Allotment Adventures: All by myself

Posted on April 18, 2018 by nicdempsey

This week, I was abandoned by the weeder-in-chief, who seems to think she should have a social life. I don’t know, parents nowadays.. (although she spent my childhood telling us that she “was put on this earth to me, not just to be your mother” – which is a fair point!)

Anyway on Saturday, the sun was shining and it was a perfect day for working on the plot. Remember the list from last week? Here it is, with what I got done crossed off…

  • build the cloche
  • outdoor sowing
    • more peas
    • beetroot
    • salad
    • parsley and borage
    • flowers?
  • sow indoors
    • cucumbers
    • cucamelons
    • summer squash
    • winter squash
    • marigolds
    • more tomatoes
    • prick out the tomatoes that we’ve sown
  • move leek seedlings into cloche
  • bonfire (weather permitting)
  • last coast of paint for the shed (weather permitting)
  • trim rosemary bush

The first thing I did was paint the shed, which looks great (even if I do say so myself…I also weeded the raspberries and pulled this one up from the broad bean fence

I planted lily of the valley in one of the flower circles (the one under the plum tree, admired my rhubarb which has taken off and sowed afgan poppy seeds in the flower circle between the rhubarb and the gooseberry bush.Check out the leaves on the blueberries…I sowed peas and hopefully protected them from the foxesI also built the cloche and sowed carrots and radishes in bucketsI also sowed beetroot and salad and spinach in the salad beds and covering the beds in fleece more because of the foxes than because I think they’ll need it this week!

I also sowed parsley and borage in the herb beds and the coriander I sowed just to see if they would come up are! I’m excited!I was shattered at the end of the day but it looks really good and if the weather stays good this week, we’ll be doing alright.

The last thing I did was picked chard because that has come back to life…I went home happy but dirty…

At home, after I washed my hands, I potted on tomatoes.

Here is the list for next week,

  • sow indoors
    • cucumbers
    • cucamelons
    • summer squash
    • winter squash
    • marigolds
    • more tomatoes
    • sow basil
    • pot on sweet peas and move to cloche
  • move leek seedlings into cloche
  • weed
  • bonfire
  • do another bucket of carrots
  • strim the grass on the edges, I also offered to do Joe’s too!

I can’t think of anything else, but I’m sure that I’ll remember something! 

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The Joy of Bathing

Posted on April 17, 2018 by nicdempsey

I have taken to a nightly bath.

I’ve been trying to do something about my lack of sleep and a bath is relaxing, in part because rinsing the bath is easier than tidying up after a shower!

Baths seems inherently indulgent and on Saturday nights, after a day of allotment work, when accompanied by a book and a glass of wine, they definitely are!I don’t use bubble bath much but I do use bath oil, I make it myself. Four fl oz of almond oil, with 10 drops each of clary sage, cedarwood and lavender essential oil. Added to the water when the bath is running and a soak of at least 15 minutes.

Yes I’m aware that my feet in this photo are filthy, my top tip for clean feet is not to spent the day on the allotment in your Birkenstocks, how not to have ugly feet is not a thing I can help you with (maybe not have my parents!), I’m just grateful they still work and you can hardly see the scar on the left one!

The trick to a bath being really relaxing I have found is to have everything else you need to have done, that way you can bathe, climb into ‘jamas and go to straight to bed and carry on with your book.

Next on my list to try epsom salts with my chosen essential oils. Anyone tried them?

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Monday Miscellany

Posted on April 16, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday and welcome to the 106th day of the year! There are another 259 days left in 2018, so I’m going to try and make this one good!

Also on this day in 1963, Martin Luther King wrote his letter from Birmingham Jail. MLK has been in the news a lot recently as everyone has commemorated the 50th anniversary of his death but that letter should be required reading for everyone..

Miscellany for this week

It rained pretty much every day this week until Saturday when it was so sunny I got burnt! Seriously, I wish the weather would just decide on Spring and I would get back into the sunscreen habit.

