We had a range of wintry weather this week. Cold nights brought frost on Tuesday and Wednesday. There were blustery winds and heavy rain (almost 30mm over around 30 hours). And thick fog blanketed the property on Saturday. I’ve decided that mornings are perfect for indoor work, at least until I devise a more effective glove combination. Fortunately, there is plenty of planning and preparation for next season to be done.

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The biggest achievement was finally confronting my indecisiveness, which was reinforced by a lack of knowledge, and making a weekly harvest plan for the season. Ordering seed was becoming more pressing, especially as our most local supplier reopened their online store this weekend. But orders are impossible without a plan. The order is connected to the plan via all sorts of assumptions and guesses (recorded in Excel of course) on details like how many plants produce a week’s harvest, how many weeks that plant produces for and whether the growing time will be the short or long end of the range on the seed packet, all of which is why I’d been delaying. But the first seed order is done. And given the weather forecast, I expect to finish the orders before the end of the coming week.

Another big indoor task (I’m still slow) was preserving the last 7kg(ish) of green tomatoes. With salt, sugar, vinegar, flour and time, they became relish, ketchup, pickles (lacto-fermented and quick pickled), “bread” and pasta sauce.  The jury is still out on the pasta sauce (tangy is an understatement) and pickles (I’m trying to be patient) but the rest was approved by Alex.

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There was still some outdoor work to do. We cut down another three beds of green manure (with a knife again) and covered them with the tarp from the beds we’d covered two months ago. That first set of green manure had largely decomposed, which was somehow surprising to see even though it was the point of the exercise. We harvested the last 12 bags of potatoes but learned that we should not let them sit around too long once the weather gets wet. Alex made two more vegetable beds. Inspired by the recent growth spurt by the lettuce in the tunnel, I planted out another tray of tiny lettuce seedlings and a tray of silverbeet seedlings. I’ve told them they have to hurry up because Alex and his tomatoes will take over the tunnel in September. At least, that’s how it goes in the plan.

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