Ambling around Kew again

More pics:

Striking

Bromeliad flowering

Passiflora coriacea - the Bat-Leaved Passion Flower

WILDLIFE

Goslings!  BABY GEESES!

Go near these two with a packet of crisps and they're fast on the cadge!

Albino Cichlid

Many bees on an Allium flower

Dendrobates leucomelas - poison dart frog

Pervy Names

Finally then, I've finished the long box: 

Untitled

Did my shift tonight, got drunk, realised I really love what I do and wrote this.  I'm still drunk so it may well prove to be shite.  

In closed venues before gigs,
the profound silences are broken only by my bootfalls
behind centuries-old brickwork,
fired from clay that predates all religion.

There shafts of light in all hues
catch in dust formed of sweat shed before I was born,
remaining ancient and musty long after I am dead.

The smells of last night's gig -
the sweat, the beer, the arousal -
mingle with cleaning fluids, paint,
and the occasional waft from the optics.

My boots echo in the stillness,
muffled by acoustic tiles.
Every subtlety of music can be heard in this room,
audited, refined, perfected, all over the static buzz
and metalloplastic scent of enough copper wiring
to touch the edge of space.

I live and breathe the calm before the maelstrom,
the tipping point and beyond,
to a hell of a night
in these cathedrals of sound and light.
This is my London.


I'll give it a look over in the morning.  In the meantime I leave you with Faithless.  

Grass, tools and evolution

I planted the lawn today.

  George now has no back garden for at least a week, maybe a fortnight.  I used aerator shoes to drive the seed in deep, like two inches deep.  Some's only an inch deep, having been raked in.  Some's at the surface, squashed in with my boots.  With any luck, a storm coming out of nowhere won't be as devastating a thing this year as it was last year.  We may end up with a half-decent lawn this Summer!  

  As thanks for putting the lawn in, I got given a lovely new edger.  I've never owned an edger before.  This one's a thing of beauty: dark hardwood handle, sturdy, quality lathework, and with a bright stainless steel blade.  I think I'm in love.  Can't wait to put in a proper border with it.  

Lastly then, the strawberries I planted last year are greening up and back on the grow.  More specifically: half of them are.  The other half are either dead or dormant.  Thankfully the surviving half are from all four cultivars planted.  This is a good thing because the weird second Winter we just had is not great for plants.  The limey London soil is definitely not great for fruiting plants (my strawbs are in compost, but there's soil beneath and the alkali is capable of creeping up).  

Those which survived are hardier to frost and more tolerant of the edaphic conditions than those which died.  

This is the basis of evolution.  Evolution depends upon life in the midst of death.  Those which survive go on to pass on those very genes which helped them survive.  This adapts the species to the prevailing conditions.  The surviving strawberries will propagate new plants - both vegetatively and sexually - until the Strawbrary is full.  Those new plants will be adapted to fit the prevailing conditions of my garden.  After a few more generations they'll have thoroughly evolved to fit the niche of "strawberry plant in Joey's Strawbrary", after which they'll need to evolve again before they'll be able to thrive half as well in any garden but mine.

Life plods on, as ever it has.

Little treats

Got the Hobbit today.  I've been sat watching that with cured meat, strong cheese, a lovely ale chutney that I traded Ruth some homemade raspberry jam for the last time I was in Leamington, and the last quarter pint of that matured mead that Neil brought back from Denmark.

Life is good.

It's a tad warm in here, even though the heating claims to be off.  I think that mead might've matured further in the months it's stood on my shelf.  It certainly tastes stronger, and the honey flavour is deeper, sharper, and more complex than a freshly opened bottle of mjød tends to be; in fact it's knocking on for a honey brandy at this point.  I shall have to import a box of bottles and store them in the attic until they're thoroughly dusty.

If you haven't tasted mead yet I implore you to try it.  Once you've fallen in love with it you can move on to sample braggot and metheglin.  Pear, clove, and elderflower metheglin brewed from citrus-fed honey and mountain water, matured until it's strong enough to wake the dead.  I haven't had a drink like that in ten years nearly but I'd walk to John O' Groats for a bottle.

