Archive for the 'Gardening' Category

And then I shall capture the Golden Stag of Artemis

These are the things I am doing at the moment:

  • Working full time
  • Looking after the kids two days a week
  • Organizing the logistics of the Dales Walk
  • Fundraising for the Dales Walk
  • Training for the Dales Walk
  • Blogging nearly every day

But perhaps that’s not enough. Hercules had twelve labors and I’m only managing six. I need to up my game if I want to qualify for greek god status (and lets face it i already have the body for it). How else can I add more weight to my load? I know, the garden!

Spring has sprung and if I want to grow any veg this year I’m going to have to get started on doing it now. Yesterday I spent a bit of time out the back and planted some peas, carrots, and spinach. I’ve already got some tomato and pepper seedlings sitting on the windowsill waiting until the risk of frosts has passed. And I have vague plans for sweetcorn and pumpkins, potatoes and runner beans.

But this year my heart isn’t quite in it. I’m still going to have a go, but wrestling the time away from everything else is proving rather difficult.

Still the evenings are getting lighter and so a little time can perhaps be salvaged there when I’m not working. Whatever happens I must make sure I at least maintain the garden. Despite appearances to the contrary I’ve invested a lot of work out there, and it would be a real shame to let the wilderness re-take it.

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Dirt

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Many people say that gardening with children is an ideal way to introduce them to basic scientific experiments. Today Amy, Evan and I have been finding out if it is possible to move more dirt inside the house than there is outside.

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In July of this year I shall be walking 78 miles in 6 days in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity founded by my close friends in memorial to their son Joseph who died aged 3 in April of 2005. Please look here for further details and consider sponsoring me. Thank you.

Field of dreams

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This is a picture of the field that adjoins our garden. It is neglected and bramble ridden and has no useful purpose other than providing us with blackberries in the autumn. It’s potential is great, and I have many romantic ideas of how I would use it to raise livestock and grow vegetables.

Finally after gazing over the wall at it for about a year I overcame my natural inertia and found out who owned it. I promptly wrote them a letter asking them how much they would want to sell it for, and for a while my dreams were full of vistas that looked a little like this:

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Unfortunately the owners wrote back informing me they were not interested is selling as they had “plans” for the land. The cynical part of me can’t help thinking their plans have little to do with agriculture:

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It’s probably for the best really. I can barely look after myself never mind about a field full of livestock. I imagine getting up at 5am to feed them would get pretty old very quickly. And who would care for them when we went on holiday? And would I really be able to send an animal I had raised off to slaughter? Probably not.

But when have dreams ever taken any notice of the petty problems of reality? So despite myself I often still find my gaze wandering over my property line and imagining a field full of chickens, goats and pigs. And my heart fills with longing and a sad whispered song sneaks from beneath my breath:

“Old McDaniel had a farm. Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh”

The greenhouse effect

On occasion I have been told I drink too much Diet Coke.  Some people have even accused me of having some sort of addiction.  To them I say pish, tosh, and poppycock.  I admit that it’s true that I drink a great deal of that sweet, sweet elixir of life.  But the motives for my consumption are purely altruistic. It’s all about saving the planet you see.

Behold! The recycled Coke Bottle Greenhouse:

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Of course this picture isn’t actually of my greenhouse.  It’s actually one that’s Scotland somewhere, but I have my own currently in production. Here’s a photo of the foundations being laid at the Hughes Mansion at the end of last month:

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As you can see I have a long way to go. Which is why I need to get serious about my Coke habit. At the current rate of consumption (averaging 2.3 liters a day) it will take me until January 2009 to collect enough bottles. I obviously need to up my game. I’ve calculated that I need to be hitting an average 6.8 liters a day if I’m to get a functioning greenhouse before the tomato growing season kicks off. A mighty challenge, but i think I’m up to it.

Perhaps I should start a sort of Fit Friends rip off blog movement in order to provide support and encouragement in this goal. Something tells me however that I may well be it’s only member. It’s a lonely life being the saviour of the environment, but someone has to do it.

Harvest festival

Despite an enthusiastic start I pretty much gave up on gardening this year. The main reason for this was our horrendously wet summer which dampened both my efforts and my enthusiasm.

Still, I did manage to harvest a reasonable crop of potatoes and strawberries, and today it has been the turn of the apples and the tomatoes. Unfortunately due to the complete absence of the sun over the last five months the tomatoes remain stubbornly unripe. But with the mornings growing ever colder I wanted to get them off the plants before the first frosts kills them.

The solution? Green tomato and apple chutney of course.

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Once it’s cooked you’re supposed to let it mature for about a week before trying it. But patience has never been one of my virtues and I snuck a sneaky spoonful before putting it in the jars. It is good. In fact it is damn good.

