This weekend, Ma and I went to Shefford. It rained but it was lovely to see the family. Since we last saw them, L’s nan has died and B has been in hospital for a non-COVID issue so it was nice just to confirm that everyone was well.
I did some allotment time this weekend but rain stopped play twice! After the mini heatwave during the week, the weather has become very ‘British’ and there’s been lots of showers.
Other than that, I ran the team quiz on Friday (so I couldn’t win) but it’s pretty much been life as normal (for COVID).
Plans for this week are really exciting! I need to do a bunch of ironing and hoovering, work on the plot and do a bunch of actual work (the kind that pays me!)
Good news is that Ma can come back to do the weeding at the weekend, we are both very happy about that!
So I had a list 2 weeks ago and this is where we are with it.
weed the paths
cut the grass
weed the top of the plot
weed the beds
pot up the verbena
half the old broad bean bed
plant out and net the kale
change the netting on the cauliflower bed
sort out the second squash bed and plant out the squash
thin out the beetroot
stake the third tomato bed
plant up the new blueberry plants
As ever it’s the weeding that’s a problem. I am feeling a tiny bit more in control of the plot but I really need to cut the grass!
I’ve also made other progress, behold the pond area!
I took up two of the pots of potatoes and used the compost to mulch the area around the pond. I’ve also planted up a lemon thyme (I need to find a place for the other thyme plant bought at the same time), some campanula and a white borage (I did a swap with my plot neighbour, a white for a purple). It’s not exactly as I imagined but I’m happy enough with it and it’s actually come together for less than £45 (including the price of the pond!). The red flowers, came from another allotment friend, and the pond weed from a different friend, the aramanth just grew, the lavender and verbena were re-located from other areas of the plot, as were all the roses.
Ma got a letter from the crem where my grandparents ‘rosebush and plaque’ are saying that if we can’t get up to water the rosebush then there’s very little point in paying to keep it there. So we’re going to relocate the plaque to my rose garden and plant some more irises there. My grandma’s dad was a gardener, so I think she would appreciate the plot, and I like to think of my grandad on the plot, probably tutting at the weeds!
Which means that the only things I have to do on this area is fence it in and plant irises. Although I will also want to give it a really good mulch again as I did that in spring but didn’t have quite enough compost!
In other news, the kale has been planted out and I sorted out the other squash bed. Neither of them are quite what I wanted to do but perfect is the enemy of good and the plants that went into this bed (a mixture of winter and summer squash) were not in the best of health. I’ve put them in and we’ll see what happens. I do need to build a bigger cage for the kale and I’m going to try and get to that tomorrow.
The cauliflower bed got weeded and got a cage, it took ages to put together because I was determined to use the netting that we had and I basically had to thread three pieces of the stuff together. I really need to find a better solution to plastic netting but for now, I’m going to just reuse it as much as I can!
Other work on the plot, I weeded round the gooseberries, and dug up the daffodils and tulips, they need to be replanted into the flowerbed at the front of the plot. I’m planning on putting all of the spring bulbs there and then when they die back the self seeded flowers can do their thing, there will of course be californian poppies, (their already in the bed, but I’ll also scatter some afgan poppy seeds there and maybe re-plant some of the self seeded calendula there, so spring bulbs and then wild (ish) flowers.
I now have 5 blueberry plants that need planting into buckets so I’m in desperate need of some ericaceous compost. For any of you still counting that makes 11 blueberry bushes in total and I’ve promised that I’ll stop at 12. The 5 new ones won’t start to really produce for a couple of years, but my three oldest plants are really producing this year so I’m hopeful that by the time I hit 50, I’ll be self sufficient in blueberries. I’ve been feeding them (and the roses) with an ericaceous feed, which does seem to have helped as I don’t have enough rainwater (what with there being hardly any rain!)
I pulled up all the mangetout last week and am about to sow florence fennel in that bed, and I potted up quite a bit of the verbena bonariesis that had sown itself in the broad bean bed. I’m going to halve that bed to give me a path and then sow pak choi in it. I also pulled up the radishes and salad in one of the beds, I’m going to pot up the self seeded calendula and then sow some more beetroot for mum and salad for me in there.
So jobs for the next couple of weeks:
cut the grass on the paths and at the back of the plot
pot up the calendula, replant some of it in the flower bed under the plum tree
On Wednesday mornings, Sean Bean is presenting a programme called Legacy of War, which explores the impact that war experiences had on entire families and down the generations. It’s been interesting last week’s was about John Beckett, who was a facist. To listen to his children talk about it and about him and about how they see their father’s attitudes writ large into today’s politics is alarming and relevant right now. Really worth a listen.
