“Next season” had seemed so distant and abstract in summer and even though it’s still on the other side of winter, it is now in sight and very real. So while lockdown restrictions are slowing garden bed building we switched to indoor-based planning. 

Aside from a business name, the main priorities are infrastructure and a planting and harvesting plan. In keeping with our comparative advantages, Alex is in charge of infrastructure, with the must-haves being a vegetable-washing station and a composting system (as opposed to our poorly managed heap). Of course there’s a longer wishlist, including a shed in the garden (to save seemingly inevitable trips for forgotten tools). Alex has planned a combined shed and washing station, with functions on different sides, a bit like the Barbie home/office I owned many years ago. The ball is now in my court to identify the problems (apparently my comparative advantage). The compost system will hopefully be built this coming week. I finally began a harvest plan, which I’ll use to reverse engineer a planting plan. That in turn will reveal if the harvest plan is possible and hopefully, after not too many iterations we will have a feasible plan. At this stage it is so tentative that the harvest plan is still on paper but this week it should graduate to Excel.

There was of course outdoor work to do, which is always more enjoyable after computer work. We managed to source enough cardboard to make one more bed, taking us to 45 beds outside of the tunnel. Hopefully old newspapers become available again this week as restrictions ease and we can crank up the pace again. We sowed more seeds and transplanting seedlings to see what grows over winter, including in the tunnel. Lettuce is one experiment since we assume people would like to eat it all year. We also sowed the third and potentially last attempt at chives after two failures so far. And Alex did a particularly efficacious job of pruning the tomatoes. Admittedly I suggested he could cut off the leaves with mildew and any marigolds with the same problem. The result was no marigolds and naked-looking tomato plants! It was a good reminder that colleagues cannot read minds even if you’re married.

• 

• 

Although the tomatoes are slowly ripening outside, the frosts are coming and it seems everyone else is harvesting their field tomatoes. So I did some more preserving this week, with the clear winner being a green tomato ketchup that provoked unprompted compliments from Alex. Fortunately, perhaps, there are still plenty of green tomatoes left.