If you’re going to have this much freezing weather, you might as well make the most of it. So I’ve been turning it to my advantage this week with a shivery sort of visit up to the allotment to recruit the sub-zero temperatures onto my side in the on-going battle against pests.

In carefully covering up all the bits of my allotment which I want to cultivate next year (to protect them from excessive wet, soil erosion, weed seeds and so on) I’ve also been keeping out much of the frost. 

That means my nice neat polythene covers have been providing a cosy shelter to thousands, if not millions, of slugs, snails and other pests, plus their eggs: even the birds haven’t been able to get at them. In other words, I’ve been doing all my pests a monumental favour ever since about October.

Or I would have been, if I wasn’t planning to play them a cunning trick just about now, when the temperatures are at rock bottom and I can catch them with their guard down. You see, while it’s so frozen, there’s no risk of waterlogging or weed invasion – so I can uncover the soil again and let the slimy ones shiver in full view of whole flocks of hungry birds. Since they’ve all gathered under that polythene, and are half-asleep anyway, it’s just a matter of turning it over: the birds get a bonanza of slug eggs, wireworms and other tasty little morsels, which keeps them happy at a time of year when they need all the help they can get and clears out my veg patch just in time for spring.

The only thing is, the frost has been unbelievably hard for this southerly bit of the country - we’ve been recording down to  -9°C at night at my relatively exposed allotment, a good two degrees below the temperature in my garden (which was cold enough). So much so, in fact, that when I pulled back the covers I found that the ground has in fact frozen underneath as well. In fact, everything was frozen to each other: I had to hammer the bricks out of the ice where they were frozen onto the polythene, and break the little puddles of solid ice where they’d grouped themselves around the edges. Who’d garden in winter, eh?

It may be that I didn’t really need to bother after all: the usual clusters of slugs and snails upside-down on the polythene are missing and there’s no evidence of them on the ground, either. But I suspect this may be deceptive: just underneath those sheets of ice is a relatively warm and dry pile of soil and manure, and if I were a slug that’s where I’d head for. So I’m going to leave the covers off, just to be on the safe side, until the weather forecast tells me the big thaw is on.

My bones are telling me it’s going to be wet’n'warm all the way till spring after that. Can’t wait…