Root beer is probably my favourite soft drink (I know everyone else hates it!) and it’s really hard to get in the UK, especially after the EU put a quota on the amount sodium benzoate in soft drinks. I generally I limit my root beer consumption to trips to Bryon. However, the Tesco’s tiny US food section has started selling this one and I am trying very hard not to buy all the root beer, it’s expensive stuff but so delicious…

It’s been a bad week for kitchen appliances Chez Dempsey, my blender has had a huge problem with smoothies this week, the stick blender died (yes ok I’ve had it for over 20 years, it’s the principle of the thing) and then this happened on Sunday night…

For this week, I want to get the squash and cucumbers sowed and not have a migraine (yep it’s that time!), I also would really like to get more than three hours a night sleep, so it may mean just going to bed at 8pm because I sleep better before midnight!

 

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Photo of the week

Posted on April 14, 2018 by nicdempsey

This week’s photo was taken on Monday and about sums it up. The BT Tower vanishing into fog…

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Friday Links

Posted on April 13, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! I trust we all made it to the end of the work week with health and sanity more or less intact, even if it’s just blu-tacked together at this point? And for those of you that don’t work Mon to Fri or don’t work at all, that you still get to have some kind of Friday feeling!

A reminder, in case you weren’t around, this week I posted miscellany, an overdue update on my reading in February and March for those of you keeping score, an update on the allotment (go and admire my tidy plot and painted shed, marvel at how much weeding my mother does!)…

Here are this week’s links from other places….

I’m so happy about this. Ealing council votes for UK’s first ‘safe zone’ around abortion clinic. I think that it’s really interesting that off those opposed only 6.6% lived in Ealing, whatever your views on abortion, once you’ve seen what they do and say to women going into the clinic changes your views, I have a couple of friends who are anti-abortion and even they think a buffer zone is a good idea. I heard the R4 interview and Clare McCullough from the Good Counsel Network, was lying, I’ve seen protesters follow women, offer them rosaries and ask them not to kill their babies outside this clinic. (This has also happened to me at another clinic and I’m still not over it), they do it when they think that no one will do anything, I’ve seen and helped people in tears because they chased after them. They were asked to consider moving back because they cause distress and they refused, none of this is about Christian compassion, it’s about shaming women and I’m proud that I live in a borough where they aren’t allowed to do it.

Britain sees the Commonwealth as its trading empire. It is sadly deluded 

Mum has dementia and now Dad’s dead she will have to sell her home. Why? I have a couple of issues with this. If the author’s mother had cancer, she would receive medicine and treatment on the NHS, but it would not provide her with somewhere to live and the assumption is that cancer is curable, any care home a cancer patient was send to would be to allow her to recover enough to go home. Dementia is not curable and thus the care has to be different, the the NHS would provide any pills she might take to slow the dementia. Ultimately, no it’s not fair and if the argument was for more joined up, sensible care for dementia patients that would be one thing. but this seems to be about money. It’s not fair that my grandad and mum were never well off enough financially to buy a house which I can inherit, it’s not fair that three of my grandparents died before they reached 55. I accept that social care for the elderly and those with dementia is banjaxed but bleating about the unfairness of care because you won’t inherit her money is ridiculous. All my mother’s possessions are hers, for her amusement and care, I have no expectation of a windfall when she dies anymore than she did when her dad died. Get over yourself…

The gender pay gap isn’t the half of it: our economy runs on women’s unpaid work. There has been lots of stuff about the gender pay gap and some talk of women ‘choosing’ to go part time being part of the problem. Overall, the problem is that mothers are the only people allowed not to privilege their work over the other parts of their lives. Fathers don’t seem to have the same option, even with changes to shared parental leave, it’s not really the done thing. We have to work more on flexible working for everyone in addition to the gender pay gap…

Nigel Farage is no fisherman’s friend: he’s been ignoring them for years. What really gets me about this absolute shower of a human being, is that he gets away with it…

Martin Luther King: how a rebel leader was lost to history. The Sunday Service last week was a recording of the service at Westminster Abbey for Martin Luther King and Ma and I were saying something similar though not as eloquent.

