2018: Year of the Shed (Part Two)

What a shed-tastic morning it has been.  It's gloriously sunny, and after a hearty bowl of porridge I was down on the allotment before 10am.  I set to work dismantling the plastic monstrosity.  First the roof came off:

Then the walls came tumbling down:

The whole edifice was held together by nothing more than rusty old screws, none of which were any match for my Swiss army knife.  Quick as you could say "George Bernard Shaw", the old shed was gone.

A shed-shaped hole

There's allotmentiers all over the place today, and more than one of them was happy to help me moving the pieces of my new shed from one site to the other.  They're a lovely bunch, allotmentiers are.  And so, behold:

These are all the pieces of my 8ft by 6ft wooden shed, stacked up against the fence of my plot, awaiting assembly.  There is much work to be done, but I can tell already this is going to be the start of beautiful friendship.  Shed on, brothers and sisters!  Shed on.

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Scrappy Allotment Update

Things are going well on the allotment. The soil was hard when I went over there this morning, but worthy bulbs and shoots continue to push their way through.  The crocuses and other pollinators whose names I forget have established themselves, appearing in delicious shades of purple and orange.

I believe there may be tulips, too, setting out their stall beside the blackcurrant bush, and elsewhere.

As for edibles, I've started putting out some seedlings of spinach...

...onions and leeks...

...and even a few potted up strawberry crowns I rescued from the border of the plot at the back end of last year.  Forgot to snap any pictures of those, so just take my word for it.

Inside the greenhouse, kale today...

...and here's a little video from earlier in the week:

All good stuff.  You know what's really good, though?  I think I've secured myself a second hand shed for the very reasonable price of £50.  So that means...

...I've got something to do tomorrow.




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Related posts

2018: Year of the Shed
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Carpet of Weeds

Just on the other side of my allotment fence there's a patch of nothing in particular.  As with most nothings, they're only really nothings from a distance: closer inspection always rewards the curious.  So it is that I happened upon this:

This is groundsel, or Senecio vulgaris or even old-man-in-the-Spring if you prefer.  It is considered a "common weed" which if I were a plant I would find hard not to take personally.  Nothing is really a weed in an absolute sense.  Weediness is relative.  There's much more to be said about this, but not just now.

What interested me was how this uncommon no garden plant happened to be growing in the aforementioned patch of nothing-but-not-really-nothing.  It's rooted itself entirely into moss-covered moldy carpet, seemingly quite independent of the soil beneath it.  I found this curious and wonderful and when I first happened across it a week or so ago thought I'd yank a bit recklessly from the soil, with enough roots to make the yank worthwhile, to repot it indoors, later to explore any herbal or other culinary uses it may have.  The 17th century proto-Enlightenment repository of botanical lore, Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653) describes groundsel as, "Venus's mistress piece...as gallant and universal medicine for all diseases coming of heat" and I challenge you to find so enticing a description of any "common weed" written this side of 1900 anywhere.

But then this happened:

It gone died on me.  The yellow buds fell off, the leaves withered.  Sensitive bugger, is our groundsel, mistress-piece of Venus it may or may not be.  Evidently a more careful extraction was required.  Today I made a second attempt, and found the plant so tightly woven into the fibres of the carpet as to make extraction without damaging the roots (presumably the cause of my previous failure) impossible.  I tore away a whole patch of surrounding carpet instead, leaving the roots as intact as I possible could, which left me with this:

It really was quite distinctly pretty; the greys and the greens, the life nourishing itself on decay.  On the underside:

I cut out a patch around the roots small enough to fit into a plant pot, and finished up with this:

I hope it lives.  I'll be sorry if it doesn't.  So sorry I'll actually go back and apologise.  It seems like the least I can do, though of course that isn't true.  The least I can do is nothing at all.  But it seems to me that the joy is to be found in doing as close to nothing as possible and still being able to call it something.

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Prayer Plant Progress

I thought maybe you'd like to see how the prayer plant cuttings I took in January were getting along.  It feels like it's been a very long winter, though the sky today is blue and there's that presence in the air, that feeling of life pushing back from the darker places where it sometimes hides; perhaps spring really is here at last, as I stupidly decided it already was five weeks ago, when it was not.  Patience is not an easy virtue to master.  Here, as in so many other places, we have a lot to learn from plants.

