Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - garden

Getting warmer

2011-04-04T14:06:00+01:00

We've been bumbling along with the central heating for the last few weeks. Every time the weather seemed to be taking a turn for the better it would invariably dive back into cold misty mornings. However it's starting to look like spring is finally arrived and starting to make it's presence felt. It certainly felt like it when I wandered around the garden on Saturday morning sipping my first cup of tea of the day. It was enough to convince me to hang the washing outside which gives you an insight to how radical my Saturdays have become.

It wasn't a very busy weekend which is just as well as the week at work was fairly harrowing. I did spend some time pottering in the garden doing my assigned tasks and finalising plans for the back garden. About the only other achievement of public note was preparing a full Lamb Sunday Roast for our neighbours.

Apologies for the rather banal quality of this post. I do have a number of things I want to write about including the up-coming AV referendum, some back of the envelope calculations with respect to student financing, and the irony of Microsoft referring Google to the EU competition authorities. However despite having a number of things I want to talk about/spark discussion I'm finding it hard to actually get around to writing about them so for now you'll have to contend with these snapshots of my domestic life :-)

In other news

2011-03-28T10:04:00+01:00

Rat diversions aside the weekend was a fairly sedate one. We visited a rather nice Japanese restaurant in town on Saturday with a bunch of the Cambridge LARP group. We left feeling well stuffed.

I spent a chunk of Sunday attending to tasks as directed by the head gardener while she continued attempting the Saturday Times crossword. We seem to have become Saturday Times readers purely on the basis of the quality of their puzzles. Marcus assures me that the Gruniad provides a more brain twisting Cryptic Crossword which Fliss aspires to graduate to one day. Personally I'm happy to manage one clue per crossword but I think I'm getting better at them over time.

We spent a large chunk of the weekend watching through C4's alternative take on teen super heroes Misfits. It's been a fun show to watch and I suspect we'll get to the end of the season 2 box set in short order. We'll have to be careful because there seems to be a lull in any decent TV until Easter when we'll be spoilt for choice. Recommendations for other box sets welcome ;-)

Is it spring yet?

2011-02-21T16:29:00+00:00

Nothing much happened this weekend apart from a complete tidy-up spring clean of the house. This may seem a little premature but when the weather finally does get better we won't have to worry about too much clutter up the house. Fliss' mum came around on Sunday and helped us Fliss tackle some of the long overdue pruning ahead of the new spring growth that would have left us drowning in overgrowth.

Oh and Fliss Prestiged, for someone who's apparently not a fan of the FPS genre she certainly seems into it!

Sunshine, sand and spades

2010-04-12T10:43:00+01:00

My muscles are currently protesting but not quite as much as post-Snowdon. We took advantage of a lovely sunny weekend to start planting some fruit and vegetables in our new veg patch.

It turns out that the hardstand for the out-building actually extends much further out into the area we want to turn into our mini-allotment than originally thought. After much exploratory digging I think I've located the final boundary which only left around a metre between that and the hedge. Fortunately the concrete in deep enough for the strawberry bed to go over as their roots aren't that deep. The tomatoes went further back and both beds where de-rocked/bricked and then improved with a significant quaint of compost. Given the amount of land we should probably take advantage of the free compost from the new anaerobic compost facility in Waterbeach which processes a lot of the green bin waste.

We also cleared out a large amount of ivy and other junk from the hedge row at the back as well as dismantling the last of the old corrugated iron fence. I think the next step is going to be finding how much it would cost to get someone in to break up the concrete and remove the resulting rubble. It will take a few years to get the land into full-production but at least we will have some local produce to show for this year.

All Weeds must Die!

2009-07-04T02:20:00+01:00

We have started harvesting things from the garden. It's a testament to how easy it is considering we don't know what we are doing. One habit I have picked up is picking a few weeds out every time I pass a bed. It's enough to keep them at bay and give your plants more space.

The bounty so far amounts to a few strawberries, large quantities of savoy cabbage, a stupid number of courgettes (not a favourite) and some spring onions. We of course suffer the feast and famine of the garden but when we do get food it does seem to taste nicer (or at least it seems that way ;-).

All this gardening is a prelude of course - we haven't kicked in the full planting plan as it's a rented house. Today we went and visited our first potential house to buy. The place itself seemed a little ramshackle (from a decoration point of view) but it was huge. It also came with a large chunk of land (two paddocks) at the back. While there is a certain charm to the idea of a living the rural idyll I'm not sure I'm ready to be a farmer of a small holding. We have a few more houses to view tomorrow, we shall see how it goes.