Red Duke Of York

It's a potato I tried growing in a pot this year. It's a "first early" which I though meant the same as a "new" potato. So I boiled them and they fell apart! Then I looked them up properly and found that they're best for baking - indeed, Waitrose sell them as "summer bakers". According to Alan Romans, William Sim of Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, bred the original "Duke of York". Then in a field somewhere in Holland, it spontaneously mutated into the red form....

Alan Romans, seed potato expert extraordinaire

If you think your job is the pits…..

…it could be worse. You could stand at the entrance to Asda with a badge saying "I am your greeter today!" you can tell it's the worst job in the place because all these greeters look so miserable. And isn't the whole concept of someone paid to greet you at the entrance to a supermarket just completely awful?

And the worst part? "Word" doesn't query the spelling of "greeter". It thinks it's a real word. 

Charlie Darwin has been at it again

I grow Brassicas which you may know as a fancy name for cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, radishes etc. Enter, the Cabbage White Butterfly which probably has a Latin name but who cares? These beasties used to lay neat yellow clumps of eggs on the leaves of my crops that hatched out into caterpillars and decimated the foliage. 

So I got a system. Once or twice a week, I'd check the kitchen garden for said neat yellow clumps of eggs and squash them. Result! No caterpillars. Woot!

Until this year when Charlie upped the ante. I found a load of fully-grown caterpillars munching away at the kohlrabi leaves. On the Sea Kale too. No eggs anywhere!

I'm still trying to work out how he's done it. Maybe there are eggs but they're so small or well camouflaged that I haven't spotted them. Or maybe the eggs are just as big as they ever were but were laid on some other plant and the caterpillars marched across the lawn?

Answers, as they say, on a postcard.

Tested

The office has some square holes in the wall. A lot are filled with network connectors, phone jacks or 13 amp power sockets. Someone put in more than we needed so some are just empty, yawning holes. Not a problem! Somewhere in deepest Milton Keynes, a marketing guy spotted an opportunity! Blanking plates! A simple square of plastic with holes for fixing screws. And, realising the importance of offering lifestyle choices he decreed that for a few pence more, the consumer could have stylish rounded corners on their blanking plates as well as the plain economy model.

But I digress. We had these holes in the office wall and the office was so quiet, I had time to deal with them. As I fitted the blanking plates, I noticed that they all had a sticky label, "Tested". 

I fell to wondering just how they test blanking plates? Maybe someone stares hard at them, daring them to laugh? Or puts 1000 volts across them to see if they burst into flame? 

I suppose it's designed to make me feel reassured. I'm not that sort of guy. I'm just not going to trust "Tested" stickers any more.

Overlapped Seed Sowing

Warning - seriously geeky gardening