Another inch or so of snow fell overnight, so now we have 2 – 3″ of lovely powdery white stuff to kick through – but absolutely no chance of any gardening taking place!

So we have time to wonder at the icicles you get from a corrugated iron roof….

Freeze thaw, freeze thaw...

And time to worry about our leeks. We’ve never grown leeks before; all the books will tell you that they’re perfectly winter hardy, so we’re counting on them being right!

The few that we harvested before the arctic weather set in were delicious, so we’re hoping that like sprouts (allegedly) the flavour improves after a bit of frost!

They look hardy don't they??

Damn cold

In one of our first winters after we’d moved here we recorded a night time temperature of -16 centigrade, but then enjoyed a decade of relatively mild winters, and thought perhaps that such extremes had been consigned to meteorological history.

Last winter brought us back to reality with a start, but still didn’t challenge our “record” low.

When we woke up this morning to hear the TV weather man reporting overnight lows of -17c in Powys, and -13c in Shrewsbury, we had visions of our record being smashed….but didn’t quite make it!   As you can see from our photo, we dropped to about -15 degrees;   cold, but no cigar.

Perhaps more alarmingly, you can see that when this photo was taken at 10.30 this morning, it was still about -8c.

It’s not showing signs of warming up anytime soon!

Sometimes we watch the weather forecast, sometimes we just look out of the window.
This is the scene that greeted us this morning.   Today, it’s mostly going to be cold.

The weathermen are predicting this cold snap is going to continue for another 10 days, so it looks like we may be enjoying this view for sometime yet.

The temperature on the nursery dropped to -9 centigrade last night; luckily, Steve Nick and Louise spent most of Friday filling the front polytunnel with all our evergreen stock, so its safely tucked up for the duration.

We don’t mind seeing a gloriously frosty vista when we open the curtains of a morning, but we can’t help worrying that this might be a harbinger of a long cold winter ahead …. we’ve already had more frosts than we might have expected this autumn, and forecasters are warning of a repeat of last years bleak winter weather, so it’s time to batten down the hatches.

So cold, so early

Most of our evergreen stock will be moved under cover this week – not because its less than hardy, but if the root balls freeze for any length of time the plants can’t transpire, so they dehydrate, and then die.  This would not be good. The irrigation system will be drained so we don’t suffer too much frozen pipe damage, and we’ll start the horticultural equivalent of doing the hokey-cokey - opening and closing the polytunnels everyday. The plants need protection, but also ventilation, so as soon as the daytime temperature is above zero we open up, and as soon as it starts to approach freezing, we close again, and this shapes the rhythm of our days for the the next several months.

Looks like a ....

Some of the timber has been sunk into the ground, with concrete collars to hold them firm, and perimeter beams have been cut to size…

The weather this week has been ideal for a bit of al fresco woodwork, so progress has been steady.

It’s exactly the size of a domestic greenhouse (8 feet by 6 feet) but those posts are a bit heavy duty for that – aren’t they?

Readers with total recall may remember us asking the very same question about this time last year. Those of you who have honed their observational skills on rather more spot-the-difference competitions than might be good for you will have noticed however that this time there’s a trailer load of timber rather than a mere truck load…so this must be something bigger!

Watch this space….

Nick's latest project...

Those of us who like our veg in serried ranks can only look on in awe (and with perhaps a little envy) at the precision (and scale) achieved by the professionals. If only my veg patch was big enough for one of those tractors…(the tractor pulling the precision seeder in this field was about the size of our first house).

That should do for the guess the number of plants competition...

Today, mostly it rained.   And rained.   And rained.   But there’s always work to do, so the wet weather gear had its first serious outing of the season.   And we were able to confirm the advice given to us last year by an assistant in one of Keswick’s (many) outdoor gear emporiums – “there’s no such thing as a truly waterproof outer layer…” That’s why we have several sets of outdoor clothing.

At least it wasn’t cold rain.

You can never see rain in photos, but students of body language and outdoor fashion should be able to fathom how wet it was while Louise was sorting through yet more trees........

We get quite a lot of power cuts here. Mostly that seems to be down to the ancient rural distribution system (our ‘phone line is equally unreliable – the cable feeding our house runs along the bottom of a roadside ditch for about a hundred metres!). But sometimes the blackouts are down to human intervention.

Our power failed at about mid-day yesterday, and after several revisions of the “repaired-by” time on the power company’s recorded telephone message, several engineers turned up in our garden at about 6 pm (we have an electricity transformer there) and announced that because they hadn’t even identified the source of the problem yet, they were going to install a temporary generator to keep us supplied. What nice people!

After several more deadlines had passed, a team of chaps with floods lights and head torches arrived in the lane in the early hours of this morning, made all sorts of banging and clattering noises, and at about 2.15 am, turned our power supply back on.

It was way too late, dark, and wet for us to investigate what they’d done last night, but we were mighty impressed when we ventured out this morning to find this :

Enough to supply us, and a few others ....

It could be catastrophic for us to lose power for any length of time of course – our irrigation system is electrically powered, so if the weather was hot and dry we’d be in real danger of losing stock, so hats off to the power company!

And the reason Farmers get nil?   It seems that the problem was caused by a plough ripping through an underground supply cable.   Ploughing too deep, or too close to the field boundary?   Cable not trenched deeply enough?   No doubt that’s a debate that the power company will be having with the farmer in question, but for now, take a bow Central Networks, you’ve played a blinder!

(This blog post is brought to you courtesy of the generator in the lane!)

We’re starting to think we may have blinked and missed a good part of 2010, because we were greeted by a distinctly autumnal vista when we flung back the curtains this morning.

Mellow fruitfulness must be next then....

We know it’s a sign of getting older when time seems to pass quicker, but blimey, surely it can’t be autumn yet?

It is, of course, classic August weather;  it’s a transitional month, still gloriously warm when the sun shines, but with noticeably longer and cooler nights, it’s a real teaser for things to come.

And while we may mourn the apparently accelerating passage of time, there’s always a bright side – the first picking of hedgerow blackberries made it into the freezer earlier in the week, so the first apple and blackberry crumble of winter can’t be far away!