We’ve hit the point of the year when our efforts are all about maintenance and readiness for next spring.

Ma is on a weeding ban (I think it’s fair that the 73 year old doesn’t weed), but we started with collection, I ‘picked’ tomatoes from the polytunnel and watered the beds in there. I also gathered two cabbages and some mint.

Ma started to clear the beans off the arches in the winter squash bed and I started to empty the back compost bed. We used some of this compost to top up the potato pots.

Then Ma riddled the compost while I weeded, with breaks for refilling the wheelbarrow with compost for riddling! One of the squash beds was lower in compost and more weedy than the other, so we laid cardboard on the bed and covered with the riddled compost. It will probably need more in the spring but this works and we made it.

That done, we decided we’d had a good day and went home, only to find that Ma had left her shoes at the plot! So back we went. While Ma was changing shoes, I checked the carrots, we have carrot success!