Damn you, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall!

Damn you, I say! But why, you might ask, is the Hedgewizard raining curses upon the head of the curly-haired god of organic meat? Well, here's why.

Yesterday I went Shopping. This is a rare occurance brought on, naturally enough, by the evils of christmas (we celebrate Yule on the 21st, but still exchange presents on the 25th because of the kids; it's actually nice having the two separated). I mean, I go to specific shops to get specific things, but Shopping? Alien concept. Yesterday I had a hospital appointment in Poole though, and since I'd used fuel getting there I thought it would be a good idea to tackle my pressie list.

Except I got a migraine, and as always the first thing to dribble out of my ears was rational thought. Oh, thought I, I have a bad headache but must carry on. Must... get... presents. The end result of course was that I staggered around Poole centre for four hours buying very little, and ended up in Asda shambling along like a zombie. A text from Witchypoo came in on my mobile asking about tea, and I texted back "Don't bother, I'll bring something back with me". After all I'm in a supermarket, so there'll be lots of stuff I can bring back to pop in the oven, right?

Wrong.

Owing to Hughie Fibbly-Wibbly's excellent programme on supermarket chicken we've resolved not to eat it, so that wiped out ninety per cent of the ready meals on offer. Previous experience of some of the other garbage wiped out half of what was left, leaving oven chips and Quorn. At any other time I would have either bought that and lumped it, found something else, or texted WP back to say "forget that; cook" but in my stunned migraine mindset I walked miserably up and down the aisles feeling like I was in some sort of nutritional desert. Everywhere I looked I saw stuff that was almost, but not quite, food. The pictures were very appetizing but I knew that the reality was all either horrible, nutritionally crap, morally bankrupt or (in a few cases) all three at once.

This has happened to me before in supermarkets, but I've never been in a position where I've promised to bring something oven-ready back. In the end I bought two free-range chicken breasts and an organic sweet pepper, and we had a stir fry which is the closest to oven-ready we usually get these days.

I would have thought there would be a market for prepared organic food by now, but apparently not. I'm increasingly finding that there's very little I'm prepared to buy when I go to the supermarket, although there are some things that are difficult to find anywhere else. On the back of that I've sent off for a catalogue from SUMA, the country's largest wholefood supplier, to see what their trade prices are like. They've already warned me that the minimum order to avoid shipping costs is something like three hundred and fifty pounds though, so if that's to be a goer then I'm going to have to form a food co-operative locally and there may not be the demand. It depends on just how low trade prices are, given that there'll be no mark-up... I can but try. I wonder if Riverford would hand out some leaflets to local customers for me?

*Gives HFW a swift kick on the way out*

Fowl Play

Entropy has arrived in the garden. It's dismaying to see it happening, but every year when the weather turns damp and cold a few things seem to decide their time has come. The garden is strewn with damp and rotting leaves, and the wind has redistributed anything I was too lazy to put away or nail down. In this case however, the agents of entropy are the chickens.

I mentioned a few days ago about having swapped their entrance over to the other side of the house, and how this was taxing their pea-sized brains to the limit. Well, yesterday we were out from first light to dusk (pretty much anyway), so it was open the chicken house and go with the chooks already being abed when we returned. Or so it seemed. This morning however, I realised that the kitchen scraps I'd put down yesterday morning were still there (or mostly so, and a mousehole under the feed bin shows just how quick the blighters are to capitalise on free food). This could only mean that the chickens hadn't left their house the day before.

Yesterday's weather was filthy, but that doesn't normally stop them even in the middle of the moult; but this morning was relatively OK, and they still wouldn't come out. It seems that after a few days of struggling manfully with the symmetrical adjustment, they'd lost the will to live. I booted them out one by one without ceremony. Bossy* was the first one out, and resumed chickeny business as soon as her claws hit terra firma. She began to wander off to the right a bit. Next came Scrawny, with a little help from me; likewise she started to scratch, and went off after Bossy. Third came Babs, who panicked a bit because the other two were now on the other side of the drinker and feeder from her; she took off and flapped madly to land more or less beside them, which drove them further in that direction. Finally came Gonzo, who instead of going down the ladder at all decided to leap to the feeder arm, and from there barrel diagonally across the run towards her flock-mates. There was an apple sapling in the way.

