It’s been a week, work is busy as I’m trying to learn and I’m taking in something else! The something else is supporting my old boss, who is our company Chief of Staff. However, he mostly looks after himself so it shouldn’t be too onerous, although I’m continually shocked by how responsible people think I am, it’s a source of constant surprise!
I also got a last minute appointment for a ultrasound, on Friday morning. It wasn’t pleasant but like all of these things (smears etc) 15 minutes of being self conscious and physically uncomfortable is better than discovering too late that you have something untreatable. I have a fibroid (truly I am my mother’s child!), I need to follow up with the doctor to work out what (if any) action the doctor wants to take but I would rather have a hysterectomy than five up my HRT! We’ll see.
At home, it’s been a week of new toys. A dehydrator and more excitingly my birthday present from Ma. A Kitchen Aid mixer. Isn’t it pretty?
Shiny, shiny
I got out to the beer festival on Friday night, drinking beer in the rain is probably one of the more British things I’ve done this year!
The weather over the weekend made a plot visit difficult, so on Saturday I finally got around to cleaning the oven! Not sure if it was the chemicals but on Saturday afternoon, I had another migraine.
Ma’s trick knee is playing up so on Sunday, I went to the plot to gather some supplies and spent some time on the bus to visit Ma.
Produce
Beetroot, potatoes, gooseberries, carrots and blueberries. The wine didn’t come from the plot though! I’ve been saying it’s a bad year, but we’ll still getting food!
This week’s plans are mostly the same as last week’s. Work is busy, we have a new starter and I have 2024 planning to start. Home is also busy because I need to catch up with the laundry and start prepping for jam making! However, I have no major social plans but I do need to hash out birthday drink celebrations!
I was solo this weekend and distracted (story of my life) but I got some things done.
somewhere in there is a pond
First the annoying. Let’s talk about the foxes. The allotment has a couple of foxes that live on or around the site. Urban foxes are common in Ealing and they had a knock back over COVID and last year because of the heat but they have rebounded and there are some adolescent cubs wandering around the site, they are fairly cautious but as some plot holders are feeding them, they are also for foxes, pretty unbothered by people.
With the hotter weather, I’ve been leaving the polytunnel open all the time, and they’ve decided that the polytunnel beds are great places for digging and going to the toilet. So the first thing I did over the weekend was to remove all the offending deposits and all of this week, I’ve been going morning and evening to open and close the polytunnel every morning to stop them getting in. I’ve also had to start barricading front to stop them getting under the flap, bloody foxes…
No foxes allowed
Going to the allotment every day, also means that the polytunnel and the strawberries get watered every day which is a good thing and the poly is looking good. I’m also taking advantage of these visits to bring the last of the compost (about 14 bags) from the front of my house to the plot. So I should have that done by the end of the week too. It’s all very efficient and I have plans for a lot of that compost this weekend.
Cucumbers in the poly
Now time for a story. Like most other families, our family language will take phrases and malapropisms from each other and turn them into a thing, for instance, cul de sacs are ‘cutty sarks’ because my dad for some reason couldn’t say cul de sac, hot cross buns are ‘cross h buns’ because I couldn’t get the order right. When my youngest nephew was born, the eldest was discombolulated by not having all the attention, all of the time and told my brother, when his mum was feeding the baby, that “mummy’s loving the baby again”
I mention this because there is a point in every allotment year that Ma refers to as “Nic is loving her tomatoes” and we have reached that point so I spent a couple of hours this weekend, ‘loving my tomatoes’. Which means they were stripped of bottom leaves and shoulders, weeded and tied to stakes. I also finally dealt with four ‘spare’ tomato plants that weren’t in beds. Three of them went into a grow bag and one of them into some space vacated by some potatoes. They are behind, but starting to flower and we have the beginning of some tomatoes.
spare tomatoes
I did a tiny bit of weeding but most of my time was spent picking berries. I got a kilo of blueberries, 1.6 kilos of blackcurrants and 600g of gooseberries. I also harvested some beetroot, there’s a bunch of it growing in the path, I think we probably spilled some there because there are choggia and boltardy and they are growing slightly better than the ones in the bed. I’ll take what I can get and it does at least prove that the woodchip is improving all the soil.
