The weather was warm, the sun shone, I got my feet out, read 5 books (bank holidays are for reading!) and worked on the plot.
This week is short and work based, everyone is back so it will be full of sorting out meetings and diaries. I’m four weeks away from my holiday and only two of those weeks are full five day weeks, which means I need to concentrate a bit harder to get things set up in my absence, no one is going to really suffer without me but I have things that need to be done by the time I go away!
Blossom
At home, I need to catch up on laundry, housework and seedlings. Life is not that challenging or changeable at the moment and I’m happy for it. It’s age, I don’t at all miss the hurly burly of emotions and dramas that populated my 20’s and 30’s, I like my non dramatic 40’s!
Sometimes, at this time of year, I look at the plot and I think about all the things I need to do and sigh, sometimes I feel really smug because we’re so far ahead of ourselves. For this year, I don’t really feel either of those things.
The plot is looking good, it’s tidy, things are blossoming, even though I’m one blueberry bush down from last year, I think we’ll have a really big crop of them. I have sown tomatoes indoors and they are still little. The leeks in the polytunnel are starting to come up and so are the radishes and salad in the bed. I do need to get on with sowing the brassicas and there are always things to be sorted but I think we’re doing ok.
First time this bush has blossomed
At the weekend, we started with refilling the bird feeders and collecting water. Things are pretty dry at the moment and the water hasn’t been switched on so Ma and I made several trips to the pump to fill up our water bins. I always get a bit miffed when I see gardeners on YouTube talking about ‘hand watering’ and they have hoses. I’m very lucky that the tap is pretty near my plot but I have to collect it in 10 litre watering cans, given how much water some of my crops need in the summer, that is a lot of backwards and forwards. I have three 80 litre water bins at the plot which I use but they still have to be filled and one of those does one squash bed in August (I remember that first summer when I only had four beds and I couldn’t understand why people moaned about watering because it only took me 10 minutes, now it takes roughly 45 minutes in summer!) but having to walk to the pump, pump the water and then carry it back to the plot does make me feel for my ancestors and realise how lucky I am.
That done, we watered the poly and the garlic and onions and planting the potatoes, we’ve left the potatoes later than usual because it’s been chilly and I always put them out too early and they get knocked back by frost, this year I decided to leave it until later. We’re growing Red Duke of York which is a first early and should be ready in about 14 weeks. We planted up 5 pots and we’ll start harvesting at the beginning of July. Next week we’ll put the Nicolas out, we have slightly more of those and they are a second early so I expect that we can start harvesting at the beginning of August, when the Red Duke of Yorks are finished. I will take some of the harvest of Nicolas and plant again for Christmas potatoes, we can store them in the pots in the polytunnel. This year I’m hoping that I can get leeks, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and kale from the plot for Christmas dinner, and if I’m very lucky brussels sprouts, we’ll see how it goes.
We also re-covered the celeriac bed (after Ma pulled up the celeriac thinking it was weeds – she really does need constant supervision!) and I sent Ma to sorting out the strawberry bath. We’re not going to get loads of strawberries this year, I think we started with five plants, but I do plan on taking any runners and planting up a tower for next year.
I finally weeded the rose garden and pond area, I will mulch that either this weekend or next month when I get more compost, but the area is looking good and the pond was full of bees (the water level has dropped and I need to clear out the pond plants but meanwhile it’s the perfect place for bees to drink from! I’m really enjoying the way that the oregano and lavenders are seeding and spreading in the rose garden, the bees like it and it means less places for the weeds to land. I also planted freesias in the front of the iris bed and dug out any encroaching raspberries from the path. It’s not a battle I can win, but I do need to keep fighting or they’ll just cover the entire plot!
The rose garden and pond area
Next weekend, I need to get to shed painting and the shed could probably do with a tidy! We will need to sort out how we are going to cover the blueberries – I’m thinking of something similar to the gooseberry netting. I would like to sort out the very overgrown area where the boysenberry is. It’s past time to sow the brassicas, I also need to sow the summer plants, squash, melons and some cucumbers, indoors. Outside we need to sow beetroot and maybe resow the carrots and peas because they aren’t doing anything. Finally, we need to build more arches.
The new flower bed, the peony survived the move but we may not get any flowers for a while!
I borrowed this one from Ma a while ago and finally got to reading it at the tail end of last month. I enjoyed it, I love her writing in the Guardian and this was just more of it. Some of it was quite close to home, she is a couple of months younger than me and North/South divide notwithstanding, I remember some of this. (Like Grace, I also got shoved into a ‘modular science’ GCSE.)
Some of the things that she ascribes to being working class and Gen X, seem to have more to do with being Northern or down to her family. I remember how the food we bought changed in the eighties and nineties but not on the scale it happened to the Dent’s. My mother has always been fairly anti sugar, we were the weird family who didn’t drink hot drinks with sugar in them, and my Grandad didn’t bring us sweets every week, we got fruit and breakaways for our packed lunches. (The cousins did get sweets from Grandad, I’m still bitter but on the plus side didn’t have my first filling until I was 19!). Christmas did get a tiny bit more elaborate, we started to have smoked salmon sandwiches after Church but we never ate turkey for Christmas.
She writes brilliantly about her heady experience of London in 1996 and it’s so weird to see London through her eyes because when you’re from here, it’s different.
