Brrrrr…

It’s gone cold here. We’re down to -12C (10F) at night. That’s proper freezing. We’ve had a bit of snow too which is nice. It makes all the frost worthwhile. But my plants are suffering.

The Winter garden is, well, wintry. The Sprouts and Red Cabbage are frozen in time but nothing is actually growing. The Leeks are bolted into the ground and I didn’t harvest the Celery in time. Poor things.

My Lettuces inside the greenhouse are – dead. I had a heater in there but I just don’t think it could cope with the temperatures and they succumbed. We won’t be eating it now.

The view from the greenhouse is bleak. My poor Peach tree (on the left) is in shock!

And inside the greenhouse there is not much action. There are a few seedlings undercover that seem to be shrugging the cold weather off. But apart from that, zilch.

It all sounds very depressing until you start to remember that a hard frost does have its benefits. It will break up my clay soil and kill some of the less frost-hardy over-wintering bugs. So it’s not all bad.