Much mad flapping ensued; Gonzo regained the flock, but at the cost of one limb of the apple sapling, torn from the trunk leaving a nasty ragged wound. I was not pleased. Within the space of two minutes the chickens had given me two jobs; to make a new, longer chicken ladder which would seem less daunting to the symmetrically-challenged, and to find a way to save the poor apple tree. At which point, of course, the heavens opened.

Owing to my having volunteered to cook to save my poor wife for once (red dragon pie, made with our own carrots, trail of tears beans, onions and potatoes) it was past three o'clock by the time I got out there, so the ladder was made in a hurry in the run itself which is when I found that my chickens share an irritating habit with cats - they like to stand on things you leave unattended for a moment. Hammers, timber, that sort of thing. The moment I turned my back on something there'd be a chicken or two on it, staring at me.

I finished the ladder just as darkness fell and all four birds wobbled up it; Gonzo had some trouble though, as she insisted onputting her feet between the rungs rather than on them. Go Gonzo! This left me to plant the Sophie late strawberries, which turned up on Thursday, in the gathering darkness. Still, they're in now even if they had dried out more than I would have liked. Which left the wound on the apple sapling; having no wound paint left, I was at a loss what to do and in the end opted to cover it with a scrap of duct tape to keep it moist and clean until I can buy some wound sealant. Now I should go and read up, see if I've done the right thing!


*The naming of chickens is a tricky thing for me, since I know that ultimately I'll be putting any that don't die of mystery causes into the stock pot. In the end I've opted to name them (internally at least) by the position they hold in the flock - Bossy (the top of the pecking order), Scrawny (the bottom of the pecking order, with fewer tail feathers), Houdini (the escape artist) and Gonzo (the wierd, thicko one). This means that as the flock grows and reduces some chickens change their names and sometimes hold two names at once. It doesn't seem to bother them much!

Work Avoidance Strategies

Everybody's got these. Come on, hands up. How often do you find yourself contributing to online forums when you should be doing your tax return, or hiding in the loo with a book when you should be digging your garden? Well I have a particularly nasty training module lurking in my bag at the moment, a national policy-declarative monster couched in deepest legalese, and frankly anything would be preferable. Hell, if I run out of avoidance strategies I'll quite happily stare at the wall rather than tackle that beauty. And yet, work demands I complete it within the next fortnight. And there's a test. Life is cruel.

I haven't posted my List lately, but reading Burro's latest rant has made me wonder why I'm not feeling panicked so much at the moment. So here we go, with only garden-related things listed;

Now
- Dig remaining two raspberry trenches
- Order remaining top fruit trees
- Finish my deliberations on the edible hedge and order the damned thing
- Get grease bands onto the existing fruit trees
- Strim back paths around raised beds
- Take some photos to post to the blog (I haven't forgotten)
- Lift a few parsnips for box storage

Soon
- Collect maple tree from Ferndown and plant it
- Figure out how to do a 2m x 4m x 4m fruit cage without breaking the bank
- Put up the suspended shelf in the tunnel
- Lay dripper irrigation round fruit trees and connect the various pieces of the system together
- Lay second section of flag path, and repair existing one
- Cut back remaining hedges
- Put up proper hoop supports for the brassica bed netting

Later
- Sketch out the garden plan and post it
- Work out planting schedule for next year and cardex it
- Double dig four new row beds incorporating lots of compost
- Double dig new asparagus bed with shedloads of manure or whatever you're supposed to do
- Chop/cut up mammoth wood pile
- Clear up the crap growing on the access path
- Work out how to have a coil or reel of hose in tunnel without destroying everything
- Build a new chicken ladder and second feeder arm
- Mesh in far side of chicken house and move fence
- Dig out remaining high border
- Fill in ruts in lawn made by sewerage wagon, and seed (early spring)

I think I'll stop now, as I keep thinking of more stuff and I have to stop somewhere. I'm still not feeling panicked (odd that) but it's perfectly true; I'll never be finished, not until I die. It follows that any time off from it that I get will be time I make. Just as well I enjoy it!

Death and Raspberries

It's a funny thing, but preparing the planting area for the raspberries has started me thinking about my own mortality, and Witchypoo's too. This might strike some people as odd, but sometimes when I'm working on the garden's structure beyond my comfort limits* I console myself that once the job is done I'll never have to do it again. Obviously this doesn't apply to every job, but in the case of the raspberry trenches I'm perfectly aware of how long it'll be before it needs to be repeated. Because of virus attack, one expects to replace raspberry canes after something like fifteen to twenty years, and the trench will need to be redug to incorporate manure and so forth then. Probably, anyway.