There has been a lot of news this week, and I can’t read about any of it. Marcus Rashford is brilliant and the UK govt is full of idiots, who couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery. So here are some links that are not about the trash fire that is my country this week!
I have a weekly catch up with my manager on Friday, it’s never a really long meeting, we talk through his diary for the next couple of weeks, talk about what I’m doing, catch up on how we’re feeling, things we’ve observed around the business that should go into the bucket for audits or risk planning. Writing it down it sounds much more high level than it actually is, often I remind him to go for a walk or campaign for him to have more of a work/life balance! We’ve been doing it since October and we continue with it now. All of this explanation to talk about his comment this week, that I’m always cheerful and take things in my stride.
I find this fascinating because as most of the people that love me know, I’m very often grumpy. Clearly, I try to be professional and not bring that grumpiness to my work because I have taken to heart the advice someone gave me, “You’re feelings are yours, you’re not allowed to inflict them on a bunch of other people who are trying to deal with their own feelings”
This has stood me in good stead generally, but the real reason, I am coping with lockdown and perpetual working from home (aside from continuing to have paid employment – which is such a relief!) can be summed up in the first photo, look at that sky at 10pm. It’s light, the sun is mostly shining and comes up about 4.30am.
One of the things, I’m acutely aware of is that this won’t last forever and I’ll be working from home in the autumn as it gets dark. That has some good points, yay for not having to commute but boo for feeling trapped in the house.
I need to make some changes to my space. I need a desk that isn’t my kitchen table, so I can have another screen and maybe a docking station and keyboard. To do that, there needs to be some re-arrangement of my living room, which has a knock on impact on the bedroom and the cupboard of doom. I know what needs to happen and I’m working on it.
This weekend, my support bubble arrived with a car and we went to do some shopping, for the plot and for me. We couldn’t get everything, we did get some thyme, I finally got a new airer and Ma got a stepladder. This was secondary to seeing Ma and getting to hug her. The second best thing was sitting at the table across from her, talking and eating. I’m adjusting to the new normal but I’ll never adjust to losing this normal so soon (Ma tells me that she’s going to be way over 90 before she shuffles off this mortal coil, so I have at least 20 years more!)
The rest of the weekend was sent catching up on the allotment and the house, oh and it was World Gin Day on Saturday so there was this.
Plans for this week are as ever, work. I’ve got a bunch of interesting stuff to do this week, some of it genuinely interesting and some of it interesting because I have to learn how to do it before I get it done!
In the flat, this is the week of the cleaning the floors. Last week, I cleaned my bedroom floor (even under the bed) and it made a huge difference, so I need to do the same to all the others. Of all housework tasks, I loathe everything that involves cleaning floors, hoovering, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, I hate all of it. If I could ever afford a cleaner, that’s pretty much all I’d really want them to do. Well that and the occasional oven clean!
On the plot, it’s do all the things on last week’s list that I didn’t get to on Sunday!
Fortunately for me, it’s June, it’s light and my energy levels are high, I need to re-establish my grip on the dirt levels in the house before my energy levels plummet and then it just takes much more energy to get anything done!
So yesterday I read this, and honestly some of the recommendations made me cross. Some of this might be cultural but really…
So quotes from the original article in italics…
I am feeling very low on energy these days. I want to read about some real love with a happy ending that gives me hope of a happier world and future.
Try An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole! It’s lovely and smart and tender, and like all true romance, it has a happy ending.
An Extraordinary Union is a good pick, I also note that it’s the only rec in the article written by a black person and about black people. So romances by black people or people of colour.
So far in lockdown I have read most of the novels of James Herriot and would be grateful for a recommendation of something similar. I’m looking for a book(s) set in a rural or natural setting, with nice people, fairly low stakes, lots of laughs, and evocative writing.
Oh man, James Herriot novels are such a good idea for what to read right now. Nothing but a vet roaming the English countryside and having some animal-centric hijinks. What could be better? Well, a couple of things come close, which is why we’re all here.
The best books I know of for that kind of pastoral low-stakes playfulness would be the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery. They have a reputation for being very frilly, but they’re mostly just about people running around small towns in Canada getting into small scrapes and then looking at the beautiful natural landscapes all around them and pushing through. I would also recommend Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which is a little more satirical in its humor than Herriot is, but is also extremely funny and ends up being very kind to most of its characters.
I’ve read Anne of Green Gables and it’s lovely but no even if you’re trying to introduce people to new things, this is not a good pick. Try Gerald Durrell. Other recommendations? Lark Rise to Candleford, try Jack Sheffield’s Teacher, Teacher, Miss Read might even be your thing but not Anne of Green Gables.
