Digging and Clearing

Had a lovely 4 hours on the plot this morning in the sunshine.
The temperature had reached -1 and the beans, courgette and tomato plants all collapsed due to the frost. We cleared them all away to the compost - such a lot of runner beans went uneaten. We must sow them earlier next year!

Frosted Runner Beans

Frosted Courgette

Jamie dug and put organic chicken manure pellets on the quarter for onions next year and I dug all the areas which had the plants cleared. It's satisfying to clear the areas and nice to be able to dig again - funny how you miss it even though it's tiring!

Pickled Cucumber

We pickled (sweet pickled) the cucumbers. The chopped cucumber was left in salt overnight to remove some of the water. Pickled in about a pint of white vinegar, 60g sugar and a teaspoon each of mustard and celery seeds. We made some last year which were really tasty but overly sweet so we reduced the sugar by half this time...

First frost

Well, at the weekend the thermometer on the plot was showing that the temperature had got down to 3degrees C. The only plant affected was the basil plants which had gone completely brown then black over 2 days - well, one of them was Greek basil so not too suprised it doesn't like the cold! We picked the last 5 cucumbers as the weather was expected to get colder this week.
And... the weather people were right! I had to scrape ice from the car this morning and had to find my woolly gloves. May not get up the plot for a couple of days but I've got a feeling the beans will have gone down - luckily Jamie pulled a few pods to get the beans out when he popped up the plot yesterday.

At least it means we can pick some sloes and make sloe gin this weekend - I've been waiting to do this for about 3 months it seems!!

Another sunny day

We went up to do some digging and other bits this afternoon, but again it was so sunny we stopped and chatted for about an hour then didn't have time to do all that we planned!

However, we did chop down and dig in the mustard green manure and planted a couple of rows of broad beans which we're hoping will over-winter. We've put cloches over the beans as the mice are still causing trouble on other people's plots.
The beans are planted on the strip where we thoroughly dug in the horse manure that we're slightly concerned about - our test at home produced 4 broad beans; a couple which look rather fern-like and a couple which look just about perfect - so not such a great result to put our minds at rest! However, we figure the on-plot test will tell us for sure, so fingers crossed that the manure is fine....

Put a lot of corrugated cardboard (ripped into small bits) into the compost bin and gave it a good mix about - it's still a bit stinky, but there is a lot of green in there so not too suprising. It's not too wet so should be ok. The black compost bin has shrunk to about half full and is lovely compost for use next year. We've also bought some bags of Westland Farmyard manure to put under our spuds again next year.

Purple chips

Used a few Congo spuds to make purple chips at lunchtime. They look so great and tasted good too!

You can see where some of the potato flesh is white, that is the case with some of the tubers where others are deep purple all the way through - brilliant :-)