Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working on the compost.

I would have rather been sorting out the weeds but the compost was showing signs of being tunnelled into , so it was time to turn it. It’s also been time to get the bokashi bins out of the kitchen. It’s a bit early but I’m going to stop with the bokashi until after the kitchen is done, I’m going to need to clear everything out ad tree r Christmas and I won’t be home for big chunks of January, I don’t want to have to manage the bokashi on top of everything else so I’ll use the council collection for now.

So for the last two weeks, most of my allotment time has been compost related.

I’ve planted the self sown rosemary and lavender plants by the compost bins too. My thinking is the plants and their scent might deter the mice and rats from tunnelling again. I know it’s not fool proof but it’s something and it gets those plants out of the poly.

Non compost related work has centred around the strawberries. We now have three towers of strawberries and five spare plants. My plan is that next year we’ll make up two more towers from runners and keep doing that until we have 10 towers, at that point we can renew two towers every year to keep them producing strongly. Knowing me, we may well end up with 15 towers because I have three now but I’m sure that Ma will work to keep me on track!

The bath that the strawberries were in is now home to the Moroccan mint, one of them was outside and is dying back and one of them was in the polytunnel. I took the ginger mint and we have a garden mint in the poly to eke the season out, we drink a lot of mint tea, but at some point we switch to teabags, I know that I should sort myself out to dry some in the summer so that we can be sufficient in mint tea so maybe that’s something to aim for next year, with two tin baths of mint, six other types of min

All the garlic is in, and the only things left to do are basically weeding and collecting. In January, we’ll sort out the patio area and move raspberries.

There’s always something to do but we are in the best shape we’ve ever been going into Christmas. This time three years ago, we were clearing the old shed at the back and we didn’t do it all by ourselves but I’m really proud of how well it’s looking in comparision.