It has been raining for the last days and it got colder here. So haven’t been in the garden for about a week. Today there were some hours of dry weather so I just went there for a look. The rhubarb is absolutely massive, although I already took out several plants , there is no way stopping it. It is quite expensive in supermarkets, I wish I could sell my rhubarb for 2pounds for 500g like in Lidl, too, and I could finance my whole year’s allotment rent with it. Honestly.
Micah is already pleading with me not to dish up rhubarb more than 3 times a week.
Unfortunately all the cucumber plants died, as did the Kohlrabi, and no clue why.
Some of the Morning Glory also got weaker and weaker till it went yellow and too soft to exist. The raddish seems to get along nicely, as do the onions. The pumpkin and the courgette plants seem to have got over the “prone to die” period okay and will hopefully make it, producing some veggies for the harvest. The potatoes are the only plants which are so happy in the garden, that we even didn’t know they were there.
At the moment I am watching the sown lavender, hopefully most of them will grow nicely and then I will plant them as a border for a flowerbed.
Inside, the houseplants have been potted up, but the azalea died as always, too, and my favourite palm seems to have a pest which looks like soya sauce drops on the leaves and even multiplies over the curtain. Not good.
Sometimes there seems to be no way of winning the battle against the nettles. They might just be a cm tall, but already burn. At the moment I am mostly planting annuals, but I should really think about a design. The problem with allotments is, that everybody just plants veggies into regular pararell seedbeds, there is not really much too design.
But I would quite like to have a pond, a bit of a bog garden, a wildlife corner, a rock garden, a water feature, a glasshouse, a coldframe, a composter (or two), a seating area, flowers, trees, a lawn, a herb garden…
Now try to get this all on 10m x 10m and you can imagine the impossibility of this. And incorporate the shrubs and the hill and the giant compost hill, which is already there. So, as usual, the first thing which has to go from the design is the pond and the wildlife feature, as well as the rock garden. So, there is actually no pond at all anymore on the allotment site.
I have met the fox now, too. Called him “Foxy” as it seems to suit him. It is not a particular scared fox, but not tame either. he now lives behind the Brambles on the old railway bridge, though he is still pissed with the neighbours filling his tunnel. But he seems to use my shed now as occasional housing.
The Sweet Peas are doing okay, as do some of the Morning Glory. The Nasturias are also well on their way as are the “Blackeyed Susan”. All of these are Climbers or can be put in Hanging Baskets, too. I would want to try out the Sweet Peas trailing up an arch and the Morning Glory covering the compost heap. The Nasturias will go in the Hanging Basket and maybe on the Hill. I hope the Thunbergia can climb up the Willow fence, but it could also be in a Hanging Basket.
One thing In find amazing, is that I actually like gardening. For some strange reason though, I did not like at all working in gardens at political projects, maybe because I couldn’t be creative as the garden was/were already established, but also because I did not feel confident.
Politically not much has happened, but I haven’t been looking for it either. There seemed to have a new text come out by Stewart Home, in which he critisises the Observer. I was told I should blog about it and create a stir, but can not find it yet.
Also, there is some weird argument going on on the new-imc list, between arafura and darwin imc. Hopefully the problem can be transferred to the imc-process list, as it is otherwise quite quite distracting form what the new-imc list should do.
At the moment I am reading a book “The Journalist and the Murderer” in which the subject/writer relationship is explored. It is quite odd, with Radio Z or Indymedia I never felt, that the subject/imc volunteer would have a fearful or unequal relationship. Actually, in most community media I never felt that there would be some hierarchy and dependency, or even fear involved. But in the mainstream media, it is common every day, every time, all the time. Sad, but it is so.
I do think it is because of the lack of accountability the mainstream media has towards its subjects/sources. They just care about making it as interesting as possible for the reader, and then, as normal just isn’t enough, everything has to be exaggerated, unpolitical, entertaining and polarised to keep both, the advertisers and users happy.