Preparing for Winter

November is usually a fairly quiet month on the gardening calendar. Catching up with the digging over, perhaps spreading some manure or lime on the soil to be ready for the spring but otherwise not a huge amount going on.

Well you can hardly describe this November as a quiet month. The storms have been incredible. I know we're exposed here, so get it full-force but it's been pretty rough everywhere from what I can gather.

Preparing Equipment for Winter Storage

My equipment is currently being stored in a pretty damp outbuilding but the allotment shed was hardly bone dry. By equipment, I mean two rotovators and a shredder. Left to themselves in the damp winter air they're going to rust and by spring be in pretty sorry state so I've given them all a good wipe over with an oily rag and a spray of WD40 around the engines just to keep the wet repelled.

You should drain any fuel out of the engines as well. Strangely, fuel goes stale over time and apparently can deposit gunk inside the engine, which could cause it not to work.

Disposing of Stale Old Petrol

Draining the petrol leaves you with a disposal problem though. You should never pour it down a drain or onto land, especially near a watercourse. It's polluting and you don't really want to be responsible for blowing up a drain!

Some councils, but only some, have places where you can dispose of stale petrol – what they do with it then, I haven't a clue. So what to do with stale petrol? I'm not going to suggest pouring it onto a patch of weeds and throwing a match in. Someone would be bound to blow themselves up and blame me!

I've been told you can get away with mixing old stale petrol with fresh petrol 50:50 or 1:3 and using that in your garden machinery. Once again, I'm not recommending it in case it damages your engine but that's what I do/

Supermarkets – Can You Trust Them?

Even the most dedicated gardener and grower still needs to buy some food and usually from a supermarket. So I was amazed to see on the BBC's Watchdog programme that Tesco have been selling a cheaper cut of beef as topside.

According to the BBC the cut they were selling would take a lot longer to cook to be tender. Now I can understand a mistake, but this was happening in a number of their shops.

Even more incredible was their response that from now on they'll label the cheap joints as 'Beef Roasting Joint'. No abject apology for misleading their customers, just a statement that they'd find a better way to mislead them.

If anyone would like to buy a Mercedes off me, then I've got one for sale. Yes, I know it's badge says Skoda but it's a car, innit? It's got four wheels, just like the Merc.

Seriously though, it shows the attitude. Now how do we know we can trust anything they say? Tesco are the people who offered two 99p bottles of squash on an amazing offer of £2.00.

Asda, meanwhile, are having problems with their adding up and managed to over-charge some poor soul £100 on their online shopping bill! You couldn't make it up. Meanwhile, Sainsbury were offering large value packs that were more money per kilo than the small normal packs.

Incidentally, we spotted that trick in a French supermarket and warned some French shoppers. Now British shoppers would just have said thank you but not the French – within minutes a crowd was gathering and berating a store manager for the outrage.

We sort of backed away quietly before they got around to rioting and burning down the meat counter whilst setting up a Guillotine.

It does make you wonder if we're too well behaved in this country. Maybe some Gallic passion and temper would help stop the rip-offs and stop the big supermarkets treating us with utter contempt. Every little helps, you know!

Or perhaps we could go back to buying quality food from local butchers, fishmongers, farmers markets and the lady down the road who sells eggs. People who actually value their customers and their reputation.