Jared Kushner’s $1.2 billion miracle it’s just so blatant…

Labour announces plan for under 25s to have free bus travel So the Tories court the pensioners, Labour go for the 18-25’s and everyone want to talk about hard working families. If you are Gen X and single, you are the demographic politics forgot. I don’t want free bus travel for pensioners and under 25, I want safe, consistent, affordable public transport for everyone, it’s not hard…

Monkey in the news. Well done Emma!

Gulf Stream current at its weakest in 1,600 years, studies show

Come Sunday: how one of America’s biggest preachers became a pariah. I read this and I realised that this is something that I believed pretty much from when I was confirmed. The idea that a loving God would send us to hell is just ridiculous to me, is the world broken? Yes, because we are. I just feel so sad that this guy took so long to get around to hearing it…

but the bishop never turned away from what was, to him, a revelation from God: hell is what humans create for themselves on earth, heaven is for all.

Other people’s blogs – I read quite a few other blogs and thought it would be nice to feature some of the posts I’ve enjoyed this week, maybe you’ll find another favourite blog!

Cassie wrote about practising mindfulness in the garden. Although it’s not the way I do it, I love this and also love Cassie’s plans for her garden, those raised beds are fantastic!

Sarah showed us the contents of her fridge. As a really nosy person, I love posts like this..

 

 

 

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Allotment Adventures: Ready to grow

Posted on April 11, 2018 by nicdempsey

The weather is getting everyone down, my lovely allotment neighbour Joe, says that he thinks it’s been the worse spring he can remember since he had the plot and he’s had the plot as long as I’ve been alive! We had two warmish sunny days and then weather forecast reckoned that there would be rain every day except Wednesday (today) but it wasn’t due to rain on Saturday until the evening so Ma and I set out to get some work done. To give you an idea, this is a photo of the sun, you can sort of see it!

After Ma’s calculation on the best value compost, we went to Wickes and bought 8 bags of compost (560 litres of compost).Fortunately, 70 litre bags are easier to carry than 120 litre bags. We put a bag in each of the beds that haven’t already had compost and covered them until we are ready to start sowing things which should be very soon.

Then we got to work on other things. First off, weeding for Ma and another coat of paint on the shed for me. It’s really surprised me how painting the shed has made it less noticeable, it blends in much better.Ma and I also worked out where the squash bed at the top of the plot would go and she forked it over. My eventual intention is to build a bed but for this year I’ll raise the bed with compost and we’ll plant squash there. This also gives a good picture of the state of the soil, it’s wet underneath but dry and cracked on top, having a bed there will stop us walking all over it. Ma set up the last flower circle at the front of the plot. We’ll get to sowing some seeds in there shortly, we can already see the self seeded californian poppies coming up and I’m happy for them to do their thing.

We planted the remaining potatoes and covered in fleece, just in case!

Despite the weather things are coming on, the broad beans and the rhubarb are starting to grow

There is always more to do but we are as prepared as we can be and just need to wait on weather and time.

We do have things to do so for next weekend when I’m allotmenting solo this is my work list

  • build the cloche
  • outdoor sowing
    • more peas
    • beetroot
    • salad
    • parsley and borage
    • flowers?
  • sow indoors
    • cucumbers
    • cucamelons
    • summer squash
    • winter squash
    • marigolds
    • more tomatoes
    • prick out the tomatoes that we’ve sow
  • move leek seedlings into cloche
  • bonfire (weather permitting)
  • last coast of paint for the shed (weather permitting)
  • trim rosemary bushes

Good thing that other than housework, food shopping and prep, walking Fred the dog (and maybe Noah the grandson) with Sarah and hopefully catching up with Ryan and Claire, I don’t have any plans!

