Before the Frost

These are the tea bags I buried in the garden in July for the Tea Bag Index, a citizen science project investigating soil health. I dug them up a couple of weeks ago, and they have been drying on the dining room table. There are accompanying soil samples to go with each tea bag. It’s time to send them all off to Tea Bag Index HQ, so they can become part of the national and international data set. It will be interesting to see the results in due course.

I spotted a forecast that it was going to get very cold over the weekend, and that we were likely to have our first frost of the season, so I put one or two plants into the shed for protection, and brought one or two indoors. Then I took some photos on Saturday of what the garden looked like beforehand, as plenty of plants were still going strong:

When I woke up on Sunday morning there had, indeed, been a frost. The car windscreen was frosted. There was a small amount of ice in the little bucket pond the Houttuynia cordata lives in, and it looks as though it’s about to retreat below the water surface for the winter. But apart from that? The garden didn’t notice. It looked exactly the same on Sunday morning as it did on Saturday.

Since the last of the summer crops don’t seem to be in a hurry to relinquish their beds, I sowed my broad beans in modules in the shed. I have some Chak’Rusga from the Heritage Seed Library, and some field beans. There may be space in the bed to sow some spring broad beans as well, and do a comparison.

And then, yesterday evening, we watched Before the Flood, Leonardo diCaprio’s documentary about the effects of climate change he witnessed during his time as a UN Messenger of Peace, in which he “discovers a calculated disinformation campaign