Beetroot
The to do list remains largely the same as last week, but my focus for the weekend is all about planting and sowing.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it but I’m going to make some changes at the front of the plot, we are going to put the strawberry towers there and move the two square beds, my cunning plan is that I’m going to plant thymes as ground cover there. I have 8 plants (Creeping Red Thyme, Caborn Wine and Roses, Snowdrift and Archers Gold), they will start at the edge of the bulb bed and hopefully creep out.
the lucian black tomatoes
I also have some camomile lawn (which is my favourite) and some corsican mint for around and in the cracks of the patio, I can’t do grass but I’m playing with ground cover..
I other news, I’ve bought another bbq rosemary to go in the corner at the front, and I got a bonus lavender (munsted) as a gift that needs a home, five comfrey plants that I bought a while ago as tiny crowns which are ready to go into the ground (they are the Bocking 14 so won’t seed all over the place), I also have one more roman camomile to plants somewhere too. Yes, it’s a lot of plants, I’ve discovered that my gardening tastes are maximalist, I like a lot of plants, all being slightly on the verge of taking over!
polytunnel peppers and aubergine
It’s not just pretty plants either, there are food plants I need to deal with too. The cabbage and sprout plugs are arriving this week and I want to get the chard sown for autumn, the leeks need to be in the ground as do the spare summer squash, beetroot seedlings and french beans…
Pull up the pea plants
Plant cabbage and sprout plugs
Plant the comfrey
Plant out the herbs
Plant out leeks, beetroot and french bean plugs
Find a home for the ‘spare’ summer squash
Re sow fennel, kale and cauliflower plugs
Sow Chard bed
Inter plant the tomatoes with supermarket basil
Feed everything
If there is any time left, I need to decide what to do about the carrot bed, it’s not doing great and I seem to have quite a bit of carrot fly damage, so I’m thinking it can be pulled up and I’ll resow carrots elsewhere and I’d like to do some weeding but that might be a step too far!
It really bugs my brain that the detail on this building doesn’t line up with this street….
We have a really loud person in our office (not from my team), she’s on the phone a lot and seems to have no awareness that we’re in a shared office space. Last week she was asked to keep it down and complained to the person she was on the call with, that she was being ‘told off’. She wasn’t being told off, she was being asked to consider others. When she’s in the office, I get a bit grumpy, because it’s so inconsiderate.
Last week, it felt like my entire week was being spent with a person that winds me up.
I got my period (54 day cycle), peri menopause is a delight. The washing machine broke and took out all the sockets in the kitchen at the same time. In case you didn’t already guess, realising that it’s not just the radio that doesn’t work and then identifying through a process of elimination, what is tripping the electricity so it doesn’t happen again and my fridges work, is not a thing that I would chose to at any time of the day but not at 9:45pm when my period has just arrived.
This is what the kitchen looks like most days, lived in…
That led to some other annoyances, contacting the landlord, hand washing, contemplating a trip to the laundrette. It’s a first world problem but it is a problem, I’ve spent a lot of my life in laundrettes, I wrote most of my A level course work in one, and until I was 28 or so, I didn’t have a flat with a washing machine, so laundry trips were just a couple of hours I committed too every weekend, but over 20 years later, I’m out of the habit and feeling put out by it.
Happily, the washing machine repair man came today and 15 minutes later, I have a working washing machine.
Vivipary strawberry
Work is busy because my brain is trying to learn things, so I’m also having to be ultra cautious about doing the things I know how to do because my brain is full and things slip when my brain is full!
A chunk of the weekend was spent dealing with the washing machine and other assorted housework. I am honestly very mojo-less at the moment. Christelle didn’t come over as planned because she was having a flare up and I didn’t want to stay at hers because I was bleeding, and ruining my bedding is bad enough, without doing it to someone else’s.
Time is never really wasted, I did get kidnapped by a book, I went to the plot, I cleaned the bathroom, I spoke to the godchildren (well 4 of 6).
This week, is still all about work. Everyone has realised that schools are breaking up, this week if it’s private and next if it’s state and nothing happens because everyone is on holiday. So I’m really busy with diaries and other stuff and also with learning the new bit of job. It feels like a tidal wave of work breaking over me, I’m catching what I can and worrying about what I’ve missed. So work, preservation of the berry harvest (it’s been a great berry year), catching up on laundry and finally taking all of the compost in front of my house to the allotment. On Friday, I’ll be at the beer festival in the park (I do love a social event 10 minutes from my house!) and on Saturday the allotment.
