Green housing.

Today I tidied up the greenhouse and the outside gow bag house.
The frost had finally killed off the peppers and tomatoes.
So I used the secatuers and snipped them into a pop-up canvas tidy bag, then I took out the canes and put them on the supports in the roof to dry out. Put all three grow bags outside to get really cold so I can add them to non-potato non-tomato growing areas next year as soil conditioner. Weeded the in-ground beds in the greenhouse and emptied and redundant pots in with the weeds to the tidy bag. Ended up with a nice full bag which was emptied into the old coal bunker I use as a compost bin.

Now all that is needed is a nice frost and builder free area to move my onions to, so that I can light a nice sulphur candle or two in the greenhouse.

Faint remembered thing!

Today I remembered that I have an allotment, had some difficulty recognising it, finally realised that the brown oblong thing with green and brown things sticking out of it was mine!

Also remembered that my blog is about gardening, of which I have done odd bits since July, my how time flies. so what have I done since then:

• got a day where I was able to glyphosate spray plot 18's weeds, which have (mostly) died off.
• the tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse have done well and are now due for final harvest and removal before we get a real hard frost as the greenhouse is unheated.
• had a pathetic squash harvest of three usable fruits, none much larger than eight inch diameter.
• harvested my "Pigletwillies" with quite a variety of shapes and sizes, they are in storage for re-planting next year for a harvest and hopefully some seeds.
• harvested a poor to reasonable onion crop.
• watched the Kale and PSB grow nicely. Picked the first of the kale today and had it with roast beef and all the trimmings.
• decided that the weather this year has really stuffed up things that normally do ok, such as carrots which were useless, sweetcorn ditto, french beans ditto, squash especially ditto.
• as a committee member of the allotment association I have obtained thirteen notice boards to errect at our sites. So far I have put up two experimental ones at my site, trialing metal versus wooden posts, wood gives a sturdier result and put up two at John;s site on the other side of town.

Alot of my time has been taken up with preparation for a house extension, which is now in full swing with the ground floor walls up and steel girders laid in on Friday for the first floor walls to go up. Amazing how much stuff you find you own when you need to clear terrace, garage, shed, rooms etc for builder access.

I was anticipating only being able to squeeze odd hours in at the plot over winter and having to pick up the mess in spring with mechanical resources, but the rhino broke his arm (ulna fracture) last saturday in a school rugby match and is off rugger for six weeks at least, so that could mean sunday gardening. Mind the silly boy said consistently that it did not hurt much and subsequently played three practice sessions and another school match before ending up at A&E due to a Westie biting him hard in the leg on the way to the match, which he played with a bandage round his leg. So in A&E he asked about his arm which had started to hurt alot more during the match and an x-ray showed a lovely break.

Rhino and I went and watched his teammates play a really hard match, which they lost, against Harrow. On the way home we got a new bathroom light switch, annoying when the cord snaps off inside the switch, which I fitted when we got home. Then I went to the plot and:

• took down the firework display ads from my notice boards.
• pruned my two espaliers.
• pruned my currents and gooseberries.
• dug one eighth of my fruit terrace over roughly with a spade to prepare for a good dung mulch.
• admired the growth on the raspberries and some useful looking out of row suckers.
• weeded and hoed my coldframe.
• weeded and hoed my raised bed.
• took down and stored my bean poles.
• cleared weeds from around my hopeful looking brussells.
• dug up a half row of spuds.
• harvested a nice wadge of curly green kale.

Hope to do more next weekend.