So in my lifetime, I'll have to replace the raspberries once. I'm turning 40 this December, so the plants will have to be renewed when I'm 55 or so. But will I want to replace them when I'm 70?

You'll already have spotted that I'm assuming that I'll be living at the same place for quite a time - but will I die here? Should I? The previous occupants were keen gardeners once, but as their strength diminished they downsized the vegetable patch until it was only six feet square, stopped tending the hedges, allowed the sloping North Garden to run riot and generally let the place go a bit. They were still living there quite happily in their seventies, but the time came when they had to move to a smaller, more manageable home and it was quite traumatic for them. I felt that they'd probably left it five years too late.

It's just that the days are long gone when you could reasonably expect your children to live and work in the same village, and to want to take over your home on your death. Thirty years is a long time, but I just can't see that happening. When we're old, or if one of us falls long-term sick or prematurely dies, time's going to come when we'll want to sell and move somewhere easier. If we're very lucky, we'll find a buyer who's into the self-sufficiency thing. I really hope so; it's possible that such things may well be the norm by then, but it would kill me to see somebody scoop the productive Eden that I plan it to be into the bin and cover it all in sterile monocultured lawn.

Which makes me think perhaps we should take a long time to sell; hold out for a buyer who wants to carry it forward, feed a family, but will still pay the going price. Maybe the place will call someone to it who'll do that, the way it called us. Still, that's hopefully thirty years away, and a lot can happen in thirty years. As the old story says - you may die, I may die, or the horse may talk. Bloody hell, how cheerful am I?

I'm looking forward to those raspberries, though!

*Say, two hours and a cup of tea. The trouble with this is that it takes about this long just to maintain everything; I only have to clean out the chooks, hoe round a couple of onions and dawdle over prodding the peas back onto their supports, and my two hours is gone. No, all the real work gets done in frantic bouts of activity, where I roll up my sleeves and start something sizeable. Two hours later I'm fantasizing about that cup of tea, and particularly about my arse colliding with a comfy chair, but it's too late; I'm halfway through something that simply can't be left half done. This can be because there's a two-ton pile of concrete beginning to set in the heat, or (as yesterday) that I've dug a trench down to within two inches of a water pipe that could split in a frost unless I finish and backfill, but there's usually something that engenders that helpless feeling of simply having to carry on like a cyclist going down a steep hill. Witchypoo asked me yesterday why I put myself in these situations, and after a moment's thought I told her; with me, it's that having to carry on that gets the big jobs done. At least, that's my theory. Happy digging!

The Stakes Are High

Although they may not be after this storm passes over! This weekend saw me try to progress the raspberry trenches. I knew this wasn't going to be easy - four 3.5m trenches 45cm wide and deep is a lot of shovelling - but choosing the eastmost one first was, in hindsight, a mistake. Or maybe not. At any rate, halfway along it I encountered the backfill from the retaining wall for the rebate, a lovely mixture of brick, slate, flints and all the rest of the crap I'd thrown in there last year. This slowed me down a tadge as you can imagine, until eventually a brainwave struck. Y'see, only three of the trenches are for raspberries; the remaining one is for a blackberry, and they don't really need a trench at all. They're good with a planting hole and lots of top dressing. That was all the excuse I needed really, so I did exactly that; topsoil, compost, farmyard manure, fish blood and bone meal. And a crowbar stuck in so that I can't lose the planting hole when I rake over.

At this point I decided that it was probably a good idea to get the stakes for the soft fruit in, so I cut in the holes for them. Stakes are fairly expensive beasts when they reach a certain thickness, and it so happens I have some treated 6' fence posts that I pulled out of a nearby landfill site when the farmer got an EU grant to plant hedging. The trouble was that the posts are to support wires up to five feet off the ground, which really only left me 9" to bury in... not a good idea in light soil, so I was forced to set them in concrete. This struck me as a good idea since I had two bags of cement going off (bought for a dwarf retaining wall that I never got round to), and a bunch of silver sand. Six holes, six posts, six opportunities to knacker my back muscles mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow, but I did it!

The two posts for the blackberry, though, need to support wire at 6' high so my recycled posts were out. Off I went to the garden centre.

