New Year - it's going to start getting busy!

We've managed weekly visits to Doug over the Christmas period - there was a little wind damage but generally speaking we were lucky.   We did have to re-lay most of the ground cover fabric (no idea how that gets ripped up so often.)

It's still unseasonably mild so the plants are still thriving.  We decided to take up the cloches for a while - the plants do not need much protection while the weather stays above zero.  We can always put them out again if we think there will be some sustained frosts.

We had our compost bin delivered last week and it was great to finally get this built and put into place.  Lyta did a sterling job turning over the open soil and pulling up lots of weeds.  I re-buried some of the edges of the ground cover fabric to help prevent it being lifted up by weeds.  We've come to the conclusion that of the two types we have, the basic one is much better.  The other has a very loose weave to the fabric and frays too easily.  We then end up throwing away great lengths of  "string" - it gets everywhere!  Phil set to with the hoe and managed to clear two buckets full of weeds.  Everything is now looking very neat again - at least for a week or two!

We have been given some lovely seeds and plants for Christmas and have some spending money saved for our visit to River Cottage at the end of March (more plants will be purchased there....)  We just have a few more to buy and our planting schedule for the next three months should be all set to go.  

This is when it starts to get exciting....  

I also built the cold frame for Nigel today, which means that we can start planting seeds on the kitchen windowsill.  Once fully germinated the seedlings can now go out into Nigel before they are properly hardened off  and then transferred to Doug for growing.  By April, everything should then be in place.  Not long now :)