winter at last...

When I got up this morning I could see that the hills were mantled in snow and looking very seasonal. We have the Lake District to the south, the Pennines to the east, the Southern Uplands to the north and the Galloway Hills to the west, all clothed in white. The only direction we don’t have hills is the south-west where the Solway widens into the open sea and that’s where the gales come from!!

I wouldn’t like a repeat of the last two winters but we do need a decent cold spell to complete the cycle and get things ready for new growth next year. Everything is looking rather sad at the moment...leafless trees and waterlogged ground so not a lot going on. I have been tidying up the greenhouse and trying to rationalize all my plant pots and containers. Because of my acquisitive nature I tend to accumulate more stuff than actually wears out or breaks during the season. Flower buckets are a case in point so I try to resist shopping at Morrisons as I inevitably end up with another stack whenever I go there.

Although the exhibition growers often start their new season in December I won’t be sowing any seeds till the end of next month and then it will be limited to peppers and tomatoes in the propagator indoors. February/March under glass is soon enough for most of the early crops in this part of the world.

We had fresh baby carrots with our meal tonight, harvested from one of the buckets in the greenhouse. They were sown mid-August into sieved compost that had already grown a crop of potatoes. It was a bit of an experiment as I wanted to see how late they could be sown and still produce a decent crop. Another lot sown two weeks later are much further behind.