It’s so good that I think I could market it. Here is a breakdown of my costs:

Tomato seeds & grow bags: £5.00
Apple tree saplings x3: £22.50
Big cooking pan: £10.99
Additional ingredients: £8.83
Jars: £5.16 (I couldn’t find any empty ones so I had to buy jars with stuff already in them)
Labour (charged at national minimum wage): £38.64
Total: £91.12

I’ve managed to get three pretty big jars worth out of the pan, and so including tax each jar will sell for £35.68. Let’s call it £36 just to give me a bit of a profit margin (that’s around $72 for our brethren in the colonies).

So, who wants one? I will accept personal checks or paypal.

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Behold! The mighty Boots, slayer of wasps

This is a wasp’s nest. The wasps are relatively content and going about their daily business.
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This is a wasps nest after I’ve stuck in a pipe and pored petrol down it. The wasps are not very happy at all.
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This is a wasp nest with a piece of burning paper being stuck into it. The wasps are momentarily going to die a fiery and torturous death
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This is what all the best dressed beekeepers are wearing this summer.
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These photo’s were taken using the timer on the camera. Which is a good job really as it’s quite hard to take a decent picture when you are running away flapping your arms and screaming like a girl.

The explosion when I set fire to the petrol wasn’t particularly earth trembling. I am therefore a little concerned that it may not have been powerful enough. As I type there may well be hideously scarred survivors surveying the smoldering remains of their former homes, vowing never to rest until they have wreaked their terrible vengeance upon me.

I am considering investing in a mosquito net.

Mashed potato for dinner tonight

harvest

What with the constant rain, a barrage of slugs and snails, and a generous dollop of neglect, the front garden has been looking rather tatty recently. Taking advantage of a brief respite from the foul weather Amy, Evan and I have spent the morning pruning, sweeping and tidying. Well, Amy and I have anyway. Evan has mostly been eating dirt.

The potatoes were looking particularly scraggy so I decided to cut my losses and dig them all out. I’ve was pleasantly surprised with the amount, size, and quality of the resulting harvest; and Amy found the whole process of rummaging in the earth for them very enjoyable.

Next year I think I won’t have the tires stacked so tall when I initially put them in, as the bottom two layers contained nothing but earth. But all in all the project was a success.

I’ve also taken out the sunflowers, the lettuce, and some of the sweetpeas as they were all dead or dying. The runner beans are still up, as are the french beans. I’m not anticipating a decent crop from either of them though as the slugs and snails have given them a real pounding. Still, there’s always next year.

Coming clean

To all you Americans who are thinking that I omitted to pay tribute to the mother of my children on mother’s day yesterday, I’ll have you know that in England we hold the celebration on a different day than you Yanks. So I omitted to pay tribute on March 18th instead.

I’m glad we cleared that up.

Whilst we are on the subject of my failures as a human being I feel I should ask for a number of other offenses to be taken into account. I am ashamed to admit that, despite me painting a thoroughly rosy picture of my gardening activities to date, I have in fact experienced a couple of horticultural catastrophes recently.

Firstly one of my three lovely, lovely apple trees (the ones I was recently boasting about the health of) has mysteriously started to kick the bucket. I’m not quite sure what the reason for this is; I suspect it’s either that I planted it too far into the subsoil or that it’s caught some sort of unsightly disease. Whatever the cause I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I’ll be getting about a third less apples than I thought I would. Which isn’t so bad I suppose as I don’t really like apples that much anyway.

Looking on the bright side I could always dig the tree up and build a chicken coop in it’s place. Of course Kerry has repeatedly made clear her reluctance to join the poultry farming elite, and may well throw me out of the house if I went against her wishes. But all is not lost, I could always sleep in the coop. A plan with no drawbacks!

The other gardening disaster has been my chives. I had originally envisioned that I would have a border of chives and rosemary (two of the more permanent herbs) separating my vegetable beds in the back garden. Unfortunately despite me sowing about a bazillion little pots of the buggers it looks like I’m only going to have enough to fill around half a square inch of space. Without exception the seeds have all sprouted to be pathetic weedy looking specimens which can’t hold a candle to the sturdy and robust examples in the gardens of my youth. They just don’t make chives like they used to anymore it seems.

I’ve moved all the little pots from the plastic greenhouse to the outside windowsill in the chance that a little more light might strengthen them a bit, but I hold out little hope. I might as well have planted bloody cress.

So unfortunately it looks like all those people I had promised a bowl of my famous chive and apple soup are in for a big disapointment. Strangely no one I’ve told about that seems to be bothered all that much. Putting a brave face on it I expect.

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Gardening again, sorry.

