Sunday December 3rd
The modules of garlic are doing nicely now, so am hoping that a day off will allow me to plant them out some time in the next couple of weeks. Pity the onions aren´t nearly as nice, but beggars can´t be choosers. The good part is that if I put the garlic into the large bed that was courgettes, there should be room for the onions to go into it as well given how few have sprouted. And I could always combine the overwintering alliums in one bed in future, which means there´s a spare bed and the strawberries have a home!

The Grand Plan 2007 (subject, as usual, to change!)

Saturday December 16th
Quick dash up to the lotties to see how things were going, in between rushing to do shopping and Christmas party prep. Went up with the friend whose servers host this site, and he now knows what´s responsible for eating all the bandwidth! Not too different to last time, except that the mesh had blown off the remaining red cabbages and either pigeons or the wind has removed a lot of the remaining outer leaves. The last cabbage was fortunately there, though a bit slimy. Cleaned off a fair few layers and apart from the usual woodlice, it doesn´t look too bad. Perfectly usable, perhaps to see if I can work out how to do a sweeter recipe than the Delia one we´ve been doing up to now. Collected another couple of white cabbages, a leek and a rather larger than expected parsnip, which put up quite a fight. Not easy since the ground was soggy and I had no gloves... Also got some decent carrots and a bunch of sage: apart from the red cabbage, the rest will go to friends who are coming round later and like fresh organic veg. Hope they don´t mind the muddy `snip!

Friday December 22nd
Decided to go and dig up Christmas dinner early, since last year we had visitors who pinched stuff. Unfortunately I was too late for the first lot of unwelcomes. Vandals had obviously walked across the plots, destroying nets. My poor broccoli net was shredded, the shed had been covered with the contents of my water butt (and was all muddy), the carrot netting was on the next plot and the compost bin had been pushed over. I hadn´t got any string etc up there, so called Sir to ask for help. It still took two of us over an hour to repair the broccoli net with string, and that net had been brand new at the start of the year. The cabbage net was also damaged, the supports to the broccoli cage were bent (one broken) and it was very much a jury-rigging, but there goes about £25 of stuff. I didn´t see too much else damaged apart from Tony´s bean canes, which had been smashed. Did manage to dig a monster leek, some more normal ones, some odd-looking parsnips and two white cabbages.

Sunday December 24th
Both of us went up again, in case anything else needed repairing. My plot looked similar to how we´d left it on Friday, but an awful lot more folk had been hit, so the vandals must have been back again. Some of the older folk will have an awful job repairing the damage, and how does one repair a plant which only grows for one year? It´s senseless. I wonder if they ever stop to think how much work it takes to get a plot to produce at this time of year? Probably not. If it was their work, they wouldn´t be as quick to destroy it. Dug another leek out, had a chat with others who had suffered damage, and decided we are all going to individually report it to the police, with estimates of cost of repairs. Hopefully by putting economics into the equation, they will take more notice. If only we could get the police to take more notice and the vandals less!