Digging and shelves

Jean likes digging. She is never happier than when she's doing something energetic and useful, so digging fits the bill nicely. I don't mind digging you understand, but since she likes it so much I leave it to her.

So while she was digging over the now-empty parsnip and leek plots, I started to build the shelves in the newly-extended greenhouse. I built the wooden frames for the smallest set of shelves. As in the old greenhouse, I will cover the frames with wire mesh to make the surface to stand trays on. This worked really well before, it lets light and water through.

A few more garlic plants have come up, so the extra garlic we bought yesterday is probably not really needed, but we realised that there is a spot for the extras near the asparagus so some will go in there.

Claggy

We added the plastic panels to the green house and it is now a splendid thing. It is warm as toast on a coolish day and the space inside is drying out. I'm very pleased with it.

We have been trying to stay off the plot to avoid making the muddy morass that we created while we made the green house. After we finished Jean dug the ground over to bury the clag. Today we walked on it for the first time in over a week and it just sank underfoot. I still have the shelves to add, but to help preserve the ground I'll wait for a few weeks, we're not in a hurry to use it yet.

We dug some more leeks and parsnips. The parsnips are beginning to look a bit rough, with chunks out of them and blemishes on the surface. One of them was rotten. There are about a dozen left so in a couple of weeks we'll dig them all up, give away what we can and freeze the rest. The leeks have just got better and better, but sadly there are only a few left, some of which were the spare ones that we planted rather late and so are a bit small.

Bricks, digging and slabs

The bricks have been laid on the concrete footing. The line is fairly level, but if the front of the new greenhouse follows the line of the bricks we will have a bow-window front.

Over the last few days all of the empty parts of the plot have been weeded and dug over. I cut down the asparagus to the ground, then turned my attention to laying paving stones into the new extension of the greenhouse. I had to cut a paver, which smashed into many pieces, but two of them fit the space so that will do.

The winter onions are doing well, the rhubarb has all died back so everything looks good for the start of the winter. No sign of the garlic yet, but that's not an issue.