Can you recommend books as madcap, inventive, and hilarious as Eoin Colfer’s Plugged and Screwed? I’ve tried Google and Goodreads to no avail. Help!!
Ooh, this is a tricky one. My normal go-to author for this sort of request would be Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair is a start-to-finish delight), but when I suggested Fforde, you wrote back that you already read and liked him. In that case, I have to assumeyou have probably already read both Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, the two best other sources for this particular kind of quirky British genre humor, and at this point I start to come up dry.
You’ve suggested Jasper Fforde but he’s read them, how about Nick Harkaway – The Gone-Away World, Tiger Man and so on. Why no love for him?
Finally for the things that I’ve been reading during lockdown, not everything but all of these were bought and read while I was in lockdown.
I’ve also re-read a good chunk of my Georgette Heyer collection, The Thief of Eddis books by Meghan Whalen Turner, lots of Chalet School books and the What Katy Did books because sometimes you just need to be told!!
So last weekend, I didn’t do any work on the allotment. There is always work to be done but I’m still missing my work partner and so I need to do double the work to keep up and I’m not keeping up. I know that it’s my first full year of having the whole plot and I know it took me ages to get the first half more or less how I wanted it.
The new half at the back is in the much worse state, the soil is banjaxed and very dry, it feels like the only thing that grows is bind weed and because it’s so very dry, the paths are cracking and I can’t really get to the roots of the weeds. I’ve still not sorted out the other big bed and I really need to get plants in there.
So it’s all difficult right now. Even so, my brain is working on next year’s set of infrastructure improvements. All the new beds are getting another layer of planking because, there is bindweed coming up in them already, I don’t have this problem at the front end because my beds are deeper! We need to really mulch all the paths with a deep layer of woodchip because the soil at the front with a couple of years worth of woodchip is in much better shape. (I love my beds and paths but if I can condition soil under the paths that’s good for if I want to move anything and when it’s not my plot anymore)
At the back, I’m going to move the compost area right to the back of the plot, because the bird boxes are occupied and it’s really shady so I’m going to set up the compost area there and add some beds to the area that the compost bins are in now. I’m also going to make sure I have enough space for a greenhouse or a polytunnel because I’m going to have one by the time I’m 50. So as difficult as I’m finding it, it’s still giving me ideas!
I’m making it sound terrible but we’re done with the first crop of the year, the broad beans are done. I’ve pulled all the beans and taken the plants up. I’m going pot up all the self seeded verbena bonariensis, halve the size of the bed and it will be the second kale bed this winter.
I’ve got a ton of jobs, so here’s the list:
weed the paths
cut the grass
weed the top of the plot
weed the beds
pot up the verbena
half the old broad bean bed
plant out and net the kale
change the netting on the cauliflower bed
sort out the second squash bed and plant out the squash
thin out the beetroot
stake the third tomato bed
plant up the new blueberry plants
Here’s the list of the jobs I want to do but will probably not get to:
I’ve been very quiet over the last week, in part because of the trash fire that is the world, and also because June 6 was also Stef and Kier’s birthday, they would have been 50.
June used to be the start of my birthday list, Stef and Keir were the 6 June, Tina was 6 July and I was 6 August and therefore I never forgot those birthdays because it was three months of sixes, 4 birthdays that were easy to remember. In 2020, I’m the only one of the four still breathing. This is not self pity, more people than me mourn those three deaths and differently and deeply but it’s sad.
Over the weekend I did zoom chats with Michael and Luc and Helene and Max and Matt and Ruth and Tess and Phil, together and separately for some of them. It was bittersweet, Stef and Keir are a long time gone. The children don’t really remember them, but death is funny and I don’t know if I can explain it but bear with me.
I’ve talked a lot this year about the irises that finally flowered on the plot, in time for my Grandma’s birthday. In December, it’ll be 58 years ago since she died. I didn’t ever know her, I was born nearly 11 years after she died. I know her from meeting her sisters when I was in my teens (mostly Ellen), through my Grandad, from the things that Mum has told me, from the books that Mum gave me that have her handwriting, from the year or so I lived in my uncle’s house, from the pictures I have of her, from my Grandad’s sister’s form what Mum talks about. There is more than one way to know someone.
All that to say, this weekend would has been tricky difficult to navigate emotionally and on Saturday, my brother ended up in hospital for non COVID-19 related reasons. Right this minute, it’s nothing too serious (just something that makes me grateful for the NHS but makes my sister-in-law’s life logistically difficult and probably worries the nephews) but timing is a bitch and I do worry for my little brother!
I have no plans for this week, other than work and sorting out the drawers in my bedroom and living room because I’m thinking about buying a desk. At some point working at the kitchen table is a pain and I’m ready to change that!
