winter and the rest

Our first actual weekend since the end of January was mostly gales and pouring rain, but it was pleasantly mild on Saturday afternoon. The lovely Australians had cut the hedge and left a huge pile of brushwood, which we cut and sorted into kindling-size sticks and burned the rest.
There’s a large flock of semi-feral pigeons, which I blame for eating the growing shoots of my winter brassicas – already badly hit by the frost. So two full beds of them are now dead, dead, dead. We will have no purple sprouting this year.
I dug over another bed, pulling out the roots of the rainbow chard. Asleep in the hollow of one root was a grey mouse; he woke, and ran off, trying to find a hole to escape to. There are lots of these tunnels around the veg garden, and the culprits seem also to have eaten most of the fartichoke crop too. All in all it is looking rather bleak, so it was more in hope than expectation that I spend the rest of the afternoon – in the dry! – sowing lots of pepper and tomato seeds in propagators. I’ve brought them all back to London though, to keep them warm and moist until they germinate.

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