Summer project, methinks.  Anybody got any elderflower they aren't using...?

Good times!

So Julia took me to Kew Gardens today.  I can tell you now, as a gardener and a scientist, to be taken around Kew by someone far more experienced both as a gardener and as a scientist is a hell of a thing!  I probably picked up as much in an afternoon as I might in a month of books!  I'm tremendously grateful for the experience, and if someone ever offers you a similar afternoon I suggest you take them up on it.

I has a happy :)

Beds and other news.

So the builders have finished and I'm getting in the first of the raised beds.  I'm putting in four of the main beds, so I'll be growing potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, neeps and cabbages.  No photos until it's done because right now it all looks fuck-ugly.

This is being hampered somewhat by the fact that I bashed myself in the hand with a sledgehammer yesterday.  The right hand.  The hand that was holding the sledgehammer.  I'm actually impressed.  It's swollen, turning purple, two fingers are lacerated, but no bones are broken.

Having bugger all else to do this weekend, I'm thinking I'll jump the train down to Egham for a night at the opera, the new one about the Ap-ocalypse.

Until next time.

Edit: apparently my hand's a mess. The joints function but I've got periosteal cracks, weakened tendons, an injured pollical system, the ulnar nerve got banged up pretty good. 4 weeks light duties: no heavy lifting, no heat, no xbox; lest I give myself a crippled hand.

Odd maths

So I've picked up on a pattern involving square numbers.  I've been running numbers all morning since I spotted the pattern and I'm convinced that this is actually a thing.  Okay, here goes:


If AxA=B
And (A-1)x(A+1)=C
Then C=B-1

Or

4x4=16
(4-1=3)x(4+1=5)=15
15=16-1

5x5=25
4x6=24

6x6=36
5x7=35

And so on.  I haven't yet found a set of numbers that this fails on, provided that you start with a number timesed by itself.  Is this like a known thing?  Does it have some kind of a name?  Because it's pretty cool - useless, but cool.

Cool Animal of the Month, 02/13: The Shouty Corvid of Twickenham

I haven't yet gotten a decent photo, but I'll update this when I do.  The Shouty Corvid of Twickenham is a bird - possibly a raven but I reckon it looks more like a carrion crow - who hangs around on King Street in Twickenham.  Its main pastime is perching off the end of bus stop roofs and shouting at passers-by.  I have no idea why the Corvid does this, but being such a character it's become very much a feature of the high street here.

Serious gardening next week.

Cool Animal of the Month, 01/13: the Harlequin Toad

Bargain of the year!

I picked this up in a charity shop on my way home from Kew.  £4 for 4.56kg of book, or 88 pence a kilo.  Unreal!

Now bring on the weekend so I can waste my day off playing Mass Effect.

My Botanical Adventure

Went to Kew Gardens for the first time today.  I really should've gone sooner.  The guide thingy suggests you leave yourself two to three hours to get around the place - aye, sure, if you're an anorexic on a souped-up granny scooter being piloted by the Stig!  I was there for five hours and I reckon I'm lucky if I got to experience half of it.  I'm going to include the bulk of the photos on a separate page because I took 103, but I'll post a choice few here.  I went in the Winter, so I presume you've got to see it again in the Spring, Summer and Autumn to really get a sense of the lifecycles of the specimens there.

 Me amidst an amazing collection of palms and ferns

The Coffin Tree can grow to be among the tallest trees in the world!

This fish was watching me.  

This Cycad is older than Kew Gardens.  Cycads as a bunch are older than the dinosaurs!

And for reference, here's a cycad being munched on by a Triceratops

This is a Banksia, named for a local boy...

There's a gallery of botanical art there, it has its own building, The Marianne North Gallery.  It features a load of paintings by Marianne North plus the Shirley Sherwood Collection, a collection of paintings by various artists.  There's a whole section on fungus for any myco geeks.  Sadly, no photos allowed.

I stopped for a burger halfway through.  It was a hell of a burger!  Venison.  You heard me; a venison burger!  Venison, in a burger.  I'll stop now.  

