A Boxing Day visit. We’ve had a lot of rain, but it paused for a day or so, so I went down to the plot – and fell over in the mud before I’d even reached my gate. Before the rain we had heavy snow, which saw off the chard at last. Not much else in the garden has been defeated yet.

I shall leave the kalettes in place until the spring, but at this point I’m not convinced they’re going to do much more than this. The individual sprouts are not up to much.

I cleared the chard and covered Bed 2, and ripped up the last few candytuft plants and covered Bed 9 too. The ground was getting somewhat churned up, so I didn’t pursue too much work.

Bed 3 has more bulbs coming up in it. It still clearly needs more compost in it, but with the bulbs all in place, I can’t just dump it in. I’m hoping I can continue to gradually creep it in around them during the year.

I decided to pull up a parsnip and was delighted  to find that the first one I came to had quite a big head. It then took ages to dig up because it was so long that it went down through the compost and into the clay, reaching the current water level! I took out the little one next to it too.  The big one was 7.5″ of parsnip plus about 12″ tail; the smaller one was about 5″ long.