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What I’ve Read – February and March 2018

Posted on April 10, 2018 by nicdempsey

I’ve been going through the last couple of months, feeling that reading has been tricky this year. I started the year with a couple of books that I loved (Elinor Oliphant, The Hate U Give, Iron Gold) and have felt that February and March were a bit meh but actually it hasn’t been that bad. So for the last two months, this is what I’ve read..

 Dragon Actually – G.A. Aitken

Did not like. GA Aitken also writes as Shelley Laurenston and I thought I would enjoy this, but I didn’t.

The Duchess Deal – Tessa Dare

I did enjoy this, I have to do a certain amount of handwaving when I read Tessa Dare but she writes well, this was funny and I enjoyed Emma and her new friends.

Brooklynaire – Sarina Bowen

So I more or less autobuy Bowen’s books but I didn’t enjoy this as much as the others in the series. I think because there had been so much lead up to this story through the other books.

The Boy on the Bridge – M.R. Carey

I loved The Girl with All the Gifts and this is another story from the same world, that ties up some threads. I did really enjoy it, I found it had all the things that I liked from TGWATG but I was interested in these people and how they would live with themselves and with the world they were in.

Mister McHottie – Pippa Grant

This was free, and I’m glad it was because I would have been sad to have paid cash money for it. I did not find it hilarious and honestly, I didn’t much like or empathise with the hero or the heroine, which is a pretty bad thing in book.

A Princess in Theory – Alyssa Cole

I did enjoy this, but not as much as everyone else seems to have done. There’s lots about it I loved, Ledi is great, her best friend needs a slap. The book didn’t gel for me,  the first half of the book and the second didn’t seem to fit. The end was all bish bash bosh, problem solved and that didn’t seem right when the characters were so finely drawn to start with.

A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’engle

The film has not had great reviews but lots of people who’s opinions I respect are really excited about it and really love the book. So I read the book and I’ve worked out for me what the problem is. A Wrinkle in Time is a classic children’s book in the US, it doesn’t have the same following here. It was written in 1963 but I don’t ever remember seeing it in the library at school or home. It isn’t a book that parents here have passed onto children. It’s a good children’s book and I enjoyed it and if they were easily available, I’d read the others. I get why my friends are excited for the film but the story doesn’t have the same emotional heft for me.

Bringing Delaney Home – Lee Kilraine

This was free and thank goodness it was because it wasn’t that good. I just didn’t get it, there was too much going on in the town and not enough going on with the characters.

Digging In – Loretta Nyhan

This was also a freebie, it was an Amazon Prime monthly pick. I enjoyed it, it was very gentle but I would have actually preferred more gardening (of course I would!).

The Rook – Daniel O’Malley (re-read)

I loved this when I first read it and I loved it on second reading, which I did to reacquaint myself with the world before reading the sequel.

Stiletto – Daniel O’Malley

What happens when you make peace with an opponent that you have been brought up to loathe? In Stiletto, it all gets very confusing and complicated and funny.

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life – Peter Godfrey-Smith

I loved this, I picked it up half price when I bought Ma a book for Mother’s Day, because books are my love language (I bought her The Catholics: The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland, from the Reformation to the Present Day, she did like it and has already been quoting bits of it to me!). As a present, buying something that gets me a cheap book it a win win, and I really enjoyed it. I’m not good at science but I understood pretty much all of it and I enjoyed the way that Godfrey-Smith mixes his experience of octopuses with explaining evolution, I really loved the explanation of the current theories of ageing. Overall, I was entertained and I learnt something I didn’t know much about.

Silver Silence – Nalini Singh

This is the second arch of the Psy-Changling series. I enjoyed it because I always do.

Tell the Wind and Fire – Sarah Rees Brennan

I really loved this so much I considered reading A Tale of Two Cities. (I’m really not a huge fan of Dickens). Anyway it was less funny than other SRB books but so good.

