. Picked a few greens, on washing found three caterpillars.

Decided to start making inroads into our Winter squash stock today and cut open two Sweet Dumpling squashes this morning to roast with lunch. Both looked perfect on the outside. Both had gone completely rotten on the inaide with all the flesh and pips disintegrating into a dry furry mush. The third one was rescueable, but still had to throw bits away.
Hoping the bigger Crown Prince variety will store better.

Anybody else had similar problems? Know it hasn't been a good year for winter squashes.

All today's great plans for lottie today were somewhat delayed by fishing the fleece & environmesh out of the fruit trees & rebuilding the little structure I grow my tomatoes & peppers in during summer & some winter salads for the rest of the year.
It is only polycarbonate sheets held together with coated wire & canes with a wind break material top but it has been standing for 2 years without any bother. I don't live too far from lottie as the crow flies & we never had any really strong blows despite the weather predictions.

But it did get me warmed up nicely, and I did manage to clear the asparagus beds, even if I have the slime of frosted dahlias to look forward to on the next visit.

Westi