A week of different weather

It’s certainly been a mixed week of weather. After a frosty start to the week the snow finally hit on Thursday, covering everything in a white blanket. The A30 and A303 (our two main routes out of the village) were blocked as cars struggled to make it up the steep hills in the snow, so instead John took Evie for a walk in the ancient woods above Yarcombe. It looked so beautiful with the snow hanging off the tree branches.

A sunny start to Friday meant the ice that had formed overnight gradually defrosted and our guests managed to make it here safely. With a day off work we’d hoped to make a start on one of our bigger jobs (painting the house or bricking the area behind the greenhouse) but instead we prioritised cold weather jobs – bubble wrapping the greenhouse and harvesting the remaining chard and beetroot. Luckily the vegetable bed covers are still up and the netting caught the snow, protecting the more susceptible leaves from frost damage. Now we’re coming up with different recipes to use them quickly. We also cut back the peach and nectarine trees and installed the fruit tree covers (after a little TLC) before the winter rain comes in earnest. The peach tree has caught peach leaf curl which is exacerbated by rain and the polythene covers aim to keep the new shoots dry until Spring. We’ve tried spraying the trees with fungal treatment but there’s nothing really you can do except remove the affected leaves when they appear.

We also moved our remaining chilli plants up into the greenhouse for the winter. We’ve had a real disaster with our chillis this year – we moved over 100 plants from the conservatory into the three-bed barn when we moved, but an attack of whitefly wiped out most of them – including most of the ones we overwintered from 2022. We finally took the remaining ones out of the three-bed, sprayed them with water and left them outside – but with the cold snap we moved them into the garage temporarily before checking them for bugs and moving them into the greenhouse. It’s not looking great but I hope we’ve managed to save a few – especially those where we don’t have any fruits / seeds left so I don’t have to buy them again!

And we picked the rest of the green figs from our tree. The figs never make it to the following summer to ripen so we use them in jam or chutney. This year we’ve missed most of the figs but managed to get enough to make one batch of jam to add to our guest offerings. It’s one of my favourite flavours – earthy and not too sweet.

On Saturday Storm Bert hit – already by early morning the rain coming down off the hill had blocked our drain. John had pre-emptively cleared the rain channel running down the side of the farmhouse into the drain but the wind blew too many leaves off the trees. The overflow gutter diverted the water along the side of the courtyard and away from our house – but when it reached the gate it meandered its way through our driveway and cut a deep channel that effectively blocked the way out. We still have a pile of stone left from the building work which we used to fix it this time – once the weather improves we’ll need to look at a more permanent repair. The wind and rain has also damaged both the garage and laundry doors – the wood has swollen so much it’s almost impossible to open them. Not great on a changeover day when we’re in and out of the rooms multiple times throughout the day. And one of our bat boxes has come down – hopefully any bats hibernating in there are safe and will stay there when we put it back up!

Our latest guests seem to have enjoyed their stay, despite the weather cancelling their plans to go out for the day on Saturday. John took the chance in the gap between guests this week to deep clean the aga and tidy up and clean in our storeroom, which was the one room we didn’t have time to sort before we moved out.