Anyway back to gardening:

I’ve been using up our old lettuce seed by growing salad leaves under our growing light which means instead of buying packs of salad leaves from the supermarket we can just armed with a pair of scissors harvest leaves from a spare bedroom. It’s working well and I’m trying to keep a steady supply going. I did try growing basil and coriander too with the idea that I would use them as micro herbs. The idea worked but I didn’t have enough seed to produce enough herbs to make to process worthwhile.

The garlic planted in both the greenhouse and on the plot is growing well - read more on my blog here. Well at least it was growing well on the plot the last time I looked which granted was before we had the really keen frosts. The winter onions were growing well too.

As the ground has been very damp - well muddy to be more accurate - we have managed to hammer some stakes into the ground 　which will be decked with wires with which we will support our raspberry, Japanese wineberry and thornless blackberry canes. Last season the ground was just too hard for this job.

In the garden the bulbs are growing away, the snowdrops are in bud and the hellebores in full flower so hopefully soon our shady piece of garden will be at its best.

Paving stones have arrived in readiness for our patio renovation and the paving of the area on which our future summer house will sit. At the moment progress is slow as it has been so wet and windy. This month has also seen the first real frosts of winter and we are keeping busy making sure our garden birds are fully stocked with food and water. The blackbirds look quite disgusted if their favourite buggy nibbles aren’t available first thing in the morning!

All our seeds and seed potatoes have arrived - only one variety of peas unavailable due to a harvest failure which is comforting as we grew that variety last year and also had a failure. Other than that everything that we ordered has now arrived with one or two freebies from both seed suppliers and magazines. No doubt more will arrive later! The seed potatoes have been set out to chit in the greenhouse - not much choice in this really but they will be protected with fleece if any really cold nights are forecast.

We’ve been disappointed with the onions that we have in storage as they have been developing mould faster than we could use them and have probably had to throw about half away - read more on my blog here. But to counter this we are just finishing off the last of our apples which have been very successfully stored in an old fridge