I've always been ambivalent about garden centres. On one level they are handy, one-stop shops for mainstream horticultural items; on the other they're immoral, cynical money-grubbing thugs only too ready to take your cash for something you don't need. Sort of like a supermarket, but with more raffia. I've reached a sort of compromise with myself; I go in when I have to, but I'm not allowed to buy anything I hadn't specifically gone in for. It seems to work most of the time. Today though I nearly came unglued, because Witchypoo and I were incautious enough to take Harry with us. He's normally OK in there, harrassing the rabbits and terrorizing the budgies, but today was different. Today was christmas.

What ever happened to christmas staying in December? And what ever happened to Santa staying firmly where he was put, in the department stores? Consumer choice, that's what happened. Baa. Baa. Nurse? Fetch my crayons!

Where was I?

Oh yes. With Harry almost apoplectic with excitement over the displays of christmas lights, I decided to make a run for it and grab the stakes before the store security grid pinpointed my presence and etched "Mug father" into my forehead with an ultraviolet laser. This left Witchypoo to guide our vibrating child through the store Without Touching Anything. I had vague trepidations about this, but got the stakes and paid for them without any more pain than forking out the £12 the store wanted for them. Gasp, clutch heart. After a little thought relenquish heart, clutch wallet. I stashed the stakes in the car, bashing open the garden centre doors like a particularly inept jouster, and turned to find and fetch my family. It was then that the full horror of the situtation revealed itself.

The store had a full-on Santa's Grotto.

Once the screaming has finally stopped and we drove home, Witchypoo and I sedated Harry with an unfamiliar TV show (always good for half an hour) and W. helped me bury in our two hard-won stakes. They even looked straight, which came as something of a surprise. A this point it emerged that I had forgotten to look at the weather report, and the Dorset Monsoon arrived to ruin all the newly laid concrete. Witchypoo retired to fetch Connor from his friend's house where he is apparently pupating, leaving me to swim up and down the garden trying to cover the concrete with pieces of plastic which were too small, and stones to weight them down with, which were not heavy enough. Then I noticed the chickens.

I think it's fair to say that chickens are not known for their smarts. An average bird can be completely bamboozled by finding itself on the wrong side of a stationary bush. Add onto this the fact that yesterday I had put in the dividing fence to cut their run in half for the winter and flipped the operative pophole over to the other side of the house. Now, all this means to the chickens is that suddenly they're looking at a mirror image of the house (pophole on the left of the feeder rail rather than the right of it) but on the previous evening this had caused them great confusion and they had to be pushed and prodded to get them up the ladder (the same ladder, I might add; I'd only moved it to the other side of the house). I had hoped that things might be better tonight, but apparently I'd hoped in vain. The chickens all stood in the patented Miserable Chicken Huddle which all small flocks do when it rains hard and no-one wants to be the first to brave the elements to look for shelter. If I hadn't intervened they would have stayed out there until the fading light forced them to work things out (assuming they did so), and there would have been no eggs for a few days until the chill was out of them. Worse yet, I'd have had to come back out in the rain to close the pophole - so it was chicken pushing and prodding in the sort of rain you normally need a film crew and a fire engine to produce. There had beeter be eggs tomorrow, I tell you.

At any rate, all eight posts are up. I only got a glimpse of them through a momentary break in the curtain of rain, but they look wonderful. Very upright and posty. Perhaps I should make a pergola instead...

Raspberry Whisky

Rain! What a bummer. Still, I've taken advantage of a bit of inside time to order some raspberries - three each of Glen Moy, Glen Ample and Glenn Campbell. Oops, I meant Autumn Bliss. Sorry. I've also started on a shortlist of plants for the edible hedge, but perhaps the remaining fruit trees are more important... tomorrow night, though! *yawns*

Let there be strawberries...

...and lo, there were strawberries. Well, most of them anyway. The Sophies are still a.w.o.l., but I expect they'll turn up in their own sweet time. I got leaky pipe laid along the new beds and planted the strawbs through polythene sheeting. Normally I wouldn't be keen on this, but these are reclaimed beds and with strawbs being fussy about having their crowns at ground level, mulching is tricky so polythene it is. I'll whip it away as soon as the foliage gets cut away next autumn, but it'll be interesting to see how the whole thing works. I'm a bit nervy because I just know the slugs are going to hide under that sheeting!