Kerry recently alerted me to a website called freecycle, a sort of altruistic ebay where people offer to give away for free various things they no longer want. The aim behind the idea is to reduce the amount of rubbish ending up in landfill sites.

Over the course of the last few days I have become increasingly addicted. The most common items that appear to be listed are freezers and washing machines, but in my three short days of perusing the listings I’ve seen everything from stuffed parrots to classical guitars find new homes.

And I haven’t been slow to jump on the bandwagon either. As I type there are thirty bags of topsoil sitting on my driveway waiting for me to lug them up the hill to the vegetable patch. They normally would have cost me around fifty pounds if I had bought them from a commercial source, but some kind chap in Crosland Moor was levelling his garden and let me have the mound of earth he had dug for nothing. He even bagged it all up for me.

Of course the effort involved in getting the bags in and out of my car has nearly killed me, but that’s not the point.

Anyway, things are developing well in the garden at the moment, so here’s a quick update:

Tree Watch: week 56

IMG_6234.JPGI was looking through my blog archives the other day and came across the entries I made after I planted my three apple trees. The trees went in during the dormant season and I was a little worried that I had effectively stuck three dead branches in a hole then added water. My fears were unfounded however, and although they were slow starters they eventually showed signs of life.

This time round however they seem to have got their acts together and are already in full bloom. What’s more I’m allowed to let the crop actually develop this year as the root system should be adequately established. There is the small downside that I don’t actually like apples all that much, but I’m sure I’ll find someone to eat them.

Oh the humanity!

IMG_6224.JPGWhilst preparing to install our double glazing last week the workmen had to move a number of pots and containers out from under our lounge window. In the process of moving the mini-greenhouse a tray full of tomato seedlings was tragically upended; scattering it’s fragile passengers all over my lupins. As if to add insult to injury, one of the individuals responsible for the incident was my own wife. Needless to say she shall be sleeping in the car for the foreseeable future.

A few brave souls managed to survive however, and we do have some more growing in individual pots elsewhere. But if Amy develops rickets caused by tomato deficiency then you know who to blame.

The rest of the veg

IMG_6227.JPGOur potatoes are doing rather nicely and it will soon be time to add a bit more earth to increase the crop. The strawberries are growing well, although I suspect that the slugs have their eyes on them as they have already had a nibble of the lettuce. Not that that stopped me from eating a few lettuce leaves too this morning. They are very nearly at a size where we can start wandering into the garden and getting a few leaves for our salad. The runner beans are shooting up, but the French beans have some mysterious damage round the edges of the leaves which may be a bit cold damage, apart from we haven’t had any frosts recently. hopefully they will recover, but there is still time to sow some more if they don’t.

In which Dan bores 85% of the readers.

During our trip to Greg and Deb’s last month we ate out at restaurants a lot. When we did Greg and I invariably found ourselves ordering the same things from the menu. Our similar taste in food was just one of the things we had in common, in fact there were so many similarities between us that it began to get slightly unnerving. We both shared the same senses of humor and political outlooks. Hell, I recently found out we both had diarrhea at the same time. The only difference between us it seems is that I am a youthful and sprightly 31, while he is an old and doddery 40.

But it’s not just Greg who I find myself having a lot in common with. Lee over at Quit Your Day Job writes humorously and eloquently about popular and pulp culture with an enthusiasm which reminds me very much of my own at one time. That was a time of course before parenthood forced me to lose touch with my inner geek and move my comic collection up to the attic. Still, Lee has the ability to awaken the sleeping fanboy in me, and for that I am grateful.

But now Lee has revealed he shares another one of my interests: trying to grow vegetables with very little prior skill or experience. He’s even started up another blog to chronicle his adventures in horticulture - Urban Cultivation (I strongly advise you to go and take a look, it’s full of drama and suspense - like a soap opera, except with lettuces).

I was half tempted to follow Lee’s lead and create my own separate blog to deal with my gardening efforts, but then I thought about how much work it would be and decided against it. And anyway, this blog was always intended to be a way of recording the growth of my family for posterity. I’m just going to expand my definition of family to include a few plastic pots full of dirt that’s all.

So - for the record. Out in the front garden at the moment there are pots of tomatoes, potatoes, runner beans, chives and strawberries, as well as assorted flowers I’ve stuck in because I liked the pictures on the packet. Inside the house on various windowsills are french beans, rosemary, and even more chives waiting untill they get big enough to plant out.

Of course all these plants look virtually identical because they are only about an inch high at the moment, but all the seeds were different shapes so I’m fairly confident they’ll look different eventually.

I’ll keep you updated. I bet you can hardly wait can you. Just be thankful I’m not on a redecorating kick at the moment, then you might have had to read through my riveting accounts of the paint drying process.

Gnome sweet gnome