The garden on the shortest day

I have been out in the garden a bit more over the last week. Rather than wait until later in the day, when I generally don’t feel like going outside, I have started going out to do something first thing in the morning, before I sit down at my desk. The weather is very mild, and a lot of days have been dank and overcast, but on the brighter mornings I can happily potter about for an hour before coming inside. It’s quite often the nicest part of the day, weather-wise.

So I have set up a second plastic compost bin on the garden ‘extension’, which is easier to get to than the first one (which can rot down in peace over the winter now). They are probably not in their final locations, but they’re OK for now.

In the absence of any more frost, I have lifted the oca. It’s my best harvest ever, with some quite large tubers – not bad when you consider they were left crammed into small pots until the raised beds were built in midsummer. With their half of the bed clear, I finished planting the shallots. I was going to wait until today (it’s traditional to plant shallots on the shortest day), but in the end I did it last week.

I’ve also sowed some seeds (parsley and spinach, in modules indoors) and refilled the bird feeder a number of times. The robin was appreciative this morning, coming down almost immediately to see what I’d spilled on the floor.

I have a real Christmas tree outside, which has been growing in a pot for a number of years. We’re not bringing it inside, but we’re going to decorate it for the birds. We bought a couple of filled coconut halves, and some seed cakes in the shape of birds, at the garden centre, and this morning I have been attempting to make seed & mealworm stars in plastic moulds (they originally housed