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.

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

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.  

Harvesting asparagus

This is sort of an aide memoire for Our Diane, as she's the main asparagus cook in the house.

I'll be growing asparagus in great troughs hung from the back fence.  Might be there's fifty shoots in a trough.

Year 1:  You identify which ten are the biggest, greenest, healthiest-looking shoots and you leave those alone.  Don't pick those because they're your breeding group.  You let them grow, flower, and seed.  Pick the remaining forty shoots for food and be sure to compost your cuttings.

Year 2:  The ten from last year have bred and new shoots have emerged.  Because they've been bred from the best of last year's asparagus, this lot are collectively better than last year's crop.  The genes for a good quality crop have been passed down.  Once again you have fifty shoots.  Pick your ten healthiest and keep them for your breeding group.  Make sure this year's breeding group is not comprised exclusively of last year's breeding group or else evolution stops.  Eat the rest.  Compost your cuttings.

Year 3 onward:  As per year 2.