The working garden is in danger of looking like it's done on purpose, although it's not there yet. I can stand in it now and get a sense of where things are going to be; it's got to the stage where you've laid all the edges of your jigsaw down and done most of the sky, so now laying the pieces of the girl in the stripy dress is a cinch. Er. Corn here, rows there, raspberries over there... but for now just backache. Joy! I'll try to get a couple of photos up in the week.

My hobby of metal-detecting proved itself self-sufficientish yesterday, when my old mate Digiveg came down from Wales to lift his asparagus crowns from his allotment and take them up north. He also brought his metal detector and we went out for a few hours with Martin, another enthusiast. Martin generously allowed us to detect on his "turf", largely because he didn't think there was much there. Imagine his annoyance when Mr Nooblin here pulls two hammered silver coins out of the ground! My first hammered finds, an Elizabeth I sixpence and an Edward III half groat, combined value about £70 and no money to be paid to the farmer owing to a complicated transaction involving Yorkshire thrift and a crisp £10 note a couple of years ago. Not bad for an afternoon's stroll!

It must be winter now...

...because I did a day's hard digging yesterday. The strawberry beds are finished. Three 4.5m trenches, 30cm wide and deep, filled with the usual subsoil/topsoil mix I have to work with, in equal parts with the recycled mulch from the council and enriched with horse muck and fish, blood and bone meal. I've decided to cover them with polythene film for one year only, and plant the strawberries through the film so that they have a year to establish before I start to wrestle with the inevitable weeds. I've also allowed for leaky pipe to be laid at the surface (a necessary evil with the soil as it is, I feel) so that will need to go down before the film is laid. But boy, am I looking forward to those strawberries!

After completing those I made a bad decision and started to dig out the first raspberry trench where I should really have cleaned out the chicken house. I just hate the way that maintenance holds back new work - but I guess that's true of anything in life! I deliberately chose the most difficult raspberry trench too; the one that lies closest to the retaining wall of the polytunnel, and thus is full of stones. And half-bricks. And half a manhole cover and some fragments of fencing. It's this kind of work that reminds me that our garden is the shape it is because it was used as a dump by the Victorians when the Big House was built!

If I needed a kick up the arse to encourage me, though, I got it tonight doing some ironing to a borrowed videotape of The Victorian Kitchen Garden, when they quoted one of the old tomes as saying that January is the last month of preparation for the gardener before a brief rest in February. This has engendered a bit of panic in me, since I remember vividly the delays and frustrations I faced last winter with the building works. The polytunnel was only put up in April, and that late start haunted me right through the growing season. I'm determined I'm going to be more on top of things this year, so that I can really give the plants more attention.

That video's an eye-opener though. I imagined that those Victorian kitchen gardens would have had a staff of about six people; instead I see there were nineteen of them! Nineteen! This puts a distinct slant on things, I think - a vivid illustration of the drudgery that modern methods (and permaculture methods in particular) tries so hard to eliminate in ways that we don't really think about any more. The peach trees were a case in point; each had to have paving slabs buried underneath them to restrict the roots, whereas these days we use dwarfing rootstocks. Likewise they used to take hours to train onto the wall with rag ties and training nails, whereas now we can use wire and reusable soft ties.

Mind you, I can't ever see me being able to produce what the head gardener was asked for at the start of the day; parsnips, chard and figs I'll manage eventually, but grapes and bananas? I don't think so!

A Tale of Pipes and Strawberries

Hedgewizard is a stupid old wizard, yes he is. Not the jarring, butter-knife-in-the-toaster kind of stupid, but the insidious kind of woolly-headedness that make joined up thinking difficult. For about two weeks now I've been chatting online about making hoops over raised beds, to form the frames of cloches or hold netting off the crops. The principle's simple; get some rigid-but-bendy plastic piping or similar and secure it to the frame of the bed with screws, bent over to be secured on the far side in the same way. It can get fancy afterwards with wire running lengthways to stop sagging, or metal piping up the two ends to give a straight side, but the basic idea is dead easy.

All you need is the pipe.

So tell me why, when I'm bright enough to work out the minimum length of pipe is...

(width of frame x 0.5 x pi) + (height of frame x 2)

...I'm still stupid enough to spend a fortnight wandering around DIY shops and online catalogues, posting on freecycle and asking around, all to try to find the piping when I already have a roll of it lying on my lawn?

