Busy weekend, pt. 2

I've finally got the first of my beds built!  I've built the fruit bed and the first two vegetable beds.  I would've blogged this last night but just as I sat down to the keyboard there was a mass exodus out the door to see Iron Man 3 and I just had to go with.

The long bed that runs along the East fence is the fruit bed.  The shorter one in the centre of things is one of the veg beds.

You want broken bricks in the bottom for drainage.  If you can only get so many bricks but have a bunch of slabs then divide them as follows: bricks under the veg beds, slabs under the herb beds.  The reason for this is that slabs have a higher pH than bricks, and herbs can generally tolerate a higher pH than veg.

I dug a pit and filled it with broken bricks,

-parked a bed over the pit,

-and half-filled it with soil.

As you can see from the plan, these are bed 1 and bed 2.  The finished beds will project twice as far.

This week I'll be shopping for compost to fill the remaining space with, as neither my compost nor my leafmould are fully decomposed and ready to use yet.  It looks shabby just now but this is the bare bones, and even that much isn't finished.  Once I've got stuff on the grow it'll look better, and better still when I've got grass growing in the rows between the beds and perennial plants like herbs in the herb beds and fruit in the fruit bed.  The rosemary will really set it off.

Lastly then, because I am a fantasy gamer to my bones, a little flourish:

Back to the grind...

Busy weekend, pt. 1

Today I've finished preparing all but one set of the panels for the raised beds.  They'll go up tomorrow.

I've built a worktop for the shed from part of an old wardrobe.

I've begun decorating the shed.

I've nailed up some trellis.

My strawberries are beginning to flower for the Spring.  We'll have home-grown strawbs this Summer.

Mayday

Today is the first of May, and it's a bit of a crossroads on the calendar.

May Day is a spring festival.

International Workers' Day is a celebration of the working class, who generate all wealth and build all things.

Beltane is a Celtic festival that marks the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice.

Today has been a good day for a party for thousands of years.  Today also marks me being out for ten years now.  I wouldn't normally mark the day, but ten years is a hell of a thing.  So at the bar last night I spent time with old friends and new, ate my fill of pork and drank my fill of cider, and everybody had caterpillar cake.  We shared tales of good times, epic nights and acts of sheer lunacy.  It was a great night, one of the best this year.

I love my mates, they're amazing :)

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.  

Unintended consequences

Our Diane's bedroom window is some five or six feet above the roof of the shed.  Bill now sees the window as a new door, sort of like an elevated catflap.

He jumped in there today and Diane freaked out, which left me doubled up laughing and prompted the following doctored lyrics:

He's climbing in windows,
snatching yo kibbles up,
trying to get treats,
so you'd better
hide your yarn,
hide your mice.
Hide your yarn,
hide your mice.

He's since tried to climb out of my window, which opens not onto a shed but a storey drop.  Daft animal.  Well, come the heat of Summer she'll have to choose between sleeping with the window shut and melting or sleeping with it open and suffering the occasional cat burglar.

If he comes in the window at Hallowe'en I shall have to start calling him LeChat de Valois.

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.

Slowed again

So the tumble dryer broke.  In a household this big, a broken dryer is not good news.  I've now got a line across most of the garden to get the clothes dry in this glorious sunshine; meaning I can't be dragging pallets about and staining wood for fear of ballsing up the laundry.  This limits my worktime severely, but there's bugger all I can do about it.

Meanwhile, the front ramp needs work done.  To facilitate this, the buddleia's going.  Once the work is done on the ramp I'll probably put in a pergola.  Pics to follow.

Et voila, pics!  How naked does that ramp look?  Makes the place look like a GP surgery.  Plus I've finally gotten to all the rubbish that berks have shoved into my hedge when they couldn't find a bin.  It filled a sack and was mostly comprised of empty cans of cheap lager.

Meanwhile, is there anything that conveys the wonder of nature more succinctly than just watching a bud unfold?  

By next post I should hopefully have my lawn replanted, unless drama has ensued.