Apres Snow

Well its the 1^st of February and their forecasting heavy snow for tonight and tomorrow; the Met Office have even issued an "Extreme" weather warning. Now according to the forecast we could get between 2 and 5 cm of snow or even as much as 15cm, for those of you not bilingual thats 3/4" to 2" or upto 6". Now to my mind that's not heavy snow, 2 to 3 feet would be heavy snow. Neither is it extreme weather; a 24 hour blizzard with 40mph winds, 8-12 feet of snow and temperatures of between -15 and -10 would be extreme weather. How badly the country falls apart due to a little snow the next 48 hours will tell.
Snow forecast aside, I've managed to get quite a bit done this weekend, despite the non-arrival of this years seed potatoes, onion sets, and more importantly garlic.
Saturday afternoon saw me on the Sunningdale plot, which had dried quite considerably since last weekend. I managed to dig through two of the 10ft x 4ft beds, manuring one as I went - I chose not to manure the shallot/garlic bed resorting to a liberal dosing of fish/blood/bone, growmore, and pelleted chicken maure. Beds dug I set about planting this years shallot and garlic crops, most of which had been given to me by a friend who gave up her plot due to emigrating to Cumbria or yorkshire or some other place North; she's not actually decided yet.
Anyway the donation of garlic, shallots, and onion sets, all of which should have been planted in October/November has enabled me to get started. I put in three rows of shallots in total, one row of Jermor, one row of Golden Gourment (I actually bought these), and one row of whatever variety it is I've grown for the last 2 years from the year befores leftovers. I was also able to pick through the 3 Germidor garlic bulbs and plant only the biggest cloves, giving me nearly 2 rows. I'm going to have to squash my own Solent White in when it arrives.
Today saw a foray to the Bracknell plot. I wasn't really expecting to be able to do a great deal, what with the week's rain and last night's frost, however conditions turned out to be considerably better than I expected. I therefore managed to complete the woodwork of the righthand most of the three main raised beds, and clear the bulk of the spoil heap made when I cleared the first bed 2 years ago. The downside of this though, is that I'm going to have a major plague of horseradish thongs as its roots were everywhere, and although there were at least half a dozen plants in the heap only one was of decent enough size to bring home in the hope of turning into horse radish sauce - all I need to do now is find a decent recipe.
Apart from clearing the bulk of the heap, and digging through the soil along side that section of the bed, I also cleared the pile of sods I'd extracted off bed 2 last November, and then extracted a further pile with a view to letting to forecast frost a snow do their worst on the now exposed couch grass roots.
Further progress as ever at this time of year is very much weather dependent.