Busy Morning

We're out this afternoon, so we had a busy morning tidying up outside.

Liz has now weeded all of the fruit beds, and I've finished repairing the netting. I haven't replaced the cord at the ends of the raspberry beds, but that's looking much less urgent: all of the net-to-net joins are now done with weather-resisting polypropylene cord.

We've pruned the gooseberries, though not the currants. The gooseberries have sprawled rather, and have pretended to be creepers or groundcover, so we've carefully tried to cut them back to suitable buds to avoid the same thing next year. They still look bigger than this time last year, so we should still get a reasonable crop.

We took up the last of the beetroot, the turnips that have done something (there are about four more that haven't really swollen: we'll see if they get anywhere), and collected some kale, sprouts, a celeriac and a leek. Definitely into winter veg production now!

The rhubarb has now arrived, so we planted them (enriching their spots with compost; they'll have another mulch in the spring). We now have four Timperley Early (right hand); three Victoria (front three on the left), and three Suttons Seedless (back three on the left). They don't look like much (anything) at the moment, but will hopefully spring into life next year.

While out there, we've also removed all of the sprinklers from the irrigation system: they're better avoiding freezing, and we won't need them for the next few months.