Greenhouse, Green Tomatoes

Faced up to the fact that the tomatoes weren't going anywhere - the majority were rotting on the vine rather than ripening - so we cleared them all out of the big greenhouse this evening.  Left the cucumbers in situ - and the trestle has gone back in for onion drying purposes during the day (unfortunately can't leave them in there overnight as they may well sweat under glass in the cooler night air).

Did manage to 'rescue' a fair number of green tomatoes that hadn't gone over yet - pictured here on the windowsill (next to our newly fitted windows*).  They've all been rinsed, and once they've dried properly, we'll consign them to a box or something to ripen them properly before they make the sauce pot.




*We've just had the rest of the windows done - we had some replaced last year when the porch was fitted - so we've now got a matched set.  The new windows also have much better double-glazing, so hopefully we won't get quite so much condensation in the coming months!

Fire and Flood

We got off rather lightly in the so-called 'big freeze'. Although we had a good couple of inches of snow at the beginning of January (and it's stuck around pretty much ever since) we missed the worst of it. And we'd got ourselves a bag of 'grit' before the stocks ran out so we could get up and down our path / drive.

The new porch (pictured) which I never really got around to blogging about - something we had done, in addition to the roofline, guttering and some double-glazing back in September / October - has helped insulate us from the cold. In due course it will hopefully be a nice place to sit, but at present it's providing a good place for stock-piling some handy wood for the stove during the cold snap.

While awaiting Sunday's snow - which never really arrived with us, although some of the surrounding villages have been badly hit - we decided it would be a good idea to give the stove's chimney a mid-Winter sweeping. All went very smoothly this time - on the previous sweeping, back in October, we managed to dislodge the chimney cowl! So we hopefully have nothing to fear in the way of chimney fires for the rest of the winter.

Still awaiting the snow - the following day - when our neighbour called round to say they could hear running water coming from the back of our house. It wasn't so much a 'flood' as a 'fountain' as it turns out. We thought the pipe to the outside tap had burst to start with, but luckily the tap had just popped off the top, so didn't take too much replacing. Hopefully that's the last water-related drama for some time to come . . .