I was up and out of the door early this morning – well for me – sweeping up some leaves from under the nearby trees to take down to the allotment.

“You carried those all the way down from home?” said a passerby as I arrived at allotment gate with my three large bags. “Get away down the road next to the castle, there’s plenty down there. And it’s only over the road.”

I fetched the trusty wheelbarrow, shovel and bags from the shed and went to investigate. My word – I was pointed to a little gold mine of leaves. Another five bags onto the heap already. And plenty more for tomorrow and the day after and the day after. Never turn down free goodies. Long may the town’s leaf sweeper be far too busy elsewhere to discover the road down to the closed castle. I could have a job for as long as the weather permits in the next five days.

Thing is – the resulting pile will be seem awfully small after it has rotted down. But it will still be cheaper than buying that amount of soil improver from the garden centre. Moral is – when the container is full, if there are still leaves to be had then put them in bags to rot down.

Truly there is always something useful that can be done on allotment or in garden. It’s a bit like the old saying about painting the Forth Road Bridge, you get to the end and it’s time to start again.

It’s the first time of growing and a bit of a learning curve with this new to me vegetable. The kohl rabi have not done very well at all down on the allotment – it looks as if I should have taken notice that they are a member of the cabbage family and treated the soil as for cabbages before I planted them. Well I shall know for next year. Oh and I shall know that the slugs absolutely adore them. Great.

That lesson seems to be required for the good old staple of the winter soup, the swede. So next year more attention will be given to soil preparation here too.

As both kohl rabi and swede are inexpensive packets of seeds and prolific growers, it seems a shame not to make the most of both crops.  Especially as come this time of year, anything that can go in the stock pot for another variety of soup is especially welcome.

Considering that I have done far better with the cabbages, calabrese and purple sprouting broccoli than in previous years, I should have taken heed of the information given so patiently when asking about cabbages and taken it to heart for the whole family. If I had  done as I was told for all of them not just for the obvious ones things might well have been better.  It’s odd to think that cabbage, beetroot, broccoli, swede and kohl rabi are all members of the same plant family.

But then potatoes (edible), tomatoes (edible), chilli peppers (edible) and deadly nightshade (poisonous) are also members of the same family. Which is why the disease of blight is such a problem for both potatoes and tomatoes.

Now I need to go and find a leek grower who will teach me how to just grow leeks for every day eating and not for the show bench. Just nice middle sized leeks not those fearsome monsters that take two men to carry into the show.

There’s more to this vegetable growing lark than I thought. Mind you – I’m trying out things that we didn’t grow in the garden when I was a youngster. So some crops are ones where I have no experience to draw on. But that is part of the fun of trying out new things. 

Apparently the light in the bathroom has been illegal since I moved in here – and probably previously too.

The one declared unsafe after the last flood was your average hanging down on an electrical string item where it is easy enough to add lampshade and bulb.

But regulations require an enclosed unit to prevent sparks meeting water. “Not that it would have been any better in a flood like you had” said the electrician dourly.

So now there is the one required by regulations installed and you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s not energy efficient.

But I shan’t get electrocuted in the bath then. It will act as an excellent collector of water next time that the bath in the upstairs flat overflows with consequences yet unknown.

Oh that’s all right then.

A shorter person here needs to know whether the bathroom ceiling is dry. It sounds a silly question but the plaster still looks damp around the light fitting.

When the bath overflowed upstairs, there was standing water in the bathroom before it decided to arrive downstairs in my flat. Now where did it go other than into the light fittings in bathroom and bedroom?

How do I know if it’s worth letting the electricians return so that I can have lights in two rooms and an extractor fan in the bathroom again?

Where’s a tall man with a damp meter when you want him? Why looking at other people’s problems of course.

All I can say is that the allotment is in far better state than the flat – and allotment is only worth about 7 out of 10 at the moment if committee did an inspection.

Sigh.

No not your little household dehumidifier but a great big industrial one is parked in the hall running at full blast.

Supervisor from repairs at housing association sent for it at once and in a hurry yesterday afternoon when he appeared to see just what was going on. He says to run it till the bathroom and bedroom are dry – for as many days as it takes. 

At the rate that water is coming out into the bucket I’d say that it will still be here on Monday when the electricians return to see if they can restore the light and extractor fan to working order. The electrician put his little test box onto them yesterday evening and shook his head saying that there was still water in the ceiling affecting the wiring.

Now there’s a beastie to walk round to get to the toilet from the bedroom (stage right) in the middle of the night. 