There were piranhas

The turtles were nothing like the ones you see on the telly though.  They weren't even armed!  Bit naff really.  

Now the Kew Pagoda is a bit of a local landmark.  You can see it from over the Thames in Brentford, from half of Richmond and Sheen, and of course from the top of a 65 bus.  So I decided to see where in the Gardens I could grab the best long shot of the Pagoda.  

Here's it up close

The Treetop Walkway is the highest publicly-climbable structure in the Gardens.  The Pagoda is taller but you aren't allowed up it.  Here's the walkway:

I expected the views from there to be amazing, and they are!  You need to get that high and see Brentford, see Sheen, to remind yourself that you're still in London.  

But the view of the Pagoda was obscured by tree branches.  

Still, at least in the Winter you can see it at all.  In the Summer that'll be a wall of green.  The view from the top of the Temperate Greenhouse (the biggest greenhouse) is significantly clearer, albeit with a big tree blocking part of it

Best view however was straight down the Cedar Vista from the corner of that wee lake in the North of the Gardens:

These parakeets live all over Richmond Borough.  A shitload escaped from some private collection back in like Victorian times or something and the rest is history.  Their ubiquity in Strawberry Hill has seen them nicknamed "green pigeons".  

I saw a Japanese Minka house.  These were made of wood and ridiculously versatile and durable.  

I saved the Evolution exhibition for last.  It was cool, though some prat had vandalised part of it.  It was full of fossils, ancient living species and models of ancient extinct species.  These Liverwort have been around for 400 million years - twice as long as the mighty Cycads!

A fossil

Aaand I'll put the rest on a side page, because there's bloody loads of them!  Suffice it to say that a great day was had and I'll be back there in the Spring.  

The Anthocyanin Test

I've used this one since I was a little kid.  Anthocyanin is a pigment found naturally in red cabbages and leaches into the water during boiling.  This test therefore comes free with a Sunday roast.  It acts as an indicator, changing colour in response to changes in pH.  It's a shotgun test, meaning that it sacrifices precision for breadth.  Don't worry that it's called anthocyanin, there's no cyanide involved, I've checked.  Cyan is simply a shade of blue; a purple chemical comes from a red cabbage and people name it for blue.  Chemists do have a weird sense of humour.

The range it covers is as follows:
Strong acid
Medium acid
Weak acid
Neutral
Weak alkali
Medium alkali
Strong alkali
Ridiculously strong alkali!

If your soil is strong enough to turn the solution white then you'll already know about it, having received prior treatment for chemical burns.  You should always start this test with a violet solution.  If your cabbage was cooked with London tap water like mine was then you'll start with a blue solution.  Titrate it back to violet using vinegar before running the test.  

In my case, the soil in the beds shifted slightly into the blue spectrum, which was surprising.  My soil is slightly alkali despite being a humus-rich loam.  The previous gardener must've gone berserk with the lime!  Most vegetables prefer slightly acid soils, so I'll have to amend the soil before I can plant the year's crops.  

Feel free to use this test at your own risk.  

In other news: George seems to think the circles around the holes in the birdhouses are eyes, looking at him. Every time he looks at them from an angle where only two can be seen he raises his hackles and growls.  We can now add the tree to the very long list of things that George believes have come to murder us all in our beds.  

Rosie and Jim Go Outside

Finishing revisiting childhood in 3... 2... 1...

I'm back.

So we've got some new additions to the garden this morning.  Rosie and Jim are from Rubus 3 and they've taken up residence on the roof of the Strawbrary.

Bill is vaguely interested in the mysterious floating plant pot.  George is convinced that it's here to kill us all!  Meanwhile, the experiment's own page now comes up top on Google when you search for The Rubus Experiments, which is pretty awesome.

The first frost

Today was the first frost of the new Winter, at least in London anyhow.  Willing to bet my mate Lyndsey up in Tayside has been freezing her arse off for a month already.  Comment that it's been two months in 3... 2...

So it touched the lawn but not the beans.  It also bejewelled those bloody weeds that keep invading my lawn, so presumably this is the time to make a serious dent in their numbers.