Here's a node from one of the January cuttings.  Those two pale yellow nobs you can see where the stems meet the knee are the beginnings of roots.  Patient as I said I wasn't, I already rooted a similar looking node in some soil in my bedroom last week.  I wondered if I should have waited longer for the roots to develop more but it occurred to me, stupid again, the roots want to be underground.  That's where they do their work.  So I planted it, and it seems to have been the right thing to do.  Already the leaves are lifting.  So I planted the node pictured above, too.  Now I have this:

Prayer plants leaves are beautiful and strange, like no other plant I've grown before.  I would like to fill my home with such things.  I took another cutting from the parent plant today, and jarred it up with some others.  My prayer plant factory.  Laboratory.  Nursery.

This is the parent:

These are the children:

Also pictured here, some of my potatoes, chitting away in the rising sun.  Plants, edible and inedible.  Yes.



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Plastic Free Market Forces

Plastic's been getting a lot of attention recently.  In the two years since the UK introduced a 5p tax on plastic bags, supermarkets here have started to wake up to the issue of plastic pollution, and  make the inevitable marketplace manoeuvres to reduce the amount of plastic packaging they're using, as the zero-waste movement gains momentum along with other insane and radical ideas about not destroying the only planet we have to live on while making it a living hell for just about every other intelligent species we can find (among "millennials", in particular, who are ruining everything, you know).

Here's a fun fact: if you use one of the self-service counters in Morrison's or Tesco, and select "no bag" from the touchscreen when you pay, the robots won't know you're lying if you use one anyway, and so you won't have to pay the 5p tax.  I know this because I've done it.  I've done it because I'm a terrible person.  (I try to go zero waste, but I keep lapsing).   I only mention Morrison's and Tesco because those are the supermarkets I happen to use with any regularity.  You can probably get away with it in Sainsbury's, too.  And because I'm not only a terrible person but also astonishingly thick, I doubt I'm the only one who's realised this.  So you have to wonder how much of a reduction in plastic bag use the scheme has actually achieved.

A recent Tesco shareholders' meeting

It doesn't make the scheme a bad idea, of course.  Taxation can and does influence consumption to some degree, and when taxes on bad things are used to promote good things, society benefits; but it does expose its limitations.  Where options exist, people will still take them, even when they are demonstrably harmful.  People still smoke cigarettes (not quite as much as they once did, granted) even though are insanely expensive and it says right there on the packet that doing so will kill you slowly and painfully.  Because people (and not just me) are astonishingly thick.  A better alternative, which takes account of our irrationality and idiocy, is to take away the option altogether.

Of course, it's less likely that supermarkets are going to stop selling cigarettes any time soon, because there's still plenty of profit to be made there.  They aren't going to stop selling animal excretions and corpses as food, either, for exactly the same reason.  (Just in case you were worrying this post was about to mutate into a praising of the ineffable glories of free market - don't worry, it's not).  There's no profit to be made selling disposable plastic bags, however.  Hence, ASDA's recent announcement of its plans to axe them altogether.

This is infinitely preferable.  You can't nick plastic bags when there aren't any to nick.   We can't choke our oceans with them when they're not being made in the first place.  If they are, some of them inevitably will end up as polluton, no matter how great the awakening to the environmental crisis becomes.  Better never to make any more plastic bags ever again.  Ban their production completely, perhaps.  Re-use, recycle and re-purpose any plastic you already have, and then eliminate it as much as possible from your life.  The government will get the message.  The market will, too.  Most importantly of all, so will the planet.  Which is the only planet we have, thicky.

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Beans Talk

After fighting off a cold over the last 48 hours with plenty of sleep, Beechams and my super-charged vegan immune system, I ventured outside again today for peak inside the greenhouse.  A couple of broad beans have poked their stems above the surface of the soil.  These are from the first seeds I sowed indoors on January 14th, using re-purposed toilet roll inner tubes.  Examining the first seedling closely, I was pleasantly surprised to find it's already sending out a long and healthy root.  This one's going in the ground, I thought.

Then I put it in the ground.

Then I covered it up with a half a plastic bottle, to acclimatise the wee thing.  It might be too soon, you see, so I'm being careful.  It's still pretty nippy out there, and there's more snow forecast.  One bean at a time.  We'll see how that goes.

I also put my "bee hotel" up the other day, incidentally - a Christmas present from my sister.  Do what you can to help bees in 2018.  Without bees we'd all be dead.  Thanks.

No Vacancies.

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