And yes, another poor session 🙁
My foot is still looking somewhat inflamed and I’ve been very hot for the last day or so, but the weather quite possibly hasn’t helped with that with the temperature going up from averaging around 20C to being 28C for the last couple of days. There’s rain forecast tomorrow, so perhaps it will cool down a bit.
Another disappointing swim, I’m afraid. I don’t like to feel as though I’m grasping for excuses, but there’s a small amount of swelling and redness around one of my left toes and a little of the top of my left foot that’s appeared since last night. That’s the same foot as I had the infection in at the start of June. I wonder if it’s been trying to make a reappearance. Something to keep an eye on. I really don’t need a repeat of that 🙁
It took a fair while to clear the other side of the “blackberry hedge” of nettles and other obstructions (which have at least ended up in the compost heap). I think in total I’ve put five wheelbarrow loads of stuff into the heap from this one space over the last week, plus a couple of barrows of grass clippings from mowing alongside it.
That done though, I was able to harvest another 2lbs of blackberries, so I think I’m up to 5¾lbs now, all in the freezer.
Having done that I thought I might as well go over the raspberry canes to see what was there that was worth picking. Not a huge amount, as it turned out — perhaps a pound or so. Those have gone into the freezer as well.
Oh dear 🙁
After yesterday’s improvement, I’m now back to where I was before. I need to think on this some more.
I now have to wonder if I may have had some sort of illness, albeit one that wasn’t at all obvious, over the last week or so. Since early last week I’ve been really struggling with my swimming. When I’ve got out of the pool I felt as though I’d worked very hard and was clearly tired, yet my times were significantly slower than they had been (almost 10% slower). I have taken five seconds off my rest interval, but I don’t think that was the issue. I couldn’t even swim my first three 50m reps as fast as I had been doing.
Then today I swam and all of a sudden I was back where I had been without anything obvious changing. It’s a mystery 🙂 The only explanation I have is that I must have had something wrong with me.
I’ve planted up quite a few of my winter salads in mushroom trays now. I think I have eight done, so forty-eight plants. Then I had an idea that is so simple I don’t know why I’ve overlooked it until now. I guess you get so hooked into one way of doing things that sometimes it’s hard to see outside the box. The main reasons for raising plants in cells in the summer are that there may not be space immediately available in the main garden, so having, say, a month in cells gives more time to finish some of the early crops, and to reduce pest damage. But there’s no space issue here and no real problem with pests. I could just fill the trays with compost, sow, say, three seeds per station for whatever plant I want and then thin them down to one once they have a true leaf or two. I still have a couple of trays to plant up, but there are some spares so I shall try this as well.
This evening I cleared many of the nettles growing up through some of our blackberry plants and then pruned off the long stems that are sticking out into the garden and not bearing fruit. That uncovered many more ripe blackberries which I have now picked — another 1¾lb of them. And I’ve only done one side. I’ll try to do the other side this weekend and get them picked as well, though my list of jobs to do this weekend is expanding at quite a rate 🙁
Whilst putting the berries in the freezer I noticed the sweetcorn that I picked last weekend. From the pale yellow colour it had then, it’s now turned quite bright yellow. I have no idea why, but I’m not going to complain 🙂
Harvesting and freezing some more sweetcorn is one of those jobs on my list, in fact. As is harvesting all the larger aubergines that we have left, together with some courgettes, to roast with some more vegetables and then freeze to use through the winter. The smaller aubergines I’ll leave, pinching out the tops of the plants and removing any remaining flower buds to see if that helps fatten them up at all.
Last winter I grew salad leaves in the greenhouse, in mushroom trays lined with newspaper and filled with compost.
This year I intend to plant most of the plants for winter salads in the polytunnel and no-dig greenhouse once the summer crops are done, but I want to have another crack at growing in mushroom trays as well just to see if I can do it better this time around. I wasn’t completely happy with the newspaper lining as it tended to fold over as the compost sank and leave hiding places for slugs and snails. It also meant I could only use compost to the minimum height of the tray sides and as the plants will be in these trays for close to six months without feeding, I wanted to get as much compost in as possible. And in fact as I don’t buy newspapers I’m reliant on others to supply them, which may not always be an option in the future.
A couple of days back I was sorting through my “cardboard stash” (no wonder there’s a world shortage of packaging cardboard at the moment — it’s all under my veggie plot) in preparation for making some more woodchip paths when it occurred to me that I could try to use cardboard to line the trays instead. This evening I dug out some trays and a few bits of cardboard and had a go. There’s no denying that it’s more of a faff to get done, but it’s not that bad really and hopefully it will pay back in the long run (in fact with a stanley knife and a board to cut on it could be done rather more quickly than I did it on the kitchen table and using scissors). I now have five trays like this:
And I’ll fill them with compost and plants tomorrow if I have time.
It’s a bit of a shock getting back to this point in the season again. I’m really not sure where the last year has gone.
I’ve largely resigned myself to the idea of having to net all of my brassicas next year to stop the butterflies getting at them, so my plan was to wait until spring and buy some butterfly net then.
However, by chance I looked at one of the sites I’d earmarked as a possible supplier of netting and they were having an end of season sale with 15% off netting products. Given that prices only seem to be going up (and with some rapidity of late), I decided to flex the credit card and bought 50m of 4m wide netting. I believe that should be sufficient to cover three of my no-dig beds completely. Now I just have to ensure that all the relevant plants end up in the right places rather than dotted about as they are this year.
Well, let’s hope the last day of the month signals a time for change because I’ve had enough of not swimming as well as I know I can. I think I’ll leave it at that 🙂
Another poor performance today. This is starting to get quite frustrating 🙁