I have three more weeks at work until I have my traditional week off for my birthday but loads of things to do between then and now.
The allotment has been neglected for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been to water but haven’t done much else and this weekend was the Open Day, so I was slightly regretting that.
But the flowers decided to flower and we got a lot done but let me catch you up on what has been done over the last couple of weeks first.
We have 11 sweet peppers (eight big ben red peppers, one lipstick, one chocolate and one yellow) and three jalapeno plants in the back bed in the polytunnel alongside three aubergine plants, one of which may or may not survive the attentions of a fox, digging in that bed! The cucumbers and melons have really started to grow and are flowering…
Outside this weekend we finished planting the tomatoes, we’ve got five tomato beds, because of the issues we’ve had with them, I only know what’s in one of the beds, that’s the bed of black tomatoes that my plot neighbour gave me. One bed has three sungolds, a marmande, a moneymaker and a gardeners delight I think. All the other tomatoes are a complete mystery! So that will be exciting. I also have five other tomato plants that are going in various places around the plot because I hate to see them unplanted. If you’re keeping count, thats 49 plants in total!
Very leggy tomatoes planted out, I can’t believe how quickly they grew given what poor shape they were in
We have three beds of mystery summer squash planted as well. I also have three plants, I haven’t been able to get rid of so it’s very likely I’ll try to fit them in somewhere in the next week or so.
It’s been a while since I’ve grown peas, and honestly we don’t grow for production because there isn’t that much space, but for a hit of pea goodness the American Dwarf Wonder Pea has been a wonder. We got loads for a very small space and I’m wondering if I can make the season longer at the front end by sowing in the poly in February next year, like all my ideas that might not work at all! But it was good to process something besides fruit.
That’s a large tray
This week, we harvested over a kilo of potatoes from the bed, which might be how we do it in the future. I took another kilo of rhubarb, we had three boxes of blueberries, and so many blackcurrants (in one pick about the same amount we harvested last year and I think we have twice as much to come!
We also took up the last garlic bed. We have loads of garlic, but it’s not in the greatest shape. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll sort and process them. Garlic that’s in good shape we’ll keep, some will go to make toum and roasted garlic and some we’ll process into the freezer to stop it spoiling!
The other things we did this weekend, I did a good bit of weeding of the paths, we found a entire self sown lavender in one of the beds, we planted some of the herbs up in the flower bed at the front and I have a future plan for that whole area to be worked on in the next couple of years.
We have five beds that need sowing or planting up this month and the peas are pretty much done and need pulling up, so that would make six. Two beds need to be planted up with leeks, one will have chard sown soon and I’m going use one to get a ‘quick’ salad bed for the rest of summer. So that leaves me with two, which I’m holding for cabbages and brussels sprout plugs due this month. Then it’s just a case of managing. Keeping up with the watering, weeding and harvesting (and processing the harvest!).
Jasmine
So this is where we are with a work list.
Top up all empty beds
Interplant the tomato beds with basil, parsley, dill and marigolds if you can find any plants
Sow chard and salad
Fill in the gaps on the french bean bed
Sow the last bean arch with gigantes (it might be a bit late but I’m going to try)
I love where I live and right now, with the the cost of living crisis and the rental crisis (and it is a crisis), I know now lucky I am not to have moved in all that time, this is the longest I have lived in one place since I was 20!
The kitchen back in 2009Kitchen this year!
The start of this year was difficult with all the building work and COVID and although I haven’t moved, I have packed up every room in the house and unpacked it again so I sort of feel like I moved!
The living room sometime in 2011
All that being said, I’m glad that I’ve been in the same place for that long and I’m grateful too. For the space and the people that kept me in the flat when my life and more importantly, my work wasn’t stable.
That is mostly my mum, who came to view the flat with me and knew immediately that this was the one and spent a lot of this year helping me pack.
Living room now
Seriously, long term stable rental for people that can’t afford to buy somewhere is vitally important for life and mental health. If you can’t put roots down in a place and settle, you never relax, you can’t be part of a community. I’ve had that opportunity. In the last 14 years, I’ve got myself back from a not good place and a massive part of that was having a home I could settle into.
For now, I’m just happy to watch the years pile up, it’s good to live in a place that feels like home!
