Wednesday 29 July 2020

Companion Planting at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire #plantsmakepeoplehappy




It's always a pleasure to see some companion planting in action.  I visited my parents over the weekend - my first venture out of Greater Manchester in six months, all masked up for the journey - out into fresher air and slower living where I probably belong.  We visited the spacious, meticulous gardens of Castle Howard on Sunday afternoon, where one veg bed has been arranged by someone who obviously knows a thing or two about combining plants.  While its neat-and-tidiness may not to be your liking, if you look past that you can see the spirit of permaculture at work




Nasturtiums in the corner of the plot, along with marigolds, distract and repel the aphids and other pests that would otherwise be scoffing on the brassicas (beetroot and kale).  Here's some almost entirely pest-invisible kale:


Curly and magnificent.



Beans and squash, perhaps going for a "three sisters" (or two sisters, anyway) effect - perhaps not, but looking very happy together all the same.  Planting the beans a bit closer to the sweet peas trellis may have been part of the plan - sweet peas, in any case, will attract pollinators to the beans.


Their website refers to an "an ornamental vegetable garden styled on a French kitchen garden, known as a "Potager", where vegetables, fruits and flowers intermingle and are formally laid out for ornamental purposes," which I can only assume is what this is.  So we have a cross-pollination of purposes, if you will: aesthetic and organic.  Nothing wrong with that.












Related posts

Nasturtium Pesto
Sunday in the Park, and then Soup
#plantsmakepeoplehappy - Fun With Pots and Propagation
September's Coming Soon
Persicaria Microcephala
A Jar of #Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
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Tuesday 21 July 2020

Intermittent Fasting: Week Two



Feeling really good this morning; perhaps even great. I didn't wake up feeling sluggish or hazy, and felt actually rested - even after one work day that brought more than its fair share of the usual annoyances another, on which I predict even more of the same.  I think there might be something to this intermittent fasting lark.

My pattern on work days is working out as breakfast at 6:30, lunch about 11, lunch about 2pm. Getting back into the habit of eating first thing in the mornings is a bit of stretch - I usually just gave coffee - and oddly, I didn't feel ravenously hungry. A hearty bowl of chilli, aged a good 36 hours in the slow cooker, though, really hit the spot.

I haven't weighed myself yet, and I didn't when I started, so it wouldn't really tell me anything. It's easy to let the number distract and discourage you, so I try and avoid them. It will be interesting to see what I weigh a few months down the line though, if I keep it up this long. So far, it's been a delight. 

 




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Sunday 19 July 2020

First of the Summer Wine



Learning by doing is my way.  I like to get the gist of things, understand the basic principles, and then just give it a go.  Rather than get bogged down in minutiae and too much detail, I find it far more satisfying to experiment.  This isn't always for the best in terms of results, but then, how much is it about results?  Who knows?  Who cares?

I've been experimenting with wine making now for about 2 years, with only limited success so far - at least in terms of output good enough to share with anyone else.  Last night I cracked open my last bottle of apple wine - vintage 2018 - and marvelled at the clarity of the first glass.  So marvellous it was I forgot to take a picture for comparison, but here's what the last glass looked like:



I think this is what can charitably be called "the dregs".  You see, the wine had "thrown a deposit", meaning that while fermenting, some residual yeast or other by-product of the chemical process had sunk to the bottom.  When I bottled it, some of this residue made it through the straining bag and sank to the bottom of the bottles, too.  So the first glass or two poured looks clear and crisp, but after that, the newly disturbed liquid looks, well, in the case of apple wine, like milky piss.  Not very appealing.  Having said that, two glasses was all it took to get me nice and tipsy, so I least I can vouch for the alcohol content.  Moving on.

This year I've been blessed with an abundant blackcurrant harvest.  So early this week I helped myself to an easy 2kg (with enough left over for several jars of delicious jam) plus a bag of strawberries, which immediately became the beginnings of this summer's wine.  First of the summer wine.  Ha ha ha.




I'm using one of the simplest recipes in the book for blackcurrant wine (the only deviation being the addition of a couple of fat strawberries, because strawberries are nice (and because I picked them early into a fasting period, so had to do something with them while they were fresh that wasn't eating them).  The recipe requires only fruit and sugar, pectic enzyme, yeast, and yeast nutrient.  No fannying about with wheat or cirtus or anything else I didn't have immediately to hand.  The recipe also promises the wine will be ready in just three months - a mere moment in wine making terms.  No second rackings required - which means (if I understand this correctly) no residue to filter out.  So by October, I should have a clear and fruity supply of home made red wine.  We'll see.

Blub.  Blub blub blub.  Hopefully.







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Saturday 18 July 2020

How to Do Things



I have an fascination with the vast and bizarre world of "productivity", somewhat incongruous with most of my other interests and beliefs, and entirely so with the spirit in which this blog was conceived.  But it's a part of me, so here I am writing about it.  It probably has to do with the obsessive side of my personality, but I could happily spend as much time experimenting with various "hacks" - things like keyboard shortcuts, filing systems, note taking apps and software, databases - as I could doing the things those systems are supposed to help you get done.  Meta-productivity, if you like: how you can get things done, rather than actually doing them.



Recently I've been trying this little trick to help me concentrate on various tasks, from the banal to the significant, taking them one at a time, as follows.  I pick Thing 1 to do.  I do Thing 1 and at some point before finishing Thing 1 I pick Thing 2 - the next thing to do.  I tell myself, sometimes out loud, "when I've finished Thing 1, I'll move on to Thing 2".  As I'm doing Thing 2, I pick Thing 3, and so on.  It's like working your way through a To-do list that never has more than two unticked items at any one time.  It's surprisingly effective.  One effect it's had is helping me focus more on the thing I'm doing: it's as if, having settled in advance on what to do next, the mind acknowledges that it doesn't need to think any further forward than that, and expends no more energy on looking for distraction, or ruminating on the uncountable number of other things I could or should be doing too.  Thing 2 follows Thing 1, and becomes Thing 1, which leads to Thing 2, which becomes Thing 1 again.  A perfect circle.

