I have been in Lockdown since two weeks before Lockdown formally started. This is because I had a very bad cold. I thought it was a cold, but from the information available, how could I be sure. I cancelled several things I’d arranged, including a couple of gaming sessions and a day out. Some friends laughed about “Chris is going into Lockdown”. And then we all did.
Tag: gardening
This has been a disastrous year for me in the garden; the worst I have had since I took up gardening.
A mixture of illness and bad weather meant that I essentially abandoned the garden for most of the year, and by the time I felt like doing something, it was completely out of control. The gravel that my veg troughs stand on was ankle deep in weeds, which also crossed the patio, the troughs themselves were full of weeds. I got depressed just looking at it, which meant I didn’t really have a plan to fix it.
Something like 8 years ago, I bought an AXL ThinAmp DSP10 – a portable battery-powered amplifier. At the time I was making a lot of use of my guitar-synth; which works, of course, if you can plug it into something. As most of the places I played (filk and non-filk) were predominantly acoustic venues, I thought this would do the trick.
Indeed it did, and for a couple of years, I loved it. While not a patch on my Trace Acoustic amp (naturally), it had the advantage that it was lighter than a laptop, didn’t need mains power, and didn’t look like an amp – which meant I didn’t get snooty looks from the true acoustic people. And it did have 10Watts, although I don’t ever think I played it at full volume.
Because of the non-existant spring, and a general lack of organisation, I failed to prepare any planting at all this year. About a month back, I took the lazy way out and bought some seedlings – sugar snap peas, courgettes, carrots and mixed lettuces, which planted up most of 2 of the troughs.
The plants are all doing well, and I have just weeded and sown the other two troughs with seed. More peas, more carrots, more salad leaves; some fancy small squashes, and some other odds and ends.
Soon after I moved in here, I was bought a decorative bird house, which got put on the side of my garage, just above the trunk of my espaliered pear tree. In retrospect, it wasn’t in a good position to be useful to birds – too close to the ground, so too many people (i.e. me) about. But, as I say, it was decorative and would have been lost higher up a wall.
All the time it has been there, not a single bird has nested in it. Until this year. I am not entirely sure what they are, as they come and go so fast, but there have been a couple of birds visiting the box. This year, I let the pear tree grow out a bit , and as a result, there is more growth around the box, and so it is more protected.
Was fairly busy at home (and places near) Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I got two troughs planted with salad leaves, sugar snap peas, carrots and courgettes. All of these were “cheats” – baby plants bought from the local garden centre – but they will kickstart the garden after a non-productive spring, and I can plant from seed for later in the year.
Also on Saturday, I played with a new toy for the BBQ – GrillGrates. Will be writing more about this on my Food Adventure blog later, but had a great time experimenting, and managed to achived high temperature grilling on my pellet grill, something I had been told wasn’t possible.
There’s been a couple of nice days lately, but I’ve either been working, or – if not – haven’t gotten up and about in time to make the most of it.
Today was predicted to be sunny, so I had an early night, and was up by 8:45.
Job number one was to put two pork shoulders on the smoker.
I have a pear tree in my garden, which is productive more years than not, with this year being no exception.
However, it is fairly rare that I get an edible crop of pears from it. I have been nicely surprised a couple of years, but usually I end up with a pile of nicely sized fruit that never ripen. I am not sure what the factor is that made things work on the good years, but it seems to be all or nothing.
I have just harvested the last of my broad beans. The plants were beginning to die off, and had attracted some kind of aphid. However, the beans themselves, once podded, were fine.
I now have a large bowl of beans – probably enough for a week’s worth of dinners, if I hadn’t already been eating them with almost every hot meal!
I have half a trough of garlic growing, and I have been impatient to see what it was doing beneath the soil. I have seen varying advice on when to harvest it – some books say wait until the leaves above ground are all brown, other resources say “plant on the shortest day and harvest on the longest”.
As the longest day is tomorrow, I decided to pull one up. I think it looks quite impressive.
I’m going to leave the rest in the earth until the leaves do all go brown, as I think our rainy summer may have made a bit of a difference.
I’ve been promising more photographs of the garden, so below the cut are some up-to-date ones.
Managed to do quite a bit in the garden today. The plan was to do it yesterday, and perhaps head over to see today, but Saturday got rained off.
Anyway, the garden is now looking a bit tidier. Several weeds had started in my gravel area, but they were easy to pull up, thanks to the area being membraned. I made a start on clearing my herb garden, and cleared out all of the nettles and weeds – the next task is to cut my marjoram right back, as it has taken over. It keeps doing this, so I am thinking of digging it up completely, and transplanting a small piece into a separate pot.