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Monday Miscellany

Posted on April 9, 2018 by nicdempsey

Morning! I hope you are all ready to start another week, I’m always ready and never quite ready, there is always too much to entertain me at home! Which is probably how you should feel about where you live, I love my little flat!

Anyway, miscellany….I bought tulips this weekend, they were 75 pence a bunch so it felt like I had to buy them…

My current netflix obsession is the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, they are like Australian 20’s Agatha Christie and I have just a crush on Miss Fisher’s bob, I know from bitter experience that my hair won’t do that but I really admire other people’s perfect hair. I notice that everyone seems to want their hair to do the opposite of what it does, people with straight hair want curly hair and blondes want to be redheads and so on. Overall though, I like my hair which is pretty much like my mum’s, the only difference being colour!

This weekend Ma and I ate our Easter lunch, for Easter we were at Ben and Lu’s and that was lovely (if I do say so myself!) but Ma and I are creatures of tradition and the anchovy roast lamb is an Easter tradition, so we did it a week later…

When it comes to maths, I am the family dud, Ma, Ben, Oli and Laura are all freakishly good at it (I have hopes of Joe but he counts better than he speaks, so those hopes are probably in vain!), which is why I’m not surprised that Ma did a cost analysis to work out whether the compost from Wicks or Homebase was cheaper. It was Wickes….so we went off to buy 580 litres, which is a lot to wheelbarrow to the plot, but I managed it. It also seems much nicer compost than the Homebase stuff.

I finally got all the potatoes planted and gave the shed another cost of paint. We’ve had two sunny days but the weather forecast predicts rain every day this week except Wednesday, at least it’s not snow but I am ready for proper Spring now but the signs are there

On Friday, I came home and really did not want to be dressed, so I took my jeans off and wondered around the house with no trousers on for a bit. My dad used to do this too and Joe is at the stage where he takes his trousers off at any given opportunity. Genetic inheritance right there….

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Friday Links

Posted on April 6, 2018 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! It’s been a bit quite around here this week mainly because I caught a bug and have been throwing up, not fun, Ma tells me that nephew no 1 has been ill too and took himself off to bed at 4 in the afternoon. Anyway, bed and sleep and Radio 4 are the best way to cope with feeling sick. That and fizzy water. I’m feeling better.

I posted on Tuesday Start the Week (which had my brother – Hi B! – wondering if I was going to get all religious, I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or worrying that he hasn’t noticed my whole life!!) and goals for April…

Here are this week’s links…

Ecuador Shuts Off Julian Assange’s Internet Access in Apparent Response to Recent Russia Tweets Cards on the table, I don’t believe that Julian Assange is being unlawfully detained, he put himself in that embassy and he keeps himself there. So I’m very amused by this.

Would you take £1m now, or £1,000 a week for the rest of your life? I’m not a millennial but I’d take the weekly sum!

How to bring a high street back from the dead

Ray Wilkins died. He was only 61, Richard Williams sums up why football has lost someone special.

A while ago, Sarah posted her Desert Island Books and I’ve been thinking about mine ever since and it’s harder than Desert Island Discs….don’t make me play favourites with the books…

 

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Monthly Goals – March/April 2018

Posted on April 5, 2018 by nicdempsey

I’m all over the place this week, with the bank holiday and then on Tuesday a bug of some kind. I had to go home on Tuesday afternoon and haven’t left the house since!

Anyway, with March over, we are through the first quarter of the year and it’s been an odd month. It’s not been a good month for illness, I celebrated the last day of February, by putting my back out in spectacular fashion. I’ve hurt my back before and it’s been painful but I’ve been able to move, a bit more slowly than usual but I’ve got to work and I’ve got around. Not this time, I couldn’t stand straight, I couldn’t sit upright, it was seriously the worst it’s ever been, at some points crawling was the only way to get around and simple things like getting out of bed took 5 to 10 minutes. It resulted in two days off work and a weekend of doing very little. There was more snow on St Patrick’s Day and it was another weekend when I didn’t leave the house because I was ill, this time it was just a cold and much milder than usual (I didn’t miss any work days) but I wasn’t taking any chances. In between bouts of illness that kept me indoors, Ma and I spent the weekend in Shefford with the boys, where I caught the cold, but other than that, I had a pretty anti social month!

