2024 - What I did today

No gardening today but spent the time draining down all the water in motorhome from heater,toilet, fresh water tank and waste tank. I don't want this freezing up as we had or first white  frost this morning!
I will still be using motorhome during the Autumn/winter but will carry bottled water and rely on the diesel heater and gas heater for my comfort. Any hot water needed will be boiled and toilet will be flushed with fresh water from a bottle.

Chopped a few sticks for lighting the woodburner. I don't buy sticks now as they are too expensive but prefer to chop my own. Pallet wood is ideal but old floor/skirting boards are good as well!

Took down the old ferret run and turned the ferret house back into a shed of sorts. Emptied the generator shed. Ready for dismantling and rebuilding (with a few tweaks) as my garden shed. Dug a little more of the cut flower bed

Cleared the leaves from the patio and put them in a big dustbin.
Pulled up montbretia.
Took down beans but left the sticks for next year. Found a few small beans which the dogs ate.
Weeded VP 3. - nothing much in it now apart from a few wizened red cabbage, lots of strawberry plants and half of the Taunton Deane perennial kale (roots in VP 4 but its spreading!
Sowed rainbow chard in two pots in GH1.
Did a load of washing and dried it in the sun.

Finished pruning out last year's canes of the thug blackberry then attempted to restrain the many new trailing canes. It's planted along neighbour's fence but its growth is trained out into our garden along a 12 - 15' stock fence at right angle to neighbour forming a T. This year it has taken to not only travelling into our purpose built leg of the T, but extending along the top of the T along neighbour's fence. It is a thoroughly anti social so and so and caught on to their dog as he was investigating, so to be neighbourly I should bend the errant canes round into ours. There was I in the middle of half a dozen evil lengths of some 15ft canes trapped. It had me by the front, side and middle and wouldn't let go. It drew blood in several places. P was all for letting thug have its evil way to fill a gap in the hedge but I persuaded him it wasn't fair to a non gardening family with a dog, soon to be two (they're getting a puppy field spaniel). Mission accomplished, we then planted several privet in the gap where thug had vacated. I resolved to buy a replacement blackberry, probably thornless.