Gurdjieff: Did things
The key is that the "Things" have to immediately follow one another, with no space for distraction in between.  I am very easily distracted.  So to use a very simple example, if Thing 1 is, say, cleaning the kitchen, Thing 2 might be something like watering the plants.  As soon as I've finished cleaning the kitchen, I can water the plants.  While watering the plants, I choose Thing 3, which needs to be something that can immediately follow that, allowing minimal possible opportunity for distraction. in between.  Things can be broken down into parts as small as necessary to achieve this: if between Thing 2 and Thing 3 I need to walk from one room to another, "walk from the kitchen into the bedroom" becomes, momentarily, Thing 2.  (Or Thing 2.5, if you like).

This might sound a little insane.  Never mind.  I'm finding it a very satisfying way of being.  I'm not very good at it yet - what I want is to be able to apply the same technique to more complex tasks that take hours, perhaps even more than a day, moving from one thing to the next in a state of flow.  It's a pale version of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" and an even paler version of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky's "self-remembering" but perhaps just colourful enough to be a platform for leapfrogging into more optimal states of consciousness.  The ideal would be to remain in a state like this permanently: always aware, always deliberate, always - dare I say it - "productive".




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Thursday 16 July 2020

"Why destroy the world if you don't have to?" - David Graeber and #bullshitjobs



I don't think I've ever heard or read a single thing David Graeber has said or written that I didn't agree with.  Here he is in a short Radio 4 podcast condensing his theory of bullshit jobs into a gentle five minute polemic in case you haven't got around to reading his book yet, which I urge you to do.

37% of Brits, when asked, said they believe that if their job disappeared tomorrow, it would make absolutely no difference to society at all.  Are you one of them?  Try and be honest with yourself (it's not easy).

And why is it, that the more actual value a job adds to society (think the low pay of "keyworkers", whose vitality, if it wasn't already obvious, has been highlighted massively by the COVID crisis) the less you're paid to do it?

Something is very, very wrong.  And everybody knows it.






Related posts

The No-Day Working Week
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Wednesday 15 July 2020

Intermittent Fasting



All this talk about food, and in amongst that I've decided to give not eating a go.  You might have heard of "intermittent fasting" (so, not really "fasting" at all then) as it's something of a fad at the moment but the little I've read up on it so far, it seems to be a scientifically credible method of weight loss and general good health.

The idea is that you only eat during an 8 hour window every day, and "fast" for the remaining 16 hours.  So if you have breakfast at 7:30am, you need to have your tea by 3:30pm, and not eat again until the following morning.  The 8-hour window you pick doesn't seem to matter too much, though obviously stuffing your face at 9pm and then getting up early for a 5am breakfast binge wouldn't make much sense and is probably terrible for your digestion.  Anyway, you do you.  I'm using roughly 10am - 6pm as my window, and it's only day 2 but already I'm feeling surprisingly energetic.  I think I often feel sluggish in the morning the night after a late, heavy meal, but yesterday and today I've sprung in to life, and without even adding sugar to my coffee; and I don't usually feel hungry first thing anyway, so this suits me fine.

There's plenty of apps available to help keep you on track - the one I'm using also reminds you to drink water periodically, which I've been obediently doing.  Which may also explain the energy boost.  Or it could all be psychological.  So what?  I feel good.  We'll see how this goes.




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Tuesday 14 July 2020

Nasturtium Pesto




It's been a rainy couple of weeks, by my nasturtiums don't seem to mind.  Last night I gathered a few handfuls of stalks and leaves, remembering that somewhere on the internet recently I'd seen reference to nasturtium pesto, further compounding my awe at this magnificent flower.  Nasturtiums are incredible - they keep pests off your cabbages, and every part of them is edible.  I've enthused about the seeds before (more than once, in fact) and on at least one occasion I've thrown the leaves and stems into an experimental salad, but never cooked with them before. Is there anything they can't do?



Most recipes for pesto insist on pine nuts but to be honest I don't know what those are or where to get them. The Co-op don't sell them, and I wasn't really in the mood for a trek over to Tesco for just one item they might not have (these are uncertain times), so I decided to skip that ingredient. The only other essential is apparently garlic, and it just so happened that I'd snipped off a garlic scape I missed a few weeks back when gathering the nasturtium leaves. I pickled the scapes, by the way; here's a picture of them:


Branston pickle jars are perfect for recycling: they have a sturdy, non-plastic lid, which means it can be heated in the oven (to sterilise) and sealed tightly atop whatever you pickle.  So thank you, Branston.  Anyway, back to the pesto.

Barely any cooking was needed, other than softening them for less than a minute in some hot water, which I then drained off the chopped leaves - stalks and all -


I mixed in a long and lazy glob of olive oil, and chopped the stay scape.  A garlic scape, by the way, originally looks like this:


It's the long tendril that grows out of the plant about a month or so before the main bulb is ready to harvest.  Chop it off and use it as you see fit.  Tastes very garlicky.  Obviously.

All that was left was the blend and mix into pasta, which is what I did:



It didn't taste amazing - surprisingly mild, in fact, given the punch that raw nasturtium leaves can pack, and the garlic, so I sprinkled in some chilli salt.  Kick.  A satisfactory lunch.





Related posts

The Art of Pottering
A Jar of #Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
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