But on how I did with my March goals

Mind and Body

  • 10,000 steps a day. – Nope, nope so much nope. The target was 310,000 for the month and didn’t get there 
  • Vitamins every day. – This was easy, I take all four at night (multi-vitamin, vitamin d, folic acid and a high strength glucosamine, MSM and chondroitin tablet)
  • Feet and Hands. – again pretty easy to do, I do it before I go to bed
  • Golden hour – I’ve been maintaining this pretty strictly because last month my sleep was appalling and doing this helps a lot, and can be seen in my sleep stats in March I had a weekly average of 4h 35min sleep against the 3hr45min I got in February.

Budget & Spending

  • Stick to the spending budgets for food and household – yep, I did this, even when factoring my ‘throw money at it’ approach when I was ill.
  • No card use. I need to leave my debit card at home this month – didn’t manage it. I used my card, mostly in the chemist!

House Beautiful

  • Hoover once a week, my dislike of hoovering is well known, so I need to make it a weekly habit. – nope, see above about hurting my back. 
  • Defrost freezer – nope
  • Sort out underbed storage – this did not happen
  • Clean oven – nope
  • Curtains in the bedroom – this didn’t happen either!

Allotment  (why is this the longest list?)

  • bonfire
  • Paint the shed
  • start sowing seeds indoors (leeks, tomatoes, cucumbers, cucamelons, peppers, kale, chard, cauliflowers) – we’ve did leeks, tomatoes and sweetpeas on St Patrick’s Day 
  • start sowing seeds outdoors (beetroot, carrots, radishes, peas, salad, herbs) – nope see above answer about the snow and the rain!
  • plant out potatoes – the anyas are planted out, the others I’ll do this weekend. 
  • buy compost and fill up remaining beds – nope, we had plans but neither of us felt up to doing it on Monday in the rain
  • –plant out mint – done and we’ll see if it lives

Year so far

Reading – The TBR list on the Kindle stands at 92 and the physical pile of books is at 32, it slowly coming down, I just have to stop buying and borrowing books (it’s a disease!)

Household budget – I started with £52.20 ended with £12.00. I’ll have £52.00 for April

Food Budget – I had £14.86 left over which went in the jar.

Saving – The jar now contains £102.43

Health – So it’s not been the best month health wise. My bad back got much, much worse and I caught a cold. Good news is that my back seems better and it wasn’t a terrible cold, I was functional and I didn’t get a cough, so I’m feeling positive about that. But I do think that my overall health is being affected by the low level stress caused by not having a permanent job and temping. There’s nothing much I can do about that apart from work harder to find a permanent role! In other good news the clocks went back in March and we have much more daylight, which always helps. 

April Goals

April, so far is looking very quiet. It’ll be work and allotment and growing all the plants….

Mind and Body

  • 10,000 steps a day.
  • Vitamins every day.
  • Feet and Hands.
  • Golden hour

Budget & Spending

  • Stick to the spending budgets for food and household.
  • No card use. Let’s see if I can make this work for April

House Beautiful

This is pretty much all repeats of March because I didn’t get it done last month

  • Hoover once a week, my dislike of hoovering is well known, so I need to make it a weekly habit.
  • Sort out underbed storage
  • Clean oven
  • Defrost fridge
  • Curtains in the bedroom

Allotment  (still the longest list!)

  • bonfire
  • sowing seeds indoors (summer and winter squash, cucumbers etc)
  • start sowing seeds outdoors (beetroot, carrots, radishes, peas, salad, herbs)
  • sowing flowers in various places around the plot
  • greenhouse?
  • sort out the section at the top of the plot where the squash are going
  • compost
  • finish planting the potatoes
  • another coat of paint on the shed

 

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