I’ve not been around on here for the last couple of weeks. Weekends have been busy and I’ve been too tired in the week to write posts. I’m hopeful that this week, I can get back into my groove, I just need to sort myself out and avoid being kidnapped by a book…
Last week was as predicted, busy, there is so much to learn, fortunately, I had a good chat with my boss and our Business Operations Manager about timeframes and expectations and feel more reassured that I’ll get it. It won’t do me any harm to be busier than usual for a while!
At the weekend, I was all about the allotment, Ma and I worked really hard at the weekend and I’m feeling a lot better about the state of the plot. Then on Sunday, I manned the allotment bar for the open day! Which was fun but tiring!
This week is really all about work, I’m starting with doing the month end report, which is a new thing so lots of brain power required and then the rest of the day job needs to be caught up on!
I’m hoping to see Christelle at the weekend and rest, we’ll see!
Guys it’s June, mid-summer which is supposed to be my happy place and it has not been. It’s all the fault of my hormones (and work but mostly my hormones). After a pretty busy week and weekend the week before last consisting of a training day in Southampton (which with travel turned into a 16 hour day) and then at the weekend a Friday with Christelle and a Sto be at my brother’s for my sister-in-law’s ’40-ish’ birthday party. I was cooked, which is why on Sunday I was in bed early and ready for the office the next day. However, my hormones had a better idea and gave me a migraine, 12 hours lying in a hot, dark room, when the sound of the fan hurts and your vision pixelates, is not at all my idea of a good time.
So last week got off to a flying start….
If you were around last year, you may remember that last July, I was moaning on about how busy I was trying to deal with a new boss, while still looking after the old one. This year, the issue is me trying to work out how to learn new work things, keep up with the current ones and work out how to fit it all into five days, while we all work out how to produce reports on a newly implemented system. Like last year, the only way out is through, I’ll spend some more days in the office and think about buying a screen to for home so it’s easier to work and generally just get my head down. At the moment, the photo below feels like a brilliant descriptor of my working life.
If the first half of this year was about the flat and building work and the second half of this year is going to be about work and engaging my brain to learn new things. However, all of the year, seems to be spent on trying to deal with my peri menopausal state. I’ve been struggling this year to motivate myself to do anything at all and then there’s the bleeding. In fairness to it and others that are suffering, I’m not and have never been a heavy bleeder, what I am at the moment is a constant bleeder, I’ve been bleeding, either period or breakthrough for 35 of the last 43 days. (Yes, of course I’ve been counting!). I’ve been to the doctors and they are checking that I’m not incubating something nasty down there, and I’m waiting for an ultrasound to make sure that’s nothing’s growing in there that shouldn’t and assuming I have an all clear, we can look at changing my HRT for a type where I shouldn’t bleed at all. I’m not sure how that would work because my periods are very much still happening just over 40-ish days instead of the more usual 28. I did ask the GP if she’d take it all out, unfortunately, she said it’s not in her skill set, which is a slight disappointment.
Lunchtime walk on an office day
The weekend was pretty quiet bar a 60thbirthday party, it was fun, nice to catch up with a bunch of Grace people and watch Mike get very excited about how his whiskey collection had grown. Apparently, peaty whiskey is lovely when it’s well aged, which means expensive! I also picked peas at the allotment an thought about this week at work. I’m a very boring person.
All the peas!
This week, I need to give myself a kick up the backside and do lots of things, at work, home and the plot, I have extensive to-do lists for all three and Sunday is the Allotment Open Day. I will be pouring drinks all afternoon. I’ve never actually worked behind a bar and I probably wouldn’t be amazing at it but I’m very good at it for the allotment open days because it’s a limited number of drinks for a limited amount of time. All that being nice to strangers does have a impact though, I need to go to a place that people are not for a while afterwards to recover!
Summer seems to have arrived and last week was hot. So the first thing we did on Saturday was water everything. We’d bought saucers for the blueberries (some of them, I ordered six but I have eight large blueberry bushes). I will buy some more for the others too.
Post watering, we sorted out the garlic and put it in the poly to continue to dry out. We have one more bed of garlic which I hope to get to next week!
Garlic harvest
We also brought things over to plant up and sort out. We up potted three lemon scented geraniums (which I know are actually pelargoniums but everyone calls them geraniums) and four spider plants, all cuttings/babies from plants at home and I don’t need anymore so they can go to the allotment plant stall in July!
