Winter Tidy Up

A more slow start to the day, still up early 6:20, but breakfasted and made a flask of coffee and left for the allotment arriving around 8:30. There was a dead rat at the entrance looks like the foxes have been playing but were not hungry enough to eat it.

Cold today and everything is wet from the rain yesterday and overnight.

I managed to get through 3 pairs of gloves as they were getting muddy and wet. But I did manage to remove the hoops from Bed 13, dig it over and remove the remains of the cabbage stem and roots, and a few weeds and then manure. I'm leaving this bed open at the moment, so that it may benefit from some weathering before covering it up. There are quite a lot of stones in this bed. 

Hoops stored behind the shed and the netting has gone over the wintering onions, so that they are double netted which may help them a little if we get more heavy frosts, plus it saves me finding a home for the netting and taking the edging on the long sides off.

The foxes have dug out into woodchips around the daleks, so I picked up all they had left on the path as a result of their digging and put it back. Actually they have been digging in most of the woodchip paths, looking for worms I'm guessing. Raked all the paths where the foxes have been digging.

Bed 11 was un-covered, dug over and a sack of stable manure added then recovered.  Beautiful my little Robin came and said hello and was feeding on bed 11 while I was working it. He as grown into such a little round fellow he obviously has been eating well for the winter.

Timber fencing slats that were being used to hold down membrane are going mouldy, so a lot of them have been broken up and placed in square flower buckets and put in the greenhouse to dry off. Once they are dry enough I will have a burn up, I have the incinerator full with dry material ready to burn.

General tidy up of the allotment mainly at the bottom end of the allotment, bags of wood chips used to tidy up the bottom of the central path. Lots of plastic extrusions used for the netting has been put back on the storage rack.

Washed off and spun some freecycle slate fragments I obtained last year, using a spinning head mop bucked I no longer had a use for and have brought down to the allotment for that very job. I will let the rain wash out the remainder of the soil, and do more loads in future visits. I need the slates to top up around the apple trees and the grapes. 

Checked the daleks and saw some nice red worms being very active in Dalek2 doing there thing.

The Greenhouse door came detached again, as I was shutting it to leave. So next visit I will have to fit the new rollers and re hang it. I have pushed a garden chair up against it for the moment to stop the wind taking it away before I can fix it.

Came home around 1:00- so a good 4.5 hours of potting around, and the plot is looking all the better for it.