I finished burying in that piping not a moment too soon, because the sky cleared that evening and the temperature went down to minus three celcius. Now the ground has been re-levelled and tamped down, and I have enough blue 20mm water pipe (now that I think of it) to do at least two of the three raised brassica beds. I wonder what I'm going to do when the rotation means that I have to grow a row of brassicas out in the open?

I've almost got the (first plot of) strawberry beds done, so last night I wrestled with the internet and ordered 20 Honeoye (which I've decided to pronounce hone-oy), 10 Symphony and 5 Sophie. All three were chosen for a combination of flavour and disease resistance rather than particularly heavy yields, and they bear at different times.

Honeoy bears throughout June so I'll bring ten on early using polythene cloches and five in the tunnel, extending the cropping season back to mid May; the remaining five will be in the open. Symphony bears in mid-July which should be quite a feast, and finally Sophie bears in late July to early August. That should mean strawberries on and off for nearly four months, but then I've never done this before! I was hoping to buy some Aromel, a perpetual cropper, to provide some strawberries right into November under cloches, but the price of Garden Organic put me off for this year and I couldn't find any certified disease-free stock elsewhere.

The bearing times I've given here are based in Kent, so we might be a week later here in Dorset. We'll see!

In the tunnel the Bronxe Arrow lettuce I planted in September is finally ready to pick gently, and it's time to start eating mizuna thinnings. The summer peas are very tentatively coming along too - some flowers and even one very tiny pea pod. I've moved all the winter sowings cards a fortnight earlier than I did them this year though - I reckon it'd make all the difference!

Tharrr she blows!

That ought to get the hit rates up... the irrigation piping is in at last! The remainder of the trenching proved much easier than the first section since the subsoil was relatively clean sand. As I surveyed the last stretch where the pipe I had to join it onto was buried, however, I realised that I wasn't at all sure where the pipe was. Cue Witchypoo and the dowsing rods, and in not so very long we'd worked out the angle of the pipe and I dug it clear with no problem at all. By now I was beginning to worry that it was all a bit too easy, but apart from a nasty moment when the allegedly empty pipe belched two gallons or water into the hole (reminding me that my left boot is no longer waterproof) it was all plain sailing. I lost some time running into town to get a couple of pushlock fittings, as it turned out the two taps that I'd bought couldn't go straight onto the pipe, and by the time the plumbing was done and all leaky joints dealt with it was getting dark. During the day Harry had appeared at my elbow a couple of times holding his toy spade and saying "I dig", so I had nightmares about him falling into the trench and getting buried by sand, and wouldn't go in until the trench was full enough for this no longer to be a danger.

There is still the matter of all the things that link onto the piping, but they are not urgent. All this, of course, presently runs off a mains tap. This has two problems. Firstly, mains water means energy input which is contrary to permaculture principles. I included a couple of use-reduction devices into my design; lots of inline taps so that each area covered is controlled separately, and a clockwork cut-off so that you can't forget to turn the system off. Even so, although we aren't metered at the moment, we will be eventually and then the energy input will no longer be "hidden" but painfully obvious and that's probably a good thing. The second problem is that Dorset has one of the hardest water supplies in the UK, so you're constantly liming the soil as you water; this can be a problem for blueberries and such fairly quickly.

Water harvest and conservation, then, has to feature in the next stage of the garden design. Happily at the fancy dress party I met a nice chap called Glenn who has studied permaculture, so I'll be inviting him along for lunch one weekend soon to get his input. The irrigation is designed so that the leaky pipe can be detached from the main and plugged into a water butt with no difficulty. All I have to do is fill the butt!

The big pumpkin was a hit with both children, and Witchypoo cooked a full roast dinner to celebrate the day. I'd bottled the candied chestnuts earlier in the day, and by chance had a few tablespoonfuls of them left so Witchpoo incorporated them into the apple pie she was making. Hit! The vanilla flavour went right through the pie, and the nuts themselves made interesting little meaty diversions. So great recipes are born...

Incidentally, the hard pruning the apple trees got last winter meant that we had no apple harvest. These apples were the ones we traded surplus carrots for a couple of months ago. Waste nothing!

