Another try at the Polka

Posted on February 6, 2024 by james

I have a bed of Summer-fruiting raspberries and a bed of Autumn-fruiting ones. At least, I did. A couple of years ago all of the Autumn-fruiting ones died. I suspect my father-in-law may have tried to kill some bindweed using glyphosate and got a bit over-exuberant with it. Last Winter therefore I ordered some replacement plants (a variety called Polka). They arrived before I was ready to plant them out, so I just heeled them into a empty bed. In mid-February, a month or so later, once I’d cleared the old roots out of the bed I moved them to their final positions. Not a single one grew.

So, this Winter I ordered more, from a different supplier. They went directly into the bed they were intended for, having cleared out a load more bindweed roots. Hopefully they’ll do somewhat better this time around.

Posted in Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 6th February 2024: New beds

Posted on February 6, 2024 by james

I need to get cracking on the new beds in the veggie plot as I have strawberry plants that really need to be planted out. I received them before Christmas and had to plant them into pots because I didn’t even have anything to make new beds with at the time. I filled a trailer with some green waste compost yesterday and today started spreading it on cardboard laid over the grass.

The plan is to mix the green waste compost and my own compost about 50/50, because I’ve found that the green waste stuff can form a bit of a “crust” if it dries out, at which point water tends to run off it rather than sink in. Initially however I just wanted to get as much cardboard laid as possible with compost on top to weight it down.

Rain stopped play at this point

The plan was to have a 60cm (2′) wide path alongside the raspberry beds on the left, with two 1.2m (4′) wide beds separated by another 60cm path parallel to them. Once I’d actually tried it out I decided I needed the path alongside the raspberries to be wider, but as I couldn’t move the beds over (one of the paths has a stop cock in the middle of it, and I don’t want that under a bed), I just made the bed a bit narrower. I’m sure it will work out ok. There’s also a path splitting the beds from left to right so it’s possible to walk straight up into the main vegetable-growing area from the house rather than having to go around the end of each bed.

So once complete, what I should end up with is two beds about 6.5m x 0.9m (21’x3′) and two slightly wider ones of 6.5m x 1.2m (21’x4′). At least, as long as I don’t run out of cardboard now. I’ve been stashing boxes away for months, but making these could well clear me out.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A bit of a stick-in-the-mud (almost)

Posted on February 6, 2024 by james

I decided back in September that I wasn’t going to have enough home-made compost for my needs this year and that I’d need to order some in as well. I then proceeded to put the purchase off for as long as possible (perhaps down to the wet weather). But now I need to get new beds made for this year’s strawberries, edible flowers and my first foray into cutting flowers so I had to bite the bullet. As it turns out, financially the delay worked out in my favour because the price for delivery of six tonnes of compost had come down a fair bit.

Unfortunately when the chap turned up to drop it off the ground was still too soft to take the load of his six-wheeler tipper truck and I ended up having to tow him out of the field using the tractor. It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks, but I guess that’s what six months of grim weather does for you.

Anyhow, I now have a big pile of compost sitting in the field. All I need now is to get it moved…

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 13th April 2022: Incorrectly-made brood boxes

Posted on February 5, 2024 by james

Years back I got hold of a load of polystyrene brood boxes and supers from Abelo for much cheapness because they were made with both top- and bottom-bee space, as you can see from the photos.

I’ve been wondering what I should do with them. For the time being I’ve been using them as bait hives, but there must surely be other things I can do with them. Perhaps used as supers for getting brood comb drawn out? I don’t imagine the bees will be too stressed about an extra bee space in that situation. Needs more thought.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged , | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 5th February 2024

Posted on February 5, 2024 by james

I want to make some new no dig beds for cutting flowers, edible flowers and strawberries, so today I mowed the grass short and started marking out where they’re going to go.

The next stage will be to cover the grass with cardboard and then put compost on top, so I’ve already filled a trailer full of green waste compost that I had delivered a couple of weeks back.

There are in fact four separate beds, each 1.2m wide by about 6.5m long because it’s quite handy to be able to walk up the middle of the garden between the two raspberry beds on the left of the photo, so I’ll probably end up using the two closest to the raspberry beds for the strawberries and the two further away (and closer to the house) for the flowers.

I also patched up most of the holes in the cheap polytunnel I bought last year for which I have to thank Storm Isha. More about that another time.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Barry John

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

has touched down between the Pearly Gates.

Perhaps “the” legend of Welsh rugby and so closely on the heels of JPR
Williams and Malcolm Price barely a month ago. It’s not even a year
since Viet Gwent stalwart Charlie Faulkner pushed over for the last
time.

