Booker T and the MG’s, isn’t it, pop-pickers?
Well, perhaps 🙂 Two years ago it was time to be planting out my onion seedlings. These had been sown on the 8th February, four seeds (ish) to a cell in module trays. Hundreds of them, because we eat an awful lot of onions.
More chippping of apple tree prunings today. Nearly all done now, and would perhaps have been completely finished but I was too lazy to go and buy more fuel. Once that’s done I can chop down a few more sycamore trees to make even more 😀 They’re in the way anyhow — two are alongside the workshop and have been rubbing against the roof whilst a third is leaning over the garden at a rather disconcerting angle. I may have to start spreading the wood as I chip it fairly soon because I’m running out of dumpy bags to put it in. I’ve started on the eighth already and don’t seem to have that many left.
My plan for today was to finish feeding all the brash from my apple trees through the chipper so it was all ready for making my flower and strawberry beds. I managed about half of it before some bits broke off the end of a branch I was feeding though and got jammed in the cutting drum of the chipper. Whilst the drum would still rotate, it wouldn’t go anywhere near as fast as the engine wanted it to so I had to kill the engine quickly before the drive belts turned to smoke and flame.
After dragging it back to the workshop I had to remove the hopper and (whilst wearing gloves, because the knives can leave you with a nasty cut even without the motor turning — don’t ask me how I know; I just know, ok?) clear all the trapped lumps of wood out of the cylinder the drum rotates in. I was particularly pleased when I offered the hopper back up to the chippper body (balanced on a couple of sawhorses because of the weight) and three of the bolts slipped right through the mounting holes allowing me to get the nuts on and keep it in place whilst I hunted for the final bolt in the mud where it had fallen.
A quick check that the engine was now happy and it, err, started to rain, so I abandoned the rest until tomorrow. It’s amazing how often it rains when the Met Office says there’s a five or ten percent chance of precipitation. I guess they must be one of those groups of people for whom one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.
I think this must have been in one of the veggie beds for almost a year. It reached the point where I decided I couldn’t pick it and just had to leave it to see how big it would get. By the time I finally removed it from the ground it really didn’t look at all appealing to eat. It’s in a “mushroom tray”, which if I recall correctly are around 40cm x 30cm, or about 16″x12″ in old money.
Who knew? My niece is learning and her mum asked if this could be printed to help her with hand positioning. It’s a bit “stringy”. Put that down to old (and cheap) PLA.
Apparently the idea is that the octopus is placed on the back of the hand and the pupil has to keep it from falling off whilst bowing, so no rolling from side to side or anything like that.
I’m not sure what Nigel Kennedy or Vanessa-Mae would make of it, but I guess anything is worth a go if it means there’s less chance of sounding like you’re strangling a cat.
As I’ve just posted about sowing broad beans I can remind myself of how they were doing a little over six weeks from today, two years ago. I’d just planted them out.
I can’t for the life of my remember why I put these mesh cloches over them though. It may have been so that I could cover them with fleece in the event of a likely heavy frost without damaging the plants.
There appear to be around 20 plants here. This year I’ve planted far more on the grounds that there never seem to be enough that are ready to pick at the same time and leaving them until there are enough means we end up with much larger and tougher beans.
I’ve ended up somewhat behind with stuff this Winter. Before Christmas my daughter and I both developed an ear infection that totally messed up my sense of balance for about a week and a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of a particularly nasty bout of cellulitis. I don’t really recall anything about the first forty-eight hours of having cellulitis other than vague hints of wittering randomly about stuff that really can’t have made sense and quite possibly didn’t actually happen 😀
Anyhow, the cellulitis meant I wasn’t really on the ball when we had some tree work done, including felling a sycamore that was leaning over some of the outbuildings. As a result I only finished clearing that part of the brash that was blocking access to the veggie plot yesterday, by feeding it through the chipper. I now have four and a half dumpy bags full of woodchip that will come in handy when I remake the paths in the veggie plot shortly (and there’s more to come).
Today therefore I got into the greehouse and sowed lots of broad beans (Aquadulce Claudia) and a first batch of antirrhinums (Lipstick Silver and Black Prince). The latter are to go into a bed of flowers for cutting later in the year (not least because the only place the bed exists at the moment is inside my head). Had I been able I’d have started the beans off perhaps a week or so ago, but thems the breaks.
I also had a bit of a clear-out and reorganise in the propagation greenhouse. I had a dozen and a half tomato cuttings that I’d successfully grown on from my father-in-law’s F1 Orange Paruche plants last September, but a particularly cold (for us, at -6°C) night saw them all killed off. My fault. I should have been more on-the-ball, though it may have happened when I was suffering myself. Those went into the compost along with some plants I’d kept after doing some test germinations before finalising my list of seeds to buy last November. They’d become all rather leggy due to the lack of light (it’s been a very dull Winter, weather-wise). So now other than my newly-sown seeds, all I have is new strawberry plants that I had to pot up because the new strawberry bed doesn’t exist yet either, and peppers/chiles that I grew last year and thought I’d leave to see if they’d make it through the Winter in the greenhouse. I’m not too hopeful in that respect, but we’ll see what happens.
Well, nearly 🙂
It’s been six weeks shy of two years since I last posted. Why? Mostly because I just lost my computer mojo I think. I reached the point where I couldn’t face sitting in front of one and trying to be creative in any way at all, be that writing blog posts or writing code. My heart (and interest, if I’m honest) just wasn’t in it.
But I’m finding my way back. I’ve been doing some coding on oacapture et al. and playing about with porting Deep Sky Stacker to Linux over the last six weeks, so I think it could be time. Along the way I might try to catch up with some of the stuff I’ve been up to over the last two years as well. It’s not like I haven’t been busy (well, except when I had covid, or cellulitis or a couple of other times when I’ve been unpleasantly ill, at least).
It’s been a grey and wet day today, so I chose not to do anything out in the open. I did however transplant my first batch of radishes (sown 13th February) and peas for shoots (sown 9th February) into the polytunnel. The radishes could probably have gone outdoors under fleece, but the ground is so wet at the moment that I didn’t see the point.
The main plot is starting to look rather sad and bare right now as we come to the end of the winter vegetables without having much that’s replacing them right now.
Hopefully this is close to the low point of the year and within a month or so things will start to look more exciting.
I wasn’t able to swim yesterday because the centre was short of lifeguards again, so I turned up today wondering what it would be like after last Thursday’s disaster.
As it turned out, the answer was not as bad as I expected. The five second reduction in interval time did make it feel very tough, but I actually managed eight reps before failing on the ninths and had only one further failure on rep fourteen. Even my 25m set afterwards wasn’t too bad. Not my fastest, certainly, but also a fair way from the slowest.
Overall I’m therefore quite happy.