Right then I’m off to see the allotment and do interesting things as the sun has come out.

How to get a Thursday morning off to a good start – get woken up by cascades of water pouring down from the flat upstairs at 5am. To find that the tenant can’t be woken up and that the housing association out of hours emergency repair service can do nothing as a result except to tell you to call the fire service who can break into properties in such situations.

Funny how flashing blue lights wake some men up fairly swiftly though. Fire engine and police to sort out the source of the water.

Of course water in the electrics will cut off the power supply – 5.30am with no tea and the out of hours repairs people saying that no - they can’t call out an electrician to make the electrics safe because everything will be wet. You’ll just have to wait till normal office hours unfortunately. Funny how the fire service could get an out of hours electricians to attend.

I was actually planning to clean out the bathroom anyway but not on emptying the cupboard yet again as that was done last time there was a flood.

And just to make life properly enjoyable – it was raining that steady, wet rain that goes right through everything. Now isn’t that just going to help to get the flat dried out.

Just add the re-plastering to be done in the bedroom if the leaky guttering can be cured then, the pointing on the outside of the bathroom wall to the plastering that now needs doing in the bathroom. Oh and the decorating that is now required in bathroom, small hall and bathroom due to floods and leaks.  So much for frugal living and balancing the income against the outgoings. It’s the unplanned £££s out that don’t help at all.

.. to the leaking half barrel that passed as a water butt, the wire for stretching between fence posts, the lengths of hose that haven’t found themselves a use in over three years, the polycarbonate covering to the frames on the contraption that was pot storage and the chipped panes of greenhouse glass.

They took their farewell ride to the community tip in a Ford Focus this sunny afternoon.

… to the rest of the rotten timber, the dangerous nailed frame from the top of the contraption that was pot storage and a large container of thick twigs from the now moved compost heap.

The pile was another fire in the brazier this afternoon.

So there are still two large, long planks holding down plastic sheeting over compost heaps which really should have been sawn up for burning. Due to the lack of bricks to do the job at present they have had a reprieve.

There are two interesting, elderly benches which are needed for sitting upon in the sun eating chocolate, drinking fizzy pop and admiring the allotment. They will be sent to the tip when the remaining wood eventually gives up the unequal struggle to support people. But they might live long enough to be used as frames for drying onions

And there’s the fire hose reel that is not going to work as a hose reel unless the handyman otherwise known as the son-in-law becomes really artistic – time is a wonderful thing and perhaps there will be some this winter.  There are obviously going to be future farewells before all is perfect but perfection is that bit nearer.

Autumn has certainly stamped its footprint on the weather now. Mornings are chilly and the mists are beginning to hang around until after breakfast.

The view out of the back window this morning was obscured again by low lying mist over the river valley which took it’s time to lift and to clear away to allow the view to the hills beyond.

A trip down to the allotment at lunchtime showed that the plot had taken on a damp and autumnal look. But at least it cleared away the three large bags of plant pots that have been stored unused in odd corners since I took over three years and seven months ago. If I haven’t used them in that time it’s unlikely that I shall do so in the future. Therefore the community allotment may as well see if the gardeners there can find a use for them.  Plant sales happen regularly to raise funds so plant pots come and plant pots go it seems.

I have wondered, when looking at these pots, who last grew Berberis on my allotment as the previous tenant was a vegetable grower.  But there was a pot in the stack that claimed to have contained a berberis bush once.  Definitely not edible, the clan berberis and mostly far too prickly to be friendly.

So gardening will be down to continuing with the clearing and tidying because the autumn mists do not encourage growth except of the last sturdy weeds before the soil cools down.  Rubbish is being stored in the leaky half water butt for future visits to the tip. Chipped panes of glass from a long greenhouse that hasn’t been on plot these many years, short lengths of hose that aren’t worth connecting up, fencing wire that is used tensioned between posts (in a plot with hedges round these last 40 years) ….. There must have been some hoarders over the years. But considering that a Ford Prefect was found buried on one plot on site in years gone by, I maybe should not complain hey?

This morning the zip on the suitcase of the handbag broke. 

Now being a girl who needs a big handbag to lug half the household goods around, this was a disaster. Especially as it happened just as I was dashing out of the door late and not able to put off the going out. It’s a good thing that the charity shop down the street opened early and had a new bag for £1.50! Not big enough but good enough for an emergency.

It was a quiet morning in the gardeners association hut. Not many customers at all, so the two nice gentlemen who were there to help to deal with the crowds of customers (!) set about seeing if there was a way to repair the zip. They failed. It’s teeth had come to the end of their useful life. Sad to say, many of us know what happens when teeth come to the end of their useful days!