It’s all a bit of a shock, really. Phil Bennett in 2022, JJ Williams in
2020, Ray Gravell and Merv “The Swerve” Davies some years back. Growing
up in the Valleys in the 70s, these were my childhood heroes.

In the words of Max Boyce:

I had a dream the other night; the strangest dream of all
I dreamt I was in Heaven, away from life’s hard call
It was as I imagined: where peace reigned all supreme
The signs to Heaven were in all in Welsh, Hell’s signs were painted green[1]

I entered through the heavenly gate; I heard the heavenly band
And there was John the Baptist, on Barry John’s right hand
He plays for the Heaven Welsh Fifteen. They’re very fit and keen
We’d play the Heaven English, if they could only raise a team

[1] A reference to road signs in Wales that were written in English
being daubed with green paint.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 13th April 2022: New toy!

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

Given that I wasn’t working I felt the need to save money and make as much of the stuff that I needed from scrap that I had lying around. So obviously I bought a new toy:

It’s a 10″ (250mm) wide planer/thicknesser from Charnwood (model PT250?) and I have to admit that I’m quite impressed. I’ve not used it that much for squaring up sawn timber, but it’s seen a lot of use planing timber to a required thickness and the speed at which it turns wood into man-glitter is quite impressive: a decent workshop vacuum is certainly required. My only current criticisms of it are that the fence must be removed to fit the vacuum mechanism when thicknessing and that it uses one-piece knives (rather than a spiral cutter for instance, which is considerably more expensive). Sadly I’ve already wrecked one set of knives by failing to spot one nail in a piece of recovered timber I was using. Hard to say that’s not my fault however rather than that of the machine.

Posted in Workshop | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tonight Matthew, I am sewing machine repairman…

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

Sewing machines… They work by magic, don’t they?

My daughter has been using my wife’s machine to make clothes and bags from old unwanted material such as pairs of jeans and shirts that I no longer fit into:

Unfortunately the machine had somehow gone wrong and had no tension on the upper thread at any setting of the tensioning wheel. Peering in though the gaps in the “bodywork” it appeared that the two discs that are supposed to drag on the thread to produce tension weren’t even touching. After a discussion in which we decided that it would cost more to have it serviced professionally than it would to buy a completely new one I decided I might as well take it apart and see how much damage I could do. There can’t be that many “ping-fsckits”[1] inside, surely?

We found a service manual online that explained how to remove the case, but having done so I couldn’t work out why the tensioner wheels weren’t working correctly so I decided to remove the mechanism for a closer look. At which point it exploded into a pile of springs, discs and washers. After at least one false start I managed to put everything back together and realised that the tensioning mechanism was now working correctly.

A semi-naked sewing machine

Right in the centre here is the tensioning mechanism in case you’ve not seen one before.

I have no idea why it’s now working and what problem has been corrected which is quite irritating given that I therefore have no idea how to stop it happening again, but I’m happy enough that it has saved me a packet which I can now spend on an Oxalic Acid vaporiser for my bees 😀

All I need now is a suitable spring balance so I can correctly set the tension range.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

No dig diary, 4th February 2024

Posted on February 4, 2024 by james

More seed sowing today. Red (I also have yellow) beetroot (Sanguina) sown four seeds to a cell in a twenty-cell module tray and a couple of similar trays of peas for shoots sown four seeds to a cell — I’d normally sow three, but the seed is a few years old so I thought I’d sow an extra one “for luck”. There were flowers in the plan for today too: Lobelia, which has the tiniest seeds ever, and Busy Lizzies, both for my wife to plant out in the garden. I sowed a tray of each, leaving sufficient seeds for a couple more sowings over the next few weeks. They’ll go into the propagator once they’ve had a decent soak.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A blast from the long-distant past

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

Back when I was at school (slates, chalk, that sort of thing, you know…) the BBC Micro was a thing: one of the first home computers, based around the 6502 processor. Quite likely it’s responsible for setting the future direction of my life. I spent a huge amount of time messing about with them in my teens, writing software both to earn myself some spare cash and for things at school.

Move on several years once x86-based PCs became affordable as home computers and with the arrival of Linux I decided to write an emulator for the BBC Micro running on Linux under X11. It actually worked reasonably well at the time; enough to play some of the original games I’d enjoyed, certainly. Even now I recall sitting in my employer’s office in Palo Alto after work when I was there to do some training or something similar, designing fonts for the teletext display mode. Here’s a random selection of screenshots…

Anyhow, I was having a little grub around in my filesystem the other day and discovered the code again, so after adding some CMake build files to take over from the original Imakefile system, I’ve uploaded it to github. Sound doesn’t work any more because as far as I recall it used ALSA, but I’ll see if I can fix that in the coming weeks and perhaps make a few other improvements too.

Posted in BBC Micro, Computing | Tagged | Leave a comment