Winters Coming

Wellies And Layers

Well im more than sure that winters on its way now. Dressing to let the girls out in the morning seems to be a case of wearing as many jumpers and jackets as we can find, and not to mention the wellies, best worn with John very long woolly socks. Mine and Johns wellies look exactly the same and there are a few times when I'll put his on by mistake, but whatever way you look at it at least our feet are keeping dry.

The girls are having to be put to bed earlier and earlier each week and its down to about 5pm now. Luckily if were a bit late they'll put themselves to bed, and I like to think on those days that Rita walks along saying 'come on girls, time for bed, lets show John and Nicola how good we can be.' Putting the girls to bed is not as much of a palaver as it used to be. A few claps behind them and they're running off home. The three gray chickens seem to be resigned to the fact its bedtime and go straight in, whereas Rita and Alison know they can string it out a bit longer by staying under the coop once in the run. Were only getting one egg a day at the moment, which could be for a variety of reasons, like shorter days or they're going through molt.

The water at the allotments was turned off last Thursday so its been time to sort out the water butts. As always we have found our own ways of attaching pipes to all the gutters and they seem to be working. The only thing I hadnt thought about when I found out the water was turned off every year was that we still needed to give the chickens water. So come Saturday (the water butts not being full) we drove to lotty with a bucket and two plastic containers full of water. Given that none of the containers had lids and the area we live in has more than its fair share of speed bumps we had a very wet car by the time we got there. It probably didnt help that we the container our new fish were given to us in also didnt have a lid so even more water was sloshed about on the way home too.

Planting and Pulling

Yesterday it was once more time to pull up more of our plants. The courgette and outside chili are now gone and the weed barriers have been taken in ready for use next year. Whilst I was pulling up plants, John was busy digging over one of the old sweetcorn patches as we'd found some potatoes suitable for planting. After adding a bit of blood, fish and bone to the soil I popped the spuds in and were hoping that with a few tricks we've learned on protecting potato plants over winter we'll be eating our own potatoes again by the beginning of next year.

In my seed planning over the last few weeks I found that at least one lot of peas were plantable at this time of year. We had a little look around until John suggested that we plant them in the floor of greenhouse two. After more digging from John we had a row of Feltham First peas in the ground. After asking if we had any more bean type plants that could be planted I found some broad beans and they went into the greenhouse floor too. Were hoping to get a few onions planted in pots in the greenhouse too before long, and if we can find any other veg to go in there it'll be planted soon enough.