Saturday 7 February 2009

Seeds and frost

Today we went to the allotment society in Kenilworth Avenue to see what seeds they had. We had a list with the plants and variety we would like. We got most stuff but no dwarf french beans. I'm wondering if we should leave them for another year, plenty of time to decide yet. As usual the seeds come with a 25% discount to members, so my 50p membership fee saved me £4. We also saw a mini greenhouse, which has four shelves covered by a plastic skin and a zip-up door at the front. We have one at home already, but the plastic skin is cracking and one of the shelf supports has broken. It really is a great thing to have against the house wall. It lets us harden off plants in a small space. The new one will probably get used alongside the old repaired one, which we have had foor many years and overflowed last year.

There is a heavy frost forecast for tonight. It could get down to -10°C, which is unusual here. It has been unusually cold for the last week or so, so the winter rain has fallen as snow. We have not seen too much snow, though there may be more to come. The forecast for a very sharp frost has prompted me to drain the water pipes on the allotment tanks so the pipes don't burst, I hope it works. The water in the tanks should be OK, they can push the lid off if needed and they have old plastic bottles in them so the ice can crush them as it expands and not burst the sides of the tank, hopefully.

The very cold spell, which is forecast to continue for a couple of weeks yet, means we have delayed planting any seeds. We would have planted our broad beans by now, but they will just catch up later.

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