30th October

At last, a day off without rain! Since the last of the chestnuts are now marinading in a light vanilla syrup (reheated daily as per Antonio Carluccio's recipe although I have suspicions that he's never actually done this himself...) Witchypoo and I escaped to the garden for a spell, even if it was punctuated by frequent visits from Harry, a.k.a. Mr Death To Gardening. Harry's latest obsession is checking for eggs. His three-year-old mind doesn't yet do logical thinking, so he doesn't understand the concept of when to check, or that there's no point checking if you've already done so within the last hour. Or, indeed, within the last 60 seconds - so often he only makes it halfway up the garden before he decides it's worth another look.

At any rate, I seized the chance to make a start on the not inconsiderable trench needed to pipe water from the top of the polytunnel rebate to the raised beds. I knew this was going to be a slow and tiring job, me being unfit and the trench needing to be two feet deep through flint and subsoil, and I was right. Happily Conn arrived just as I was thinking of calling it a day, so two thirds of the trench is dug and I should hopefully manage the rest of it - digging, connecting, relaying and filling in - in a single dry day. If only!

In between bouts of frenzied mattock-swinging I took stock of the polytunnel. It's interesting how different plants have come on (or not) in this dull weather, but the fastcrop carrots seem to be growing on nicely, and mizuna and rocket look entirely happy with the situation; pak choi and winter lettuce less so. I've been too slow with getting the suspended shelving up, but I'll put it up over the winter to make use of the extra space once the growing season is starting again. The ordinary peas have stalled with the first flowers showing, which is a pain. I reckon if I'd been a little quicker getting them in we'd have been eating fresh peas now; but that would have meant taking the melons out sooner, and my late spring sowing knocked that on the head. Come to think of it, that means that my lack of fresh peas is down to the builders... bastards. I'd never have believed it but they're still not finished, and I've had to instruct the architect to tell them that unless they finish within four weeks (there are two left), I'll be employing someone else to finish the work and taking them to court for the money. Don'cha lov'em?

In summary, a mid-September sowing for the autumn would have been much better. This must be what Garden Organic meant when they said you can plan your tunnel for summer or for winter, but not both. I'm still not sure I quite buy into that though, since I think a lot of things could have been in trays waiting for space to become available. You never know - maybe I'll manage it next year!

The tunnel also has a bit of an unwelcome guest, a slime mold sprawling along the soil under the peas. These are interesting creatures - neither plant, animal nor fungus, but behaving a bit like all three. They're single-celled organisms growing in colonies like a gruesome fungus until they run out of nutrient, and then they disassemble themselves to join into a slug-like blob before crawling off to look for food elsewhere. How revolting is that? This particular one is known affectionately as the "dogsick fungus" because that's exactly what it looks like. Lovely. I have no idea of how, or even if, to deal with it - so I'll just watch it for the time being and hope it either dies or shuffles off somewhere.

The worms have settled into the worm bin and are making definite inroads into the handful of cooked carrots I threw in with their compost, but my initial worry (that I just wouldn't have enough to handle all our waste) now seems well-founded. I may have to give in and order some worms by post, but the cost is still high enough to make me pause. I'll decide tomorrow when I see how many worms there are in the New Zealand composter - perhaps I can capture enough from there to boost the worm bin but we certainly can't wait for the existing numbers to pick up!

It being nearly Samhain (Hallowe'en, a big deal in our house) at the time of writing, Connor tackled the biggest pumpkin last night while his old man made the - final! - batch of marrow and ginger jam. Given that we took no special steps to get a large pumpkin, I think we did exceptionally well. A bit warty on one side it might be, but it's bigger than anything you'd see in a supermarket and a bit of an effort for one person to carry. I managed to pull a bowlful of good-sized seeds out of it (more of them later) and even though I told Connor not to worry about hollowing it out (thicker sides mean a better shelf life) he had to scrape it out a bit because the flesh was too thick to carve with our little pumpkin knife, so we got a panful of flesh to cook with too! One "scary cat" face and an oil spray to prolong its life, and we're good to go.

Last week I tried roasting some pumpkin seeds in a spice-and-salt mixture, and although they were very tasty the husks are not to my taste. Too chokesome. I did notice, though, that the seeds in some pulp I threw out on the composter sprouted mightily, and I've seen something about how good they are for you on the web - so I've washed and dried this latest batch to eat as beansprouts. I'll keep you posted!

Tonight is a Samhain fancy dress party. I'm going as a tramp, and Witchypoo is a cat - so wish us luck!