On Saturday, I get to see my Mum for the first time in 12 weeks, she’s going to drive over mostly to pick up some marmalade! It’ll be good to see her!
I started compiling these links on Sunday morning and at that point it seemed that the US was on fire and it doesn’t seem to have got any better over the week. I’m a Londoner and lived through rioting in my city (which is where the picture below comes from) it’s always happened when people feel unheard and hopeless. You can talk to me all you like about looting and agitators, but at the core, it’s about a population of people being treated badly feeling that justice will not be done. That peaceful protest hasn’t worked, that there is no hope and no point in being respectful of property and no point is listening to ‘authority’ that exists not to protect but to diminish and dehumanise them. It’s happened here and it’s happening in the US right now.
Over the week there have been lots of posts on social media and #blackoutTuesday and I have been mostly silent on social media. I’ve talked about it to people in real life but I want to be very careful about what say here and elsewhere because I don’t want to distract from other voices or get it wrong. I also wanted to sit in any discomfort I might feel and actually think about it, not be defensive.
I’ve been thinking this week about Martin Luther King Jr. and his letter from Birmingham Jail because it’s a reminder that change only comes after conflict, that non-violent is not the same peaceful. It’s a long read and if you don’t have the stamina for all nine pages of it, then this is the paragraph for white people who think they aren’t racist (the bold sections are highlighted by me)
I must make an honest confession to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
There isn’t anything much I can do about what is happening in US except pray, however, I can educate myself, I can sit with my tension and discomfort and use it to work for change. I can call out racism when I see it, and I can listen to my black friends when they tell me what I can do to help.
Well it’s been quite the week. We have a government that is incompetent, heartless, clueless and weak. All of those traits have been on full display since the election and more so during the pandemic. So I have quite a few links on Cummings but Boothby Graffoe has summed it up perfectly!
We endure these things individually because we understand ourselves to be also enduring them collectively. Cummings’ actions – and, even more, Johnson’s valorisation of them – strip away the second part. The big, communal and institutional structure that gives a value to the millions of individual sacrifices has been kicked away – in Johnson’s defence of Cummings, the only value is the individual “instinct” of the members of the ruling caste. To use the Blitz analogy that England apparently cannot escape, it’s fine to leave your lights on during the blackout if you’re an important person with documents to read.
There’s sometimes a fine line between a government reacting nimbly to events and one that appears to be totally at sea. But right now Boris Johnson is working flat out to make it abundantly clear that his government has chosen to firmly come down on the side of complete cluelessness
We’re nearly at the end of May, it’s been 10 weeks since the Weeder-in-Chief has been on the plot and I’m struggling to get it all done, there’s always something that doesn’t get finished because I’m sidetracked by weeding.
The weediest bits of the allotment are all on the new half, especially the bindweed which seems to be everywhere and it’s so dry, I’m just pulling up what I can and hoping that eventually it’ll die but right now I’m really frustrated about it because the volunteer potatoes everywhere are bad enough. The old half is also starting to look neglected, I really need to get down and sort out the front, which is full of californian poppies (lovely) and grass (not so lovely).
Weeding woes aside, what did I actually get done last week? Well, the compost arrived and I filled and planted up one of the big squash beds with winter squash. 15 plants mostly uchiki kuri and waltham butternut. I was also given some sweetcorn at the weekend, so that will get planted into that bed this weekend.
I also got around to planting up the last of the tomato beds. I think I did pretty well, I have 30 plants in the raised beds and only 5 left over. They will go into the overflow boxes as they did last year! But that’s still pretty good, last year I had to give away over 30 plants, this year I gave away eight and I only lost one, the benefit of being at home and able to do daily watering before work!
So what’s left to plant?
I have four beds at the front of the plot that are reserved for courgettes, crookneck summer squash, cucumbers and french beans and I need to plant the sweet potatoes in the hot boxes next to the herb patch. As mentioned earlier, I need to get the 10 sweetcorn plants in for the three sisters bed.
The biggest job is going to be the second squash bed, I didn’t have enough cardboard and compost to cover this and so for the last 10 weeks, it has languished and the heavy clay has hardened and grown bindweed. I’ve watered it this morning and covered it with plastic, in the next two weeks, I’m going to have to uncover it, water it some more dig it over (not my favourite thing at all but there’s just no way I can cover it with compost and hope for the best, it’s way too dry. Once that’s done, the last 9 bags of compost can go in and I’ll plant the remaining winter squash in there, I have about 7 good plants and a bunch of pumpkins and a patty pan that can all hang out there!
Then, after watering, I have to start the weeding and cut the grass on the paths and moving some stuff and working out what to do about the pond area! Life on the allotment is all go but there is some time to admire the flowers!
Nic Dempsey 