Due to a mixture of laziness, other priorities and a pusillanimous reluctance to engage with the chill dampness, I have been sadly neglectful of the huerto over recent times. However, a delightful array of gardening Christmas presents filled me with zeal and thence to work. Here’s my wonderful new Dutch spade (there’s also a new fork, which I have promised not to break!)

In a few hours I managed to:

• bring from home 8 sacks of Dug fertiliser
• clear the ground around new fruit trees (revealing lovely emerging clumps of snowdrops :0)
• weed the invading grass from the thyme clumps
• clear last season’s bean bed of weeds and debris & top dress with compost
• remove the netting from the brassica bed, then weed and compost the remaining sluggified cabbages and broccoli stragglers
• cut back the raspberry canes and take home for shredding ready for composting:

So all in all a productive day, despite the most shaded areas resembling tundra! Interestingly, where the frost layer is only superficial, I have found it actually facilitates weeding; breaking the frosted earth with a trowel seems to enable the root of the weed to come up more easily than usual…

And all with lovely warm hands, thanks to my new gloves ‘winter touch’ (thank you, Ian). It always seems such a shame to start dirty work with immaculate new gardening gloves; a scruple, however, that I seem to get over remarkably quickly.