Jack Frost is here again...

Gosh it has been cold! I bet we’ve had 10 straight nights of frost, & good heavy frosts at that – a couple of nights down to -5 or -6 degrees, but with really bright sunny days.

This means that I’m rather glad that I only have robust seedlings in the mini greenhouse – the broad beans, onions, shallot sets & brassicas are all pretty hardy, & don’t seem to have come to any harm, & the forecast is for warmer weather after tonight (down to -3).

I’m glad that I covered the broad beans at the Hill with fleece – they looked well snug yesterday – mind you, the 4 or 5 left over plants left to their own devices in pots by the compost heap look pretty good too.

With the weather so cold, I thought that I’d better leave planting out the crimson flowered broad beans for another week – they are not particularly billed as a hardy variety, & I’d hate to lose them to frost – so my visit to the Hill on Saturday was confined to finishing the shed, & some digging.

The soil is finally drying out – it’s much less claggy on the spade, & a few weed seedlings are about, so it won’t be long until sowing time is upon us! I marked out plot A with a centre path – I’d rough dug it after taking down the beans in November (leaving in the nitrogen fixing roots) – & now have two dug over narrow beds. Then I picked PAK CHOI, KALE (alice), a SWEDE (best of all) & a TURNIP (snowball) for dinner & turned my attention to the toolshed.

Once the roof & doors were fixed to my liking, it just needed a coat of preservative. Fortunately I had about a third of a can left over from painting the fence at home which has been sitting out by the bench at home for the last few months, but I soon realised that I had no means at the Hill of opening the can. I saw Dahlia David & his wife down at the bottom of the Hill at their plot, so I took the can down to see if he could help.

After a great deal of huffing & puffing (not to mention a nasty gash on his hand) David had the lid off – hurrah! – & revealed the can to be three quarters full. I carefully walked back to the toolshed, gave the can a stir, then got painting. Eventually it dawned on me that the reason that the can was so full – & the preservative so ‘thin’ – was that the rainwater must have leaked into the can. At this rate, it will take about 8 coats to give the toolshed even a nominal coating of preservative!

Back home on the sowing front, I put 4 peas in each of 30 pots which are just starting to germinate – & sowed a few seeds each of SPINACH (Samish f1), SPRING ONION (Ishikura), TURNIP (snowball), ONION (Brunswick) & SWISS CHARD (bright lights) all in pots upstairs. The CABBAGE (red sprouting) are all up & the pots moved to the mini greenhouse.

And the wine making? Well, the celery wine has now virtually stopped ‘working’ in the demijohn, but is still rather emulsion-like in appearance – which I guess that will clear in due course.

With regard to the parsnip wine, I racked it off into another demijohn (making sure I kept a little aside for SG testing & tasting, of course!) – the upshot of which is that I have some very personable chardonnay style vanillary wine which has an alcohol content of nearly 16%! Wow! It will now mature in the demijohn for another 3 or 4 months before being bottled & put aside until about Christmas when I hope it will have mellowed into something really rather good!