Sparkly lawn!  Alas for the hole in the bottom corner there.  

The beans are coming along nicely.

Scarcely kissed by the frost.  

Take THAT ya bastards!

That's all good, but today I also found that I had something to be really proud of.  The roof of the arbour was covered in a thick layer of frost but not a drop touched the seat.  That must mean that a) I got the roof seals spot on, and b) that I've successfully sited it for maximum shelter from the worst of the cold.  Happy with that!

Frost

No frost!

Really chuffed with that.  Right, I've got a day off tomorrow so I'll be racking the cider.  Wish me luck!

xx

Flies, bats, other stuff

The composter is attracting flies, even as we are fast approaching the Winter.  This must mean the composter is generating a certain amount of warmth, which is nice.  Getting rid of the flies is something of a must, however.  I don't mind flies, they do their jobs in the ecosystem and the world keeps turning; but they encourage spiders, which I personally quite like but which my sisters get freaked out over.  It's bad to put house spiders out in Winter as they won't last the night, so I resist doing that, but I don't want to swell their numbers by letting a fly explosion run unchecked.  The solution is to assert a biological control over the flies. More spiders are out of the question.  Frogs are crap.  Wasps scare the living shit out of me.  Birds can be great, but there's quite a spread with birds and you don't know when putting in a bird box whether you'll attract the sort of bird that likes flies or the sort of bird that likes your crops.

I've decided on bats.  London has many species of bat, and Strawberry Hill comes alive at dusk with the tiny, leathery sound of pipistrelles in flight.  I'm picking up a pair of bat boxes tomorrow which I'll fit high up in the big Maple just as soon as I can get ten minutes use of an extension ladder.  Eventually I'll set up BatCam as part of the BirdCam project, but for now the priority is pest control.  It's also nice to be able to offer shelter to an endangered species.

I'll need to stain the bat boxes so as to protect the wood from the elements.  Should I stain them a blending colour like green or brown?  Red like the fences?  Something like purple or blue to be bold yet stylish?  Something that really sticks out like a neon pink?  Or should I stain them black and then paint a little batman symbol on the front?  Decisions decisions...

Mike's doing well.  The beans are doing well.  The strawbs are doing well.  The lawn has a hole in it.  Those Thymus are doing well, though I still never figured out that 'lilac' business.  The brambles seem to be doing alright, to the point that two of them have shown overt growth while a third is budding.

I'm getting a budget from the household in January to make improvements to the garden, which should be sufficient to finance a shed, the beds, and a greenhouse tent.  This is awesome!  I mentioned before that the ramp out front is bridging the DPC and needs to be replaced, well so too does the patio out back.  This'll put the shed, beds and greenhouse on hold until it's done, but it should be done fairly quickly.  I think I'll stain the shed blue an paint the trim (corners, door frame, window frame) white.  I think that'd be bold, but look nice.

In other news: there was some kind of magpie turf war going on in the Buddleia earlier today.  It was quite intense, more so when a shitload of parakeets and a raven got involved.  Bill stayed indoors for that one, and of his own volition too, which I guess means he's smart enough to value his eyeballs.

I need more tea.  Down the bar last night...  Okay, it's a bit of a long story.  Jesse disappears for donkeys' at a time because of work.  When we see him again; he, Liam and myself have a thing of sitting about the bar in our boxers and drinking.  I don't normally have more than two pints on a night out, three at most, so now my head feels like it's been carpeted.

On the other hand, it isn't every day that one's arse gets a round of applause.

Bye xx

Wa-Hey!

Looks like I haven't just killed thirteen bramble cuttings!  This is excellent!  It means that the experiments are definitely going ahead (I've been biting my nails over this one) and that at the end of it I'm likely to have a viable plant with which to carry on the lineage of brambles that have lived up to now in the front garden.  Think in terms of Noah's Ark if that helps.

Pics when the camera turns up.

