Having spent five hours in the car as a passenger yesterday on what should have been a two hour journey, I now have a very nice looking chart of my seeds, with all their details about sowing, transplanting, harvesting and care all in one place. I still don’t have a plan as to what’s going where in my plot, but damn it, I have a seed chart.

The sun shone today (mostly directly into my eyes, as it’s winter) and I went down to the plot to make a few more trip holes to endanger people’s ankles. Mum came down in the morning and kindly dug up the rest of the raspberries for me, being able to to put a bit more metaphorical and literal welly into it than I could. We also put together yet another bag of compost rubbish for our brown wheelie bin (having filled several on Christmas Eve too). The bottom of the rubbish heap I’d been making had become rather stinky and slimy from all the brassicas, so we got rid of most of that and restarted the rubbish pile with woodier items on the bottom.

This afternoon I carried on with the eternal task of dock and buttercup removal around the plot. In so doing I’ve made a nice hole right by the gate and I’ve already stepped backwards into it. I also spent an amount of time on top of the pre-existing compost heap. It’s not staying and before it can be deconstructed, the content needs to be sorted into rubbish, compostable material I’ll keep and the compost that’s ready to be used. The first part of this task involved dragging off all the woody sweetcorn plants from the top of the pile and then digging up the various potatoes that were busy growing haulms instead of rotting.

There are plenty more weeds to come up yet, as I gradually turn the plot into a mini Somme, but I’m also on the verge of needing to get the bean poles out, make a start on marking out at least where the boundary beds will be and where the compost bins and shed will stand. My new compost bins and water butts turned up on Christmas Eve and are currently standing in Dad’s garage. I’ve played with them a little, but not enough to have worked out how to get the lids off the water butts – and that’s kind of important, because inside them are the rain diverters you use to attach them to a down pipe. Well, there’s still time: Shed Corner needs clearing and preparing, the shed needs ordering and erecting and guttering needs to be added. Only then will it really become a nuisance if the rain diverters are still inside the water butts.