I sometimes have so much time off around Christmas but the days are too short or the days are too wet to be able to do much at the plot. This time I just decided to walk up to the plot regardless and so any bits I could. I also wanted to harvest some bits too, something we don’t seem to have done much over the last couple of months.

The ground was way too muddy to do anything too much, but I was able to weed and generally tidy up. I tidied up the sprout plants which haven’t really produced much this year. They started off as quite weak seedlings and then got over crowded by pumpkin plant. I didn’t get round to putting off the lower leaves and so they just grown until they ran out of space and light.

The swede has done well, after some really feeble seedlings I ended up buying plants off of ebay and they have haven’t done too bad. The theme of bad seedlings is something for this year, the compost (peat free) was not good and nothing thrived.

Upon looking under the bottles I spotted small broad bean seedlings starting to appear.

There had been a delivery of woodchip to the plot site and I had hopped to collect some and redo some of the paths. I didn’t have the spade on the plot, plus it really was raining hard. I also felt that I needed to remove the composted down woodchip on the paths from last year and put the new lot on top, something that would take time and be for another time. Hopefully the large pile of available woodchip will remain over Christmas and I’ll revisit early one (hopefully dry) morning.

I did manage to take home:

• swede
• a couple of sprouts
• parsnips
• beetroot

This was the first lot of parsnips, I had one wonky one and another one that was dead straight. Beetroot was a nice harvest, normally by now all plants would had been pulled and eaten but we grew so much this year that I just left it in the ground (not being able to get to the plot much for the last couple of months has helped). Not damaged by slugs of anything, and a decent size, we roasted a couple to go with the roasted parsnip and the mashed swede.