The Rubus Experiments, pt. 2

I'll be setting this one up tomorrow.  Broadly the same set-up as for Rubus 1, but with different variables:

Windowsill 'Tilly' (my bedroom)

• Hot
• Average humidity
• Maximum direct Sun

Windowsill 'Tom' (dining room)

• Hot
• Very dry
• High Sun

Windowsill 'Tiny' (living room)

• Warm
• Average humidity
• Minimum direct Sun

Windowsill 4 (Rubus 1 group)

• Coolest, though warm still
• Most humid
• Second-highest direct Sun

From Rubus 1, only Milo and Doodle will be involved in Rubus 2.

Further updates will now be found at rubusexperiments.blogspot.co.uk

The Rubus Experiments, pt 1

Note to secondary and FE biology teachers: feel free to use this as an example of a simple and practical botanical experiment.  The link presently comes up second on the first page of Google when searching for "The Rubus Experiments".  The Rubus tab across the top of the page will link to the site where I'm posting the experiments progress.  

  The ramp out front needs replacing as it is presently bridging the damp course.  Everyone finally admits it, so that'll likely happen a few months from now.  The ramp covers more than half the surface area of the front garden, so it'll mean something of a slash-and-burn of plantlife out there.  That Buddleia will go (TFFT!) but so will my brambles.  Those brambles have been there for over ten years and they're a brilliantly heavy cropper.  Every year in late Summer/early Autumn we have more blackberries than we know what to do with.  I didn't plant the bramble myself and nobody knows how many generations of Rubus have grown here.

  More important than sentiment is genetics.  Genes are like stories: they shift in the retelling.  The verses which suit the culture tend to be retained, to grow and to flourish, whilst those which don't will fade into obscurity.  That plant has a genetic heritage which enables it to hold its' own in that place, that soil, those conditions, in spite of competition from other plants.  That plant belongs to that garden, and a similar bramble bought from the garden centre might not suit the space in the same way.

  What to do, then?  Well, I intend to keep the bramble one way or another, but if the bulk of it must be chopped down then I might as well try some stuff out.  I'm not saying this'll work, so you shouldn't take this as a guide to action.  Still, here's what I'm getting up to:

The tools I'll need.  

I've filled the pots with soil from my garden, the same soil the parent plant is growing in.  Most would say to use potting compost, and I'd tend to agree.  My soil is crumbly, silty loam which successive gardeners since the 1930s have dug endless peaty compost into.  If I wanted a better medium for growing I'd have to invent it.

I took the soil from the beds.  Specifically from a point furthest from where my V. faba are growing.  No sense in depriving the beans at this time of year.  Once filled, I took cuttings from shooting tips of the Rubus. They're easily spotted by the claw-like, mitroid tips.  These are where new growth is happening most vigorously, so they should be most likely to take root.  The greenest shoots are best.  Prior to cutting the blades of the scissors were suspended in a pan of water as it boiled.

The growing end of a vine.  

The shoot cutting, size 7 hand for scale.  

I took only healthy shoots, avoiding any that had a problem with greenfly.  Heh, "problem", kinda makes it sound like "if you're not talking to your plants about greenfly..."  Aaanyways; once a shoot cutting was taken, it had to be rinsed under the tap.  A good soaking helps prepare the cuttings.  A hole was made in the centre of my potted soil using a skewer and the cut end put into the soil.  I then used my thumbs to press the soil down gently, just enough to close the hole without compressing the soil.  

I've made five of these - each of roughly the same length - and put them in the Nursery.  Mike has been relocated to my bedroom windowsill for the duration.  Mike seems to be recovering well from his infection.  Once there they each got a solution of 4:2:6 up to the yellow line on the saucer.  Now for the experiments.  I say experiment, but these are more akin to case studies than true lab experiments, albeit with certain controls in place.  

1. I've taken four cuttings of thin, green shoots.  One of a thicker, purpling shoot.  Which will fare better?
2. Two of my shoots curve.  I've pointed the tips of these away from the Sun, where normally plants bend toward the Sun.  Will the phototropic action of auxins cause the whole shoot to straighten up as it brings itself sunward or will the tip kink towards the Sun instead?  

Basic exercises in botanical study, but interesting for all that.  I'll observe the cuttings over the coming months and report on their progress.  Here's the five as they stand today: