Just a quick shot of the veg plot in late Spring. Most exciting are the asparagus plants in the closest bed producing their first ever shoots. This year they need to be left for the plants to develop. It’ll be a couple of years before we can really take a decent harvest. I marked each plant with a plant label so I could see where I was expecting them to come up, but I was still so pleased when all thirty of the crowns I’d planted produced shoots.
Ages back I decided that I was going to try to teach myself to play piano. Sadly it all fell by the wayside for reasons I don’t really understand. Possibly the lack of progress to a standard where it became possible to play something vaguely interesting just got to me in the end.
Giving up isn’t really in my nature however (my wife describes it as “being stubborn” :D), so last October I started again and was doing rather better until early December when I (and my daughter oddly enough) caught some sort of infection that affected our inner ear and sense of balance which really messed me up a fair bit. It was rather like being very drunk, but without the expense and the hangover. It was very strange for a while. I recall at one point standing at the top of the stairs and being unable to work out how to get down them in the full knowledge that if I tried to step down normally I’d end up in a heap at the bottom.
Then in the latter half of January I developed a quite unpleasant case of cellulitis that has taken a while recover from fully, but now I’m ready to go again so I’ll take a few steps back and try to pick everything up as quickly as possible.
The time has come. I really need to sort out getting a new job now. I’ve not done any full-time paid work for ages and whilst I’ve achieved an awful lot with the time I’ve had free, the mortgage has to get paid somehow. I don’t think there’s been a single day when I didn’t actually achieve something, often several things, other then when I’ve been ill. That’s over a thousand consecutive days without ever once saying “I just can’t be bothered today. I’m going to veg out and do nothing.”
It’s a bit odd, having to write a CV at this point. I’ve done all sorts of programming and systems admin work over the last twenty years for dozens of clients and it’s all been word-of-mouth. I don’t think I’ve written a CV or that anyone has asked to see one in at least twenty years. Then I’m told I’ll need to put stuff on Linked-In. The horror.
So, if anyone knows of UNIX/Linux-based systems admin or coding work where working from home is possible, by all means get in touch. Something that relates to the environment or that directly helps to improve peoples’ lives would be a bonus. However, moving for work just isn’t feasible in the short term. We have two elderly parents who share our home and are in quite poor health. Trying to move them now, even assuming we could find somewhere suitable, would probably kill them, quite literally.
Running out of heated propagation space is starting to look inevitable, so today I have cleared some space in the house for my “backup” propagators. One of them is definitely looking rather sad and could really do with a replacement cover, but I suspect as it’s so old any replacement might not fit correctly. An alternative might be to buy a new propagator, but I’m thinking that for little more than the cost of a new one I could buy a soil heater cable and build a permanent one in the greenhouse that would hold five times as many module trays. It’s a very tempting idea.
Once the propagators were sorted I got another bed’s worth of weeding done in the veggie plot, so that’s three and a half down, four and a half to go now.
My bee shed needed to move so I’ve been pulling together everything that was in it. I’m mostly using starter strips and unwaxed frames now, so I’m not entirely sure what to so with this lot, that is “some of” the wax I’ve recovered from old frames over the last ten years or more. Turning the wax in for more foundation or credits towards other purchases isn’t really looking like that great a deal either. Ideas on a postcard…
I had to go out and do some weeding today. The state of the veg beds was quite distressing, with Hairy Bittercress like this:
and sycamore seedlings already out of the ground and growing away.
I managed to get two and a half beds done, dodging rain showers, and in fact when the Sun came out it was so pleasant just being outdoors. I didn’t have the heart to dig these up though.
On the positive side, the PSB is finally producing heads. Last Winter we were eating it from November and by mid-February many of the plants were all but over, but this time it has taken so long to be ready. I’m guessing because the second half of last year was quite dull and wet.
I guess that means we could end up with a glut over the next few weeks. Not that it would be a hardship.
I also sorted through some carrots that the mice have found. They were stored in trays of compost on top of a table so I’m not sure how they managed it, but clearly they found a route up somehow. I’ll need to find a better solution for next Winter.
This is the first pineapple plant that actually survived when I tried to get it to produce roots in a jar of water, one year on.
I suspect it has split into three separate plants, but information about pineapple propagation beyond actually getting them to produce roots seems to be rather more sparse. It’s going to go into the ground in Frankenstein’s Greenhouse anyhow. If it survives there then great. If it doesn’t then trying to keep it alive is perhaps not the best use of my time. Even so I’ll be glad that I tried it, just for the experience of having got new plants to grow.
