Woolly hats and no knickers!

It really has not been a great week weather wise – cold at nights with some frost, & Saturday was not much better with a sharp wind. That didn’t stop Reg-next-plot who was busy with the loppers tidying up the hedge & saplings at the back of his plot, but I'm not surprised that we had the Hill to ourselves.

It was cold enough for Reg to be wearing a loose fitting woolly hat which seemed to spend just about as much time clinging to the side or back of his head as it did actually keeping his head warm.

My own hat was rather less mobile, & I kept warm by taking up the sunflowers at the front of the plot – the soil underneath the plants was surprisingly dry considering the exposed areas of the plot are rather cloggy.

Although I want to get the odd raspberry suckers into some semblance of order, it didn’t feel like the day to do that job, so I did some harvesting instead. I cut a CABBAGE (primo II) & CAULIFLOWER (all the year round), dug a PARSNIP (white ace), a couple of SWEDE (best of all), & I thought that I’d see what the SALSIFY was looking like, & so dug up a couple of them too (bit like a thin white carrot, really).

After bleating on about not being very keen on BEETROOT, the kind people on the GYO grapevine have come up with some very tasty sounding recipes which I will be trying, so I had half a dozen of those out too.

The KALE (alice) is looking fabulous – but I'm keeping that for when all the cabbages are eaten, so instead I pulled a couple of LEEKS (mrs D). The leeks do seem to have a sort of burrowing bug or worm in them – brown & just a couple of mm long, they seem to munch their way vertically down a layer in the leek – & there are maybe 2 or 3 per leek. They don’t seem to do a lot of damage, but it would be nice to know what they are & I can’t find them in any of my books.

Poor Belinda Scarecrow is in a bad way – her arms appear to have dropped & her head is in danger of totally losing contact with the rest of her, so before she entirely loses her head, I’ve brought her home for some maintenance.

I hear that there is speculation at the Hill as to the absence of any garments around her nether regions, so I’d better preserve her modesty with a skirt too – before her reputation slips even further than her arms have…