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I’ve planted up quite a few of my winter salads in mushroom trays now. I think I have eight done, so forty-eight plants. Then I had an idea that is so simple I don’t know why I’ve overlooked it until now. I guess you get so hooked into one way of doing things that sometimes it’s hard to see outside the box. The main reasons for raising plants in cells in the summer are that there may not be space immediately available in the main garden, so having, say, a month in cells gives more time to finish some of the early crops, and to reduce pest damage. But there’s no space issue here and no real problem with pests. I could just fill the trays with compost, sow, say, three seeds per station for whatever plant I want and then thin them down to one once they have a true leaf or two. I still have a couple of trays to plant up, but there are some spares so I shall try this as well.

This evening I cleared many of the nettles growing up through some of our blackberry plants and then pruned off the long stems that are sticking out into the garden and not bearing fruit. That uncovered many more ripe blackberries which I have now picked — another 1¾lb of them. And I’ve only done one side. I’ll try to do the other side this weekend and get them picked as well, though my list of jobs to do this weekend is expanding at quite a rate 🙁

Whilst putting the berries in the freezer I noticed the sweetcorn that I picked last weekend. From the pale yellow colour it had then, it’s now turned quite bright yellow. I have no idea why, but I’m not going to complain 🙂

Harvesting and freezing some more sweetcorn is one of those jobs on my list, in fact. As is harvesting all the larger aubergines that we have left, together with some courgettes, to roast with some more vegetables and then freeze to use through the winter. The smaller aubergines I’ll leave, pinching out the tops of the plants and removing any remaining flower buds to see if that helps fatten them up at all.