I also decided it was time to deal with the mystery summer squash, they are a mystery because I resowed them and didn’t label them. I think most of them are early prolific straight neck and or courgettes, green bush I think! Eight of them went straight into beds (yes that is a little overcrowded but I’m not sure they’ll all make it and I had them). Two really lovely looking ones went into pots and are in the polytunnel, when they’ve got a big bigger, I’ll plant them into the last bed that’ll have summer squash. The other four went into pots and will go to the plant sale.
Finally, we planted up the new strawberry plants. I ordered them from DT Brown and have never had any issues, this time, there were issues. The delivery company said they had been delivered, they had not been delivered, the driver swore blind he had delivered them but couldn’t produce a photo. After I reported it, they arrived two days later, looking like this…
They were looking in a fairly sorry state but we did what we could. I’m hoping that by the end of summer I’ll have enough runners for another 30 plants. The plan is that every year we have 41 new plants until I have ten towers. Then at year five we can renew the towers from year one. Ma did have a very good question about where are going to put them all! I’m going to move the square beds at the front, where the courgettes are this year (it’s a winter project). They’ve never done brilliantly, and we can find room for them elsewhere on the plot so I’ll move one this year and one when we run out of room for strawberries.
Also this week, we ordered a new table for the plants that need more sun than the tables at the back get. I also got to some of the grass on the side path by the shed, the tomatoes are doing a lot better and the extra peppers I ordered, arrived damaged, I think they turned the box upside down because two of them were uprooted! They are being replaced but I also got three from a fellow plot holder who had too many, one red, one yellow and one chocolate, so that should be fun. The jalopenos arrived this week too (completely unscathed) so I should be able to plant the pepper bed up entirely on Friday, which is good because the slugs got all the lunchbox peppers!
Last week was the first week that I felt that it might actually be summer. My week was pretty run of the mill, I did two days in the office, I have the house a bit more under control, I stayed on top of the laundry AND the ironing!
There was good news this week about my new responsibilities at work and my rent isn’t going up as much as I expected. I’m relieved. I’m feel very lucky, yes I’ve worked hard to get money sorted but the rent is the thing I can’t control, but I do think I’m reaping the reward of being reasonable at the beginning of the year (and a good tenant for the last 14 years!).
I can’t believe it’s been 14 years but here we are. I moved in the July before the eldest nephew and youngest godchild were born and those children are bona fide teenagers now and at least one of them is taller than me!
So the sunshine and some organisation at home are really helping my mood.
The weekend was pretty standard, we had a good day on the plot and because Saturday was World Gin Day, Ma stayed the night for martini drinking.
My perfect martini, a 6:1 of Plymouth Gin and Noilly Prat
On Sunday, we were up early (without hangovers) and Ma went home on the 7:47 bus, I went to the allotment to open the polytunnel and ending up doing a happy hour of weeding. I then came home, did some housework, did some shopping and some food prep for the week. There was also the chance to do the 65 bus route on a vintage bus, I passed (so much of my life has been spent on that bus, I wasn’t going to do it for ‘fun’).
It was an extremely (by my standards) Sunday.
This week is going to be busy at work, I’m going to Southampton tomorrow for a team training day and they involve a 5am start and me being busy all day making sure that the team has everything they need and are fed! Then I have Friday off to see Christelle and maybe work on the plot. Because on Saturday, we’re up in Shefford for Laura’s 40th birthday party – I think she’s only 3 years late, but it’ll be a really good night!
In fact this week kicks off three weekends of me having to be nice to people (or just around them), the week after I’m going to a 60th birthday party and the first weekend of the July is the allotment open day.
We are (yet again) in a week where the news is not great. Well Donald Trump being indicted is pretty good news! But someone, probably the Russians have blown up a damn and flooded Kherson, the Canadian wildfires have caused smog down the East Coast of the US (a friend in Washington DC reports that that whole area smells like BBQ and it’s apparently the equivalent to smoking 12 cigarettes a day!), and children were stabbed in France.
Rishi Sunak admitted defeat and pulled together a trade agreement with the US (it’s not the agreement he was looking for but it’s probably better the free trade agreements the Govt ‘negoiated’ with Australia and New Zealand!). Finally, the Labour Party seems determined to do the most damage to it’s election chances by showing us what a bunch of factional control freaks they are…
