I've been gardening this afternoon

With the weather having warmed up today, I've covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the "heat" (after all, 6 degrees is "heat" after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche  and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche. 6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn't big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn't grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it. But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I'll build a garden shed there.

I've also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans - I had a load of them lying around and so I've flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I'll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn't started yet - it's still November around here.