And no – I decided that I didn’t  to hunt high and low to find a shop to fit a new zip to a handbag that had cost me £5.99! The local cobbler only does shoes and won’t even do leather belts so that was the most likely option out of the window.

As it costs £6 to fit a new zip into a pair of jeans locally, the likelihood of finding someone to manage a zip in a leather handbag at a sensible price doesn’t seem worth the waste of a good Saturday afternoon. It’s a sad reflection on how things are today that something basically solid should fail the user for lack of a decent repair – and no I don’t have the skills. I have never yet in my entire life managed to put a new zip into anything decently and am certainly not advanced enough to consider working with leather even if I had suitable tools. Which I don’t – the last time I had to sew something onto leather was about fifty years ago and there were leatherworking tools in an obscure outhouse on the farm.

So the handbag has gone to join the collected leather pile in a garage locally and may yet live to have other uses.

I ALWAYS put my house keys in one particular pocket when going out of the house so that I know where to find them again. Today I put them into the left pocket not the right pocket. So they were lost!

I turned the place upside down looking for my keys and eventually went down the allotment with the spare pair in my right hand pocket. Didn’t think of looking in a different pocket did I?

On returning home, quite by mistake I put my hand into left hand pocket and found my missing keys.

Doh! Women!

Yesterday the sun shone, the wind dropped and the start of autumn turned up in all its glory – cool then sunny then cool. So bonfire it was!

The brazier isn’t shiny any more after four hours of continuous work. There wasn’t much ash to show for all the feeding of the fire either when I went down to empty it this afternoon. But it was fun whilst it lasted. And the pile of rotten wood disappeared so that can only be an improvement on the clutter lying around the allotment. There is more rotting wood turning up from various corners but it requires a man with a saw to cut it into manageable lengths before we can go have another fire and this could be a long time in the happening.

I’d just finished throwing wood into the brazier when the nice family turned up at the allotment gate bearing compostable material, cardboard and nine bin liners full of leaves that had been blown off trees in the winds on Saturday. They had been doing some community service sweeping the street outside the front garden in order to bring down something to make into compost.

At least I gave them red cabbage, kohl rabi and the last of the carrots in exchange. After they had gone on their merry way to the household tip with the rest of the rubbish in the car (and taking the three bags of non burnable and non compostable rubbish of mine with them too), I spent the next forty five minutes ripping up cardboard, throwing it on the compost heap and covering it with red cabbage cuttings and carrot compost and generally clearing up. Then I came home smelling strongly of bonfire!

Today has been unromantic jobs like planting out the two curry plant cuttings that have taken root, weeding and clearing the area under the fruit trees and starting to spread the now unused compost heap into the cleared spaces. Not as much fun as having a bonfire but far more important in the long term.

Yesterday was just wet and miserable but there was a delivery due down the allotment. So no way could I stay safely indoors. Despite the rain I did a test on erecting the new mini poly tunnels which will be used next spring to help to protect and bring on seedlings. With a little help from my friends or Don from the next allotment anyway. Putting the new water butt in place and filling was no problem.

And finding places to dig in twelve bags of compost was even less trouble – much to my surprise. There was an old strawberry bed which had never been properly composted, this year’s potato patch and the newest strawberry patch all in need of attention. All were easily turned and composted in quicker time than expected. By the time it was done though, I was a lovely shade of mud and even the bus driver on the way home up the hill had to laugh.

Today the weather man certainly hit true with the weather forecast today! The recordings at the local sailing club put us nicely at the bottom end of the Gale Force 8 levels. There was no dinghy sailing today despite the national sailing competition planned. The black flag of cancellation and stay off the water was flown.

I can’t say that I have tried walking since earlier today before the winds reached a crescendo to test out the serious impeding that such winds are supposed to cause but it was not a day for gardening. And certainly not the day to have the bonfire that I had promised myself.  Sigh – I do so want to have a bonfire.

There’s that nice pile of wood left over from demolishing the floor of the contraption otherwise referred to as the cold frame down on the allotment just stacked and waiting to be burnt. There’s the nice new brazier stacked safely away from wind damage which I had planned to use today.

The daughter drove me passed the allotment and everything was still in place earlier today but there was no way that any useful work could be done on the jobs outstanding. Like having a bonfire. And tomorrow may be little better as the wind is likely to be only marginally less gusty looking at the forecast. Sigh – I do so want to have a bonfire.