We’ve had some very very cold, frosty nights in the past week, so all the annuals were done when I got to the plot this morning. One nigella had a flower and there was some candytuft in the left border still going though. The coreopsis is about done and I need to cut it back now or in the spring. The peacock orchids have been finished off by the frost; they’ve been flowering since September.

I chopped up all the cosmos in Beds 1 and 4. Bed 4 could do with a top-up as an amount of compost stayed in the cosmos root balls. I’ve taken up all the marigolds in Beds 2 and 8 (and the one in 7) and chopped them up. The few zinnias were done too, but the anise hyssop looks ok for now.

All the nasturtiums had melted and it was crazy to pull up the curtains of foliage for the trailing ones. The other nasturtiums were much smaller plants. They were all pretty wet and didn’t need any chopping, so armfuls of them went straight to the compost. I’ve revealed a lot of weeds now, which will be the next job.

Since we’d had some frosts I decided to pull up a test parsnip. The top looked about 2.5″ across, but starting to dig showed it was going to be much heftier than that. I had to dig and dig and eventually I was able to pull it out. It left a tiny bit of its thin root in the ground and was 36cm long. Halfway through the digging some long-tailed tits visited the efeder and tree, closely followed by blue tits and a great tit on the feeder. I’d also seen a kestrel hovering over the allotments, so it was a good bird day.