With a couple of nights forecast to drop below 0°C, I decided it wasn’t wise to plant out my garlic and broad beans today but I did have some I could spend at the allotment. What did seem like a worthwhile primary task was to dig out the remnants of the lovage plant inside my “veg cage”. I’ve got another lovage plant (and a transplanted offshoot from the one I’ve removed) and lovage is a herb that I need in far smaller quantities than the massive volume produced by a healthy plant. It doesn’t seem to need extra protection so the space inside the netted cage is better used for other things.

I hadn’t realised what massive roots the plant would have. As well as a mass of material directly at the base of the plant there were quite a few elephantine roots. I ended up adding them to the compost heap but subsequent research suggests I could have harvested them for culinary purposes… although they would have taken a fair amount of washing. That will be something to experiment with in future.

Meanwhile, the lovage is gone, the beds have been topped up with some compost extracted from my composting system earlier this year and I’ve covered them with black fabric to inhibit weed growth and perhaps stop the ground getting quite so cold. By the end of the week we’ll be back to temperatures that are seasonally cold but not freezing and – hopefully – I’ll finally get the over-wintering garlic and broad beans off to a start.