Tag: garden
I opened the Royal Mail app to track a box of plants supposedly arriving today, and saw this: an estimated carbon footprint of my delivery’s emissions. That’s new. I suppose it’s a good thing that this particular delivery will be going in the dirt to soak up some more carbon. I wasn’t thrilled about having to order them in the first place, but I had a lot of seed failures, I didn’t get the wildflower bee and wildlife bed I wanted, and I need more native pollinators in the garden. But it’s interesting to see an environmental cost to ordering, put right there in front of me.
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Also to do today. A couple of Xmases back, I got bought an Idoo hydroponic propagator, and the current batch in there – Zitava pepper, crystal lemon cucumber and Romano pepper — needs to come out today. The three pods on the far right are Little Gem lettuce, and they stay in there and get harvested as needed right out of the machine. Little Gem is a Romaine lettuce, which means it has actual protein and nutrients in it. They grow in little coconut coir pods, which you can buy cheap online and cut to size. The Idoo-brand hydroponic feed is expensive, but any good one will do, and I save a bunch of money by using this one, to great effect.
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Garden day. The humidity is disgusting. But I have berries — gave the first strawberry and raspberry to my partner while she was home for a day. These, however, are going to be mine all mine. As will the blueberries that seem to be emerging. Cheapo fruit netting arriving later today.
Came across this article today while skimming my feeds – some things you can do if you’re sick of social media – and then went outside as planned, and now I’m eating a quick lunch before planting.
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Gave up on trying to grow rosemary from seed for a while, got sick of never having rosemary to hand, so I ordered some plants, and of course they turned up today when I’m racing to get stuff done in the office
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I needed a cheap, tough watch for garden work, because I’m not wearing a Apple Watch or any of my three nice watches while I’m dealing with dirt and water and whipping branches and tools and swinging an axe.
So, for £30, I picked up a second-hand G-Shock Watch Men’s G-Rescue Black/Red G-7900-1DR off eBay. It came in a bag with no instructions. Took me a minute to reset the time. I have no idea what the big round thing in the top left corner is. The blue thing in the middle is a tide indicator, according to the internet. I just found what purports to be the operation manual site, but it does not work well. (noting this largely for myself)
All I need to know is this: it works in the wet and in the cold and it’s extremely hard to destroy. No more wrestling my phone out of a secure pocket just to see what the time is. Or carefully working out there with an Apple Watch on that buzzes my wrist every couple of minutes.
Also about watches:
Another grey day with a chill in the air. My body thinks it’s still February and wants me to go back in the cave to finish hibernating.
ON DECK: Unless something else happens during the day, I’m bulling my way through to the end of a treatment and then going to a new project outline tonight.
INBOX: 75, but that’s mostly delivery notifications. Ran out of everything at once.
LISTENING: Night Tracks.
READING: PROCESS: THE WRITING LIVES OF GREAT AUTHORS
OUTSIDE: this article on THE PAPER:
Where are you?
OG: I’m home today but I usually work at the Cardiff University hospital library. It’s got a good, studious atmosphere, as I’m surrounded by lots of extremely stressed medical students drinking Monster energy and reading about bones.
What can you see from your desk/ through the window?
EM: I don’t have a fixed desk space at home—sometimes I sit by the front window, but it can be quite distracting. Like the other morning I ended up charging a scaffolder’s tools cos the guy he was working for on the street wouldn’t open the door to him, then I ended up chatting for ages with a different guy who used to live in this house, who made his presence known by shouting, ‘Is the pond still out the back?!’ at me repeatedly through the window.
In the garden, it has come to this: plant hats.
So many of the gardens on our street have been paved over that it seems all the slugs and snails in the postcode have come to live in ours. Therefore, I’m trying everything I can find to help my plants survive.
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Just arrived. Thanks to Cate Winter for alerting me to the existence of black hollyhocks and finding a place where I could buy the seeds. Amazing thing to do.
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As you can see, a very ordinary, small, town garden. And an axe. Which I got for Christmas, and which I had to use to hack through thick, buried wisteria vine running under the western bed.
I got paid last week. I discovered a few months back that buying dormant fruit trees at this time of year is surprisingly cheap. So I have some apple trees incoming, ones that I can raise in containers. I’ve slowly been building a small stock of fruit trees, even as I raise other plants from seed. The soil is fucked. There’s no drainage, either. And, as my daughter’s partner pointed out, there is probably more salt in the air from the Thames Estuary than I, as a lifelong resident, actually notice. I’ve been amending the soil at the back western corner, behind the axe there, to start a pollinator/wildlife-highway section, and I’ll have to do something similar at the front end. I am determined that by summer this garden will be producing food.
I once read an interview with Jon J Muth where he talked about having his and his friends’ kids cover a wall with random messy marks, which he then considered the under-painting for a new mural, taking inspiration from the marks he had to work with. I consider my long-neglected garden in a similar way.
(Apparently I wrote this on Jan 30 and never posted it)
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