Plumbing problems

Today's visit to the plot, the first of the New Year, was really just to check things over and to take along the kitchen waste for the compost bin. The site was deserted, and the sound of a running tap carried so clearly and persistently that I had to investigate. The water to the site is turned off in the winter months (danger of burst pipes/plenty of wet falling from the sky anyway), but this standpipe tap was gushing away and making a swamp of the nearby plot. I couldn't budge it to turn it off, so the man with the strimmer graciously left his kitchen re-tiling work at home and came along with a spanner (tho I'm told that the correct technical term is a 'mole wrench'). He managed to reduce the flow to a faint trickle, which will have to do until the Allotments Division of the city council opens tomorrow and can send someone round.

Otherwise the ground was too frosty to dig, but I could see what the books mean when they talk about the earth being made 'friable' by frost. We stood and looked at the encroaching weeds and made lots of resolutions about spring digging.