I received a huge clump of lovely pink Japanese Anemones from a lady on Freecycle. After soaking them in a big bucket for a few hours, I enriched the soil with some multi purpose compost, removed the weeds, and split the plant into two clumps with a spade. In a few days, I will chop all the growth down to ground level, and wait for them to start growing again in May. They are at the front of the house, which is north-facing. They appreciate not growing in full sun, so I am hoping they will be pretty happy there.

Sent a banana seed through the post. cost 61p!!!! how the feck do they justify the price hikes when I still don't get my mail until midday!!!!!!???? One bloody seed!!! Disgusted.....

Broke my new phone. Gutted.

Meanwhile, in the garden...........

Decided that the planned bed for Spring bulbs under the tree will have to wait. Really need to improve drainage at the top of the garden where we're growing veg first.

I gave the Pansy Palace (yes, I am that sad to name a bed) a major overhaul today. It had become overgrown with Nasturtiums, and the pansies in there had become really leggy. So I pulled everything out. Went to B&Q to have a look round. Came away with 30 pansies for £3, 12 lovely yellow Violas for £3, and a wonderful Christmas Box for almost £7. Enriched the soil with half a bag of the compost that was delivered the other day, and planted everything. I'm delighted with the way it looks. Interplanted the bed with 30 Salome Daffodils.

I have resigned myself to the fact that we won't be having the Barbeque Summer that the Met Office promised us. It is raining now. Actually, it's been raining more or less constantly for a few days, beginning with a torrential rain storm, complete with thunder and lightning. So the garden is flooded. Again.

I ordered six 70 litre bags of multi purpose compost from creativegardenideas.co.uk last week. Free delivery too! They should be arriving today. Most of it will be used to create a spring bulb bed around the tree at the bottom of the garden. I'm hoping that there will be at least one bag left over to enrich the onion bed. Speaking of onions, I'm finding lots of conflicting advice as to when would be the best time to plant the sets I bought. Some sites say September, others October and November. I even saw one recommend the shortest day as the best time to plant them. I don't want them to run to seed prematurely by planting them out too early, but I don't want to wait too long to plant them, as already the temperature is dropping outside.

Well I've harvested the rest of the first row of potatoes. Lovely, huge spuds are now in the fryer. Maris Piper make the best chips. The Nasturtiums have started popping out seed all over the bed. I must have collected hundreds from the little area I did today. I found out today that the reason the Nasturtiums went so crazy is that the soil they were growing in was too rich. Apparently, if you grow them in very poor soil, with little or no nutrients, they grow in a more compact fashion, and you will still get as many flowers. That will be something to experiment with next year.

I picked off the seed pods from one of the Lupins. I could hear the seed rattling within the pods, which had gone a brown colour. They are now outside in some seed compost. I'm unsure whether a frost is needed for the seeds to break their dormancy. We'll have to see what happens.

Well the raspberry cane which took so long to get going has finally given up the ghost.

All this Grow Your Own stuff is really difficult. Planning has been an epic fail. Planning, or lack there of, is the reason why we'll have no raspberries, pumpkins, pish poor onions, no spring onions....... alas, the list of failings is quite long. Still, at least we've learned from them, and hopefully, next year, things will be more successful. Hopefully.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but the Brussels Sprout plants are beginning to form little buttons. Sprouts for Christmas! The leeks are still going strong, and the Maris Piper spuds are ready for digging up. I'm tempted to do it now, but we've had a fair bit of rain. Or is that an excuse.......? Ok, Ok, I'll do it now.....

Bought some autumn-planting white and red onion sets. They are known as Japanese onions, and will go in in the next week or so, to hopefully produce tasty onions in early summer next year. I think that as the pumpkin is unlikely to produce fruit so late in the season, I might pull it up next week, and dig the large raised bed over, adding lot of compost, and plant half the red onion sets in there, and maybe a few cloves of the garlic I bought too.

I was toying with the idea of giving onions a miss next year, but will be trying again, purely because I'm pretty sure it was my fault that this years failed so bad. They're maybe golf ball size, and the tops have flopped over, so they won't be growing anymore. I'll probably lift them tomorrow. I really liked the idea of growing our own onions, so I will be sowing some main crop onions on the shortet day, to hopefully give them the longet possible growing season. Not sure which variety to go with yet.

It will be a mad few weeks once we have harvested what we can. We need to enrich the soil, and improve drainage. I'm sure the best way of doing this will be by using raised beds. I have finally sourced a company on-line which deliver compost. They deliver for free which is even better! Will have to have a look round for some wood to make the frames. We would like to edge the raised beds with gravel on the top of weed suppression membrane. I think this would give it a really nice look.