I also think it’s vulnerable in a particular working class way. Throughout the book, she details that her father basically abandoned three children, she talks about it, about how she begins to realise something isn’t right, yet can’t put her finger on it and then her shock when she knows what he did. She alludes to this being why she ‘runs’ away but she never looks too closely or tells you what she feels about it. All the information is there and yet not. It feels familiar, honest but not truly open, because you can’t stop people knowing facts but there’s no reason to be emoting everywhere, I like her more for it and for this, which I couldn’t agree with more:
Some years would pass before I accepted that my type of working-class people are really not suited to being bohemian, as bohemian really means chaotic, self-destructive, whimsical and a bit whiffy. Most North London bohemians would be a lot happier if they stopped wife-swapping and got a nice ‘To-Do’ list on the go; then their homes might be full of neat rows of fabric conditioned socks, rather than self-involved sobbing, cat piss and orchids
Last year I changed deodorant, going from Sure to Fussy. This was part of my less plastic mission, and it’s been pretty easy to do. Fussy isn’t an anti-perspirant so there was an adjustment period, but I never got smelly (I still wash!). Fussy is probiotic based and unlike several natural deodorants I’ve tried (Wild – in both normal AND sensitive), doesn’t leave my armpits red and scaly. I’ve only ever used one scent (Wide Eyed) which is very subtly citrussy and works for me, it also doesn’t leave any white marks on my clothes.
Fussy is a subscription model, I started off with one case and one refill for £13 (currently £10) and they then send you 3 at a time at a cost of £15 and they estimate that you’ll use one refill a month. So like all of my waste/plastic reduction changes, it’s a more expensive option (I’m still mad that we don’t have a way of taxing things that are environmentally bad so that they are more expensive). However, I’ve used 7 refills over 10 months so it hasn’t been as expensive as I feared and it’s really handy not to have to remember to buy it, Fussy send you an email a week or so before which gives you the option to delay a delivery and it means I never run out.
Akshata Murty’s non-dom status is totally legal – and perfectly toxic for Rishi Sunak. What I’m really puzzled by is how she kept her non-dom status during lockdown, my understanding is that you can only spend a certain amount of time in the country. So what happened during lockdown? How did she only spend 183 days in the country? As for Sunak to say it’s a political attack (from his home in California!), I’m sure he was disgusted when his party was attacking Cherie Blair and I’m sure he views the recent dragging up of Stephen Kinnock’s tax affairs in Denmark 12 years ago as completely wrong.
Last weekend we had strange weather. We were on the plot on Saturday and it was sunny, then snowy. I’m not a person who skis, so wearing sunglasses as it snows is not an experience I ever expected!
Anyway, Saturday. We took all the cardboard, all the shredded paper, the bokashi bin and the camomile plants to the plot. We’d been to Waitrose first thing in the morning and I bought two native blueberries and Ma bought a scented viola.
So we dealt with the compost and polytunnel part of the work. Which meant a couple of trips to the well pump!
We had to strim the paths. As we were doing it, Jon who was using the petrol strimmer for the plot work day took pity on us and did it for us. I have to make this a monthly task from now until autumn.
We did the other side and felt happy that it was all done for this month. Then Ma and I assembled things. We must be getting good at this because there was swearing but not at one another! First the obelisk for the flower bed at the back (the new bed with the Edelwiess lavender, peonies and roses). Then the first of the five arches. This one is going over by the rosemary to support the mini squash I’m growing in the beds there. We had one there for a couple of years, so this is just a return to status quo. The other four are going over the squash beds for bean support, but we’ll probably make them a little bit shorter.
Then Ma trimmed a lavender bush while I planted the blueberries and viola and cut some chard.
Everything in on the plot and on the site generally, despite the snow, the blossom on the plum tree is coming out and the blueberries are really starting too.
Finally the white tulips came out with a vengeance,
Lots more to do but we’ll still waiting on the weather!
It’s April Fool’s Day, given the state of the world, I think we should cancel April’s Fool until the world in general and the Prime Minister in particular, stop being so ridiculous! Aside from that, it’s Laura and Sarah’s birthdays today, I hope at some point Laura manages to celebrate her birthday, this one and last two have been stymied by COVID. Instead of photos of them, I’m going to post photos of their dogs!
Rishi Sunak has broken his promise to help with the cost of living. My mum has been saying since the Spring Statement that Sunak won’t bring in measures to help people he doesn’t think will vote Tory and that those that really need help with cost of living right now, hardly vote at all. She’s not wrong.
‘Absolute joke’: Southgate hits out at England fans who booed Harry Maguire. He shouldn’t have been booed but he also shouldn’t have been picked. I’m not a brilliant football genius but I’ve never rated Maguire, I don’t think he’s been a colossus for England. Even if you do, Maguire’s mediocre performance shouldn’t have seen him selected. Booing Maguire was out of line, but it was Southgate not Maguire that picked the team. Yes we beat Cote d’Ivoire (also yes I do get really annoyed when people say Ivory Coast because the country requests that every one use the French and it’s even worse when people say ‘the Ivory Coast’, like saying ‘the Ukraine’. I don’t go in for a huge amount of wokeness but it’s just showing good manners polite to call people (inc. trans people) and countries by the name they wish to be called – here endeth the rant) but it wasn’t what you’d call a virtuoso performance.
Nic Dempsey 