This is how I have supported my broad beans for the last few years once they’ve been planted out. They seem to do really well which is lovely, but also it’s a problem because the strings just don’t do a very good job of containing them.
This year (2024) I’m contemplating two changes. The first is to use canes tied to the stakes to provide a stronger support and stop the strings bending out over the paths as the plants flesh out. The second is to have more plants: it always seems to be that there are never enough beans of the ideal size at the same time, so more plants seems to be the solution. If there are too many they can just be blanched and frozen.
When I dragged myself out of bed this morning the evidence of an overnight frost was there for all to see, but at least it was sunny and being outdoors appeared quite inviting regardless of the mud that keeps trying to suck the boots from my feet whenever I wander about in the garden.
By the time I was vaguely compos mentis however, the sky hard turned grey and the rain had returned, so I opted to hide in the greenhouse as there was plenty of sowing to be done.
First up was peppers and chiles. For chiles I have: jalapenos, cayennes, Hungarian black (no, that’s a chile, honest) and a variety of Capsicum baccatum that is allegedly the same as used in commercial Peppadew peppers, to which I am rather partial. I’ve tried growing the latter before and they’re impressive plants, making as much as 2m of growth in a season, but they seem to need a long season too. Last year I got fruit and left them on the plant as long as possible to see if they would ripen until a very hard frost turned them to mush 🙁 This year I shall plant them in Frankenstein’s (passive solar) greenhouse to see if that helps.
When it comes to sweet peppers I have unknown purple and chocolate varieties of bell pepper, plus a pointy red variety called Kapia and a yellow Corno di Toro.
After that came, err, “lots” of onions. About 450 seeds of a red variety called Carmen and about 250 “brown” onions, most of which were “Density IV” and the rest were “Yellow Rynsburger” which were left over from last year. I should perhaps plant some of those out of the way when the time comes and allow them to produce seed.
Then I had an aubergine variety called Black Beauty, flat- and curly-leaf parsley (Gigante d’Italia and Moss Curled 2(?)), radishes (French Breakfast 3), dill, and the rest were flowers: rudbeckia, more antirrhinums (Black Prince and Royal Bride), nicotiana, ammi majus and a couple of varieties of sweet pea.
In all I think I sowed thirty trays (twenty cell half-size module trays) of seeds. About half are in the propagators, but I’m going to need more space in the greenhouse once I’ve done more sowing next weekend. I really need to get the strawberry beds finished so the new plants that are currently in the greenhouse can be planted out, but the ground is so wet again that I might have to decide instead that the peppers I tried to keep alive over Winter are in fact as dead as they look and make more space by ditching them in the compost.
Pretty much anyone who is into amateur astrophotography will be familiar with Deep Sky Stacker (aka DSS). It’s a great application that takes combinations of light and dark frames (amongst others) and merges them to produce a single stacked output frame. It’s Windows-based, but allegedly runs on Linux (and perhaps MacOS?) under WINE. WINE is a very impressive piece of work, but I often struggle to make it work how I’d like, so my usual workflow for processing my images involves transferring the subs from the Linux machine that manages the imaging to a Windows box to do the stacking.
Some years back, DSS became open source and I considered attempting to port it to run natively on Linux. Professionally I have a bit of form for this sort of thing as my first “proper” job was porting development tools to various flavours of UNIX and UNIX-like systems, back in the days when there was an entire ice-cream parlour of flavours (and host processors). However, the process was just too slow going given that I’ve had very little to do with Windows (the less the better in my view) since before NT was released.
Fortunately for me, the DSS project team now have a goal to convert the code to use Qt rather than Windows’ native, err, windows, which has removed many of the stumbling blocks for me. The code is still pretty Windows-centric in places and my preference is to have the application “just work” without the user needing to install “extras” that might break other components of their system, but the opportunity to move forward grew.
So, I cloned the repo and started beating on the code (and the build system — having something that will work on, say, Launchpad is a major plus). Yesterday I reached the point (having fairly hideously hacked a few bits and pieces) where it’s actually possible to complete compilation of the main application (there’s a command line version and a live-stacking version too, but they can wait). That doesn’t mean it actually works. I’m quite sure it doesn’t. But it gives me hope that I’m heading in the right direction. And if it will compile on Linux, perhaps it might also be made to run natively on MacOS (not quite yet — there are one or two ducks that still need to assume the appropriate relative positioning first). But here’s what I’ve got:
