Snow stops play

Well it stops any constructive play in the garden if you don't want to sprain your wrist digging rock hard ground. We've still got plants to move (mostly shrubs in the wrong place) and now we've got a morello cherry tree to plant on our north facing wall where the old compost heaps were. Apparently a morello's a good thing to put there - and I'm already wondering about steeping some cherries in vodka. We did that about, gosh, 6 or 7 years ago in our first garden and it was delicious. And the steeped cherries made very nice ice cream afterwards too.

With little chance to actually do anything outside at the moment (other than hurl snow at each other and lose control of large snowballs, sending them hurtling perilously down the drive), it's time to have a plan about what we're going to plant. We're turning the greenhouse over almost exclusively to tomatoes this year - the Bloody Butcher & Rudolph varieties that were such a success last year. It's nice having a go at growing more unusual things, but it's also a good idea to look at the things you really eat, and which cost more than a pittance to buy, and focus on those. And it's not so fun to have a go at unusual things if we're going to have as dull and rotten a summer as 2008 again!

It's also important during this cold time to keep nipping out with a kettle of hot water to keep the bird bath in water. And to check there's enough food out for the birds. We're hoping that we're getting nesting blue tits in the garden again this year. They seem v. interested in our nestboxes. And we hope that the new visitors that we've spotted over the autumn and winter - great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, blackcaps, goldfinches and nuthatches - will stick with us. Fortunately the magpie numbers still seem low.

I'm a bit late with this tip - but one to remember for January next year (!) is to look out for post-Christmas food special offers. I remember that the much-missed Green Poultry on Cambridge Market used to discount their unsold Christmas turkeys in January. Lots of bargain meals there. And this year, Northern Harvest were offering half-price frozen free range turkeys which we've been enjoying this week (when it finally thawed!). You've got to like the leftovers of course, but you get so many meals out of it, it makes a nice cheap-ish treat.