First working session in 2018 on the plot

Friday 12th January
Struggling with my wife's illness and cancelled Christmas arrangements I've only made visits to the plot to harvest veg and drop off compost material. Today was the first chance I've had to actually work on the plot.
I brought the trailer down full of bags of leaves and kitchen waste but had time to do some work.
One of my neighbours with a garden surrounded by trees rang me to say he had bags of leaves for me. He had 5 part filled builders' bags, large and heavy and will have more when he has time to clear the rest of his garden. I thought I had missed having his leaves this year but now I will have to get the two year old leafmould bin cleared to have room for it all. (I still need a petrol mower to shred the leaves otherwise they take too long to rot down!)
To make sure I had somewhere to spread the leaf mould I realised I needed to clear a stack of pine needles. It didn't take long to spread them over the path beside the newly planted summer raspberries after I had set some boards on edge along the row of plants to stop them being buried.
I then reset my three rat traps using peanut butter as a bait.
Finally I harvested food to take to my daughter's for a delayed Xmas visit. There were Brussels sprouts, leeks. I pulled a Mooli hoping my son-in-law who is from Zimbabwe knows something of how to cook it. I wanted a parsnip and tried to dig one out. It was very resistant and I managed to slice a chunk off the next one struggling to unearth it. When I eventually extracted it I found it was about 18 inches long! I also lifted the damaged one which was a respectable size. When cleaned up the large one was rather cankerous but the smaller of much higher quality.

​I went home pleased to have started the New Year's work and all set to prepare for my delayed Christmas visit to my daughter with my produce.