Phew! Sitting down with cup of coffee at last......

Hello Friends,
I'm making headway now with all the tasks I'd fallen behind with. Today I put the greenhouse to bed for the winter. That's always a bit of a seasonal marker. First, I collected up all the remaining food,

including red peppers (Variety = 'Thor'. Very good. Much better than the iffy petulant sulkers I grew last year!), chillies & a bunch of basil. I've frozen the jalapenos & green 'Heatwave' chillies & strung the ripe 'Heatwaves' up for drying, & turned the basil into a batch of fresh pesto for some pasta.

An hour of sweeping & clearing made sufficient space for tender plants to come under cover before the first hard frosts - agapanthus, lavender mint & grapefruit mint here, enjoying some rays.

Grapevine suffered a severe pruning. I'm not a natural pruner. I start off with a plan & it turns into a more of a frenzied hacking, but however bad it looks (& it will die back to little more than a collection of twigs over winter), it does always burst into grape-promising buds in spring. 

That's the thing with us gardeners, really. Garden tasks are so seasonal, but there's always this looking forward to the next season too. I brought this dahlia (Variety = Lolo Love) under glass this morning to protect it from freezing, so that felt kind of quite wintery, but also these two trays of strawberry runners which I potted up to increase our fruit supplies next summer. I always feel sad when our awesome swifts depart for Africa midway through August, but I know that this has to happen for me to enjoy their noisy return at the beginning of May.

So with spring sunshine in mind, I sowed our sweet peas. Two varieties - A mixture of hot colours called 'Floral Tribute' & a cooler 'Blue lagoon'.

I always find I get better plants from an October sowing. I've tried sowing sweet peas in March but they have invariably been spindly ungrateful little things, refusing to thrive. They are pretty hardy plants on the whole. I will probably be able to plant these outside at the end of March. If you want to sow some, it's well worth saving the tall 'disposable' coffee cups & large yoghurt pots, as sweet peas (like all peas & beans) seem to like a deep root run. No need to buy special root-trainer pots - there's already quite enough plastic waste knocking around!

And before coming indoors to do some baking (only bread, in case anyone was just getting on the bus in anticipation of a large interesting cake!), I had what I can only describe as an idea of near genius. Oh, ok, that's stretching it, but as someone who lives in permanent fear of eight-legged beasts fiendishly concealing themselves before deliberately leaping out on people, this is a low-tech innovation of note.

......A large plastic freezer clip fastened firmly across the tops of my gardening gloves. Ha! No baddies getting in those! Just need some bigger ones now to clip across the tops of all my boots!
That, friends, has been today's activity.
Till next time,
C x