I had a quick check on the peppers under the grow light this morning. They’re looking pretty good now are some are even producing their first true leaves.
There are one or two more oddities though, such as these ones with three leaves.
I also found a packet of mixed up home-saved Cayenne chile and Kapia sweet pepper seeds. Since everything else seems to be doing so well I decided to sow a few of those as well 😀
From the description of a submersible pump on Amazon.
Remind me again, what sort of chemical is methanol?
Removing the tyre and inner tube from the wheelbarrow wheel turned out to be somewhat easier than I was expecting given that the front wheels of the lawnmower are the ones I usually have to deal with, and they’re an absolute pig.
I didn’t even need to look for the puncture, because it was that obvious.
So, on went the patch, nice and easy.
And then it all went downhill 😀
After leaving the patch for some time to dry I reinflated the tyre just to check there weren’t any other leaks and realised that air was still leaking from the patch site. In fact, the patch hadn’t really stuck very well at all, and when I peeled the rest of it away, this is what I found.
Oh well. No spares in the drawer, so off to order one online. Two, in fact. Fortunately they’re less than £5 each.
The Antirrhinums were sown last weekend and this weekend it’s the sweet peas’ turn. Forty-seven seeds in all which isn’t many, so I’ve sown them one to a cell in module trays. Hopefully I’ll get decent germination and there’ll be enough for the main garden as well as the cutting garden.
I’ve just been idly looking at the cheap polytunnel that I’m turning into a polycrub on Amazon. Not sure why. My brain is just in random mode at the moment.
In the details for the 6m x 3m polytunnel, it says:
“Do not leave up in heavy weather.”
“NOTE: Not suitable for bad weather conditions”
So if you have plants inside and the weather turns a bit nasty you’re supposed to take it down? Even when the edges are supposed to be buried in the ground? I’m sorry? What exactly is the point of that?
As Asterix might well have said: “These Chinese are crazy!”
Apparently this weekend Trump is threatening to place a 100% tariff on all Canadian goods if they sign a trade deal with China.
I’m just so tired of hearing these threats from him. It’s got to the point now that whenever he does it, in my head I just hear some whiny six year old squealing “I’m going to tell my daddy on you!” every time he doesn’t get his way. Canada exports a huge amount of crude oil to the USA and about 10% of their natural gas. If he whacks 100% on those I shall laugh until I shit. Perhaps he’s thinking that he can source it all from Venezuela instead?
I hope Carney calls his bluff. TACO, and we all know it. Because Sleepy Don is just a bully and you don’t handle a bully by giving in.
In turn I shall look even more closely at what else that comes from the USA that I can avoid having to pay for.
Given the success of my late new potatoes last year, I’m going to try for some very early ones this year. I’ve saved all the inedible green potatoes from last year’s harvest and today, in the torrential rain, filled six compost sacks with the last of my 2024 food waste compost and put one potato in each. They were already starting to shoot, so I didn’t see any reason to chit them.
Then I covered them up and transferred the bags to a greenhouse to try to protect them from frost damage before watering them in.
I’ve just been out watering the polytunnel. Not something I’d usually do much of during Winter, but having seen how dry the soil was when the rabbit tried to excavate it, I shall be watering every day for a while just to get a bit of moisture back in. It’s not like we’re short of the stuff at the moment 😀
The Winter salads don’t appear to be moving much. I guess that’s testament to how dull the weather has been over the last week. However in more promising news I’d say that at least half the garlic is now above ground. Only just, but it still counts…
it appears that I have another one. Fortunately this one shouldn’t be a hard one to fix and hopefully won’t cost that much money.
I’m fairly sure the tyre has an inner tube, but I think it may have been damaged around the valve as when I push the valve to the side. air starts leaking out.
Too late for attention today though. I shall have a look at it tomorrow assuming I can fight my way through Ingrid’s rain.
In the aftermath of the leak in our mains water supply, I’ve been comparing our current consumption with our historic use and come to the conclusion that the leak has been present in some form or other since at least 2014! I didn’t spot it because the incremental changes in consumption were not that large and because there was absolutely no sign of a leak on the ground.
I dread to think how much that has cost us over ten years or more. Easily several thousand pounds, I would have thought 🙁
