First Frost

Today sees the first frost of the winter: later than I'd expect, but October was mild, and we've only just put the heating on this last weekend. The rest of the weekend (getting the boiler fired up the first time each winter is not insignificant, with two thousand litres of water to heat from 14 to 85°C) was spent on bits and pieces, including chopping and stacking a few cubic metres of firewood, and—fortunately, given today's weather!—lifting the Bishop of Llandaff dahlias.

I notice that my 25th October entry, about putting up the orchard fence, is my 400th. Cue some stats and data...

Bizarrely, in both my first twelve months of this blog, and the second twelve, I managed exactly the same number of posts (111); and in each of the third and fourth years, I made 90 entries. As well as a round number of posts, it's almost exactly four years since I started keeping the log of what was going on in the house and garden.

I've now managed to blog on 73% of the days of the year: interestingly, I've always written something on 1st September. One day, I'd quite like to compile a collection of diary entries, one for each day of the year. I think they'd give an interesting view of the regularities and irregularities, as a 3rd March from one year is followed by a 4th March from another. Monty Don's book, The Ivington Diaries, follows this structure, and I rather enjoyed reading it.

Apparently, it'll take me at least one more year of blogging to accumulate enough entries to cover the whole year (I managed to 'collect' 29th February last year, by accident, so I don't need to wait until 2018 for that!), but I may get there yet.