I’m all for reusing where possible, and grey water is a big waste area, but I don’t think I could bring myself to organise the plot’s water requirements along the lines suggested by this book.

I found it in Foyles at lunchtime and it’s very comprehensive, even going to great lengths to explain the kind of urinals you can get for women so that they, too, can collect their liquid gold.

Regardless of the fact that foxes and cats probably urinate on a vegetable plot from time to time, and that urine is generally very clean and sterile, I don’t think I could enjoy my vegetables if they’d been fed this way. Neither could I feed them to my friends.

If you could, Liquid Gold: the Lore and Logic of using Urine to Grow Plants can be found on Amazon (£4.49) and second hand on AbeBooks (from £1.82).

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garden, gardening, self sufficiency, recycling

This weekend, in between accepting deliveries of slabs in preparation for the shed’s Friday erection (it’s currently stacked up on the patio as a series of panels) we gave the plot a good clear out.

We took out the dwarf French beans, which had come to nothing, the pepper trees that had succumbed to the frost, and the last of the beetroot, which we boiled and skinned and sliced into bags for freezing. That’s a bit of an experiment, really, after we read about freezing in an allotment book; normally we’d have turned to pickling but as we still haven’t broken into the first batch we’d pickled we don’t yet know how successful we are on that front.

We also gave the bramble a short back and sides.

The squash plants are now all dead - even the one in the greenhouse. That’s surprising as the high-low thermometer claims it hasn’t yet dropped below zero (although I have my doubts) and the lavender plants in there are back in flower and positively flourishing.

So we only have four crops left in the plot right now: about two-thirds of the carrots, plus all of the leeks, Brussels sprouts and cabbages.

I don’t know how successful the cabbages will be as they’re looking a bit bug-nibbled around the edges, but I think the hearts are coming on well. The sprouts are going great guns and are probably ready for their first picking. The leeks are quite slender and the carrots, after a few blackened ones in the second pulling, are something of an unknown quantity.

The value of this year’s harvest so far stands at £172.68. Most of that’s from the tomatoes, but I’m hoping that there’s £18 worth of crop left to harvest before the end of December and push the total for the first year (of only 8 months) to just over £200.

Fingers crossed.

The number of cyclists in London has increased 83% in the last seven years. Whether that’s down to lousy public transport or rocketing petrol prices isn’t clear, but now that petrol has topped £1 a litre you can take an educated guess.

(For American readers, that’s about $8.15 a gallon - and GasBuddy tells me that in St Louis right now it’s actually $2.87.)

Apart from being a good source of exercise, cycling is a fast and free form of eco-friendly transport (once you’ve bought your bike), so it fits in perfectly with the Blagger ethos of low-cost, low-impact living. Besides, the ride to and from the station, even in the cold, has actually become something of a highlight of my day.

But the press release trumpeting that 83% stat isn’t about the growing popularity of the bike, but the increased dangers of this form of transport over any other: 61% of cyclists complain of cars coming too close, 51% worry about not being seen, 48% of cyclists feel unsafe on the roads, and 75% of accidents happen on junctions because bike lights generally point forwards and backwards, not to either side.

They may be scare tactics, but they were convincing, and an effective introduction to Pedalite, a self-powered lighting system that you attach to the pedals of your bike. It’s charged by the turning of your crank shaft, and flashes lights to the front, back and - crucially - side of your bike, making you more visible to cars approaching from a side road. That’s something that’s concerned me more and more since the nights started drawing in, and wasn’t much alleviated when I invested in a fluorescent belt and chest strap to reflect the lights of oncoming cars.

They’re eco-green and, like bike transport itself, free to run once you’ve made your initial investment (£34). So, I’ve ordered a pair, having been assured by the site that they fit any bike designed for someone over 9 years old.

It’s difficult to see whether they’re metal or plastic from the pictures on the site, but you get a money-back guarantee, so I’ll report back once they’ve arrived and I’ve fitted them to my bike. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Pedalite in action.

Dead pepper tree

The first frosts of winter have been genocide to the plot. While the sprouts may only improve with some extreme chilling, the dwarf French beans, the pepper plants and all but two of the squash plants have been killed off.

It’s left it in a sorry state, and at the same time revealed how many peppers were hiding among the foliage. I reckon I could have picked two dozen if they’d had another couple of weeks to mature.

The squash, which I thought would be hardy and easy to grow, are turning out to be quite fragile. There are no fruits on any of them yet, and only the ones growing in the trugs, which I thought would have been more susceptible to the cold than the ones in the ground, are doing anything that looks remotely like growing.

Obviously the theory that the residual heat in the ground would help didn’t work out. I guess all that heat has well and truly gone by now. Perhaps covering the soil with black plastic would have helped, but it would be pig ugly.

So we need to have a big clear out of anything forward of the leeks, which won’t take too long, but is a shame nonetheless.

The cabbages, meanwhile, remain something of an enigma. They’re quite leggy, rather than round but I’m still hopeful they’ll fill out around the middle in time for Christmas. As things stand, though, they don’t really look all that appetising.