Today marks the day when we finished filling up the compost bin that we’ve been using since the start of Winter. Always seems to be the one that takes longest to fill. To try to keep the pile moist and warm, this time I’m putting a layer of grass clippings on top, followed by some thick cardboard. Before I closed it up though, I had to see what the temperature was inside.
Pretty toasty! 😀
Spending some time at the bakery has rekindled my desire to bake more and one thing I’ve always said I wanted to do was to make some proper Cornish pasties. Clearing the veggie plot uncovered some small swedes left over from last year so that finally pushed me into doing it. We had a few potatoes and onions left over from the last harvest too, so other than the beef skirt, pastry and seasoning, everything came from our garden.
A little more practice wouldn’t go amiss, but I’m not at all unhappy with the result. And they taste great, which is the most important thing 😀
The next step is to make some veggie pasties that my daughter will be willing to eat. We have some leeks still standing in the plot, so I reckon they should be in the filling.
My son’s Fiesta doesn’t, and had a puncture that I wasn’t sure would be safe to drive on far enough to get it fixed. Fortunately I still have the set of standard profile wheels that I fitted to my own Fiesta in place of the low profiles (because the ride is much better on our roads with the standard profiles).
The original wheel (opposite side of the car):
My old one:
So I was able to take off the wheel with the punctured tyre and still drive the car to park it out of the way.
And the actual puncture:
No idea what that rusty piece of junk is in the tread, but it certainly shouldn’t have been there.
The greenhouse is starting to fill with module trays and seedlings now…
Back in January I took some of the green Charlotte potatoes that I saved from last year’s harvest and put them into bags of compost in the greenhouse. By mid-February they were starting to sprout.
And by the tail end of March they were looking pretty healthy.
The instructions on the original seed potatoes said that they’d take around twelve weeks to be ready to harvest, so I think it might be time to have a look at them this weekend 🙂
This is (most of) what I managed to get done today.
Thus far I have no idea about whether I’m going to put shelves or drawers or some combination of the two into these, nor about doors. I think I have a fair size piece of worktop left over from our barn conversion, but I can’t recall where I stored that at the moment. For the time being I’ve just put a table top that I made ages ago and then never used into place to allow me to get more stuff out of the way.
No, I have no idea how we came to have so many caulking guns either 😀
I wasn’t intending to use the red storage boxes once everything is reorganised, but I’m now thinking that I might. They came out of my father-in-law’s work van when he retired many years ago. They could be quite handy for keeping some stuff together on the shelves.
My plan is to leave a gap next to these two units as a space for me to sit and then make up another couple of units to go the other side.
In fact, assuming I have sufficient offcuts left over, I think there may be space for two more units after that along that wall, but that’s something to sort out another day. Tomorrow I’ll be happy if I can just get another two units into place and get more stuff out of the way. I still have a planer/thicknesser sitting on the floor that I want to get moved, for example. Fortunately my dad has borrowed my small 7×12 Chinese lathe so I don’t have to find space for that at the moment.
The other thing I’m pondering on is adding a kickboard. It’s tempting, as a way of stopping small items disappearing under the units if they’re dropped and I do have some spare (also from the barn conversion), but on the other hand if it gets wet it will just rot away and make a mess.
Here it is. A fair drop from the morning reading though nowhere near where the professionals say it should be. And I notice that as my BP has come down, my heart rate has gone up.
This doesn’t seem to be an uncommon event. When I was suffering due to my body’s reaction to having my blood pressure much lower, my heart rate went bananas.
It almost feels as though it is my natural reaction to not being able to get as much blood to my organs as my body thinks is required.
And I’ve only just finished the last pass through the veg plot!
Winter being so mild has meant that an awful lot of weeds didn’t die off when they would normally have done so and having weeded pretty thoroughly at the start of November, by the end of February it was high time to start again. That took quite a while to get done because I was struggling to do much more than an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon with a decent rest between the two.
Unfortunately thanks to the plot being surrounded by sycamore trees it was time to start again almost immediately:
I also removed quite a bit of this, which is apparently Sagina procumbens, also known as pearlwort.
Allegedly it provides protection against fairies, so we’re in trouble now 😀
It’s not all bad news though. In the course of weeding I found that the aparagus are sprouting
And the “Winter” compost bin is now full. There’s not enough material to fill it over Winter, really.
I’ve put a large sheet of cardboard over the top to try to keep some of the heat and moisture in.
I do wonder sometimes 😀
Actually, the ones I’ve met at our local GP practice are excellent, but when this happens the day after blood is taken for blood test, it’s a bit alarming.
And then a couple of weeks later, this one (for a fasting blood test, this time).
An ex-Tory justice minister somehow failing to realise that he doesn’t get to decide that the law doesn’t apply to him.
