17th day on the plot

Weather: a fine sunny day. 7 degrees, light south wind, but almost no wind on the plot due to the wind-shadow of the buildings to the south.

I went up to the plot for 90 minutes this afternoon, in the fine clear weather.

Hoed the bottom plot again. The light frosts don't appear to have had any effect on the remaining weeds and the scattering of tiny seedlings, so it seems worth keeping on hoeing. There may well be a week of heavy -10 frosts ahead, but that's not certain. It could be another mild winter. So it seems worth trying to keep disrupting the remaining weeds on a weekly basis, rather than banking on a hypothetical frost to do it for me in the future.

I dug over another section of the middle plot, getting a good heavy half-bag of weeds and weed-roots out. These weeds may have to stay in the green bags for a year or two, but I'm hoping that after a winter and a baking summer they might even be compostable in a separate quarantined compost pile. Or perhaps they could be buried at the bottom of a deep bean trench at some point in Spring 2014.

The new boots work a treat, and their height means that my trouser ends get less muddy.

I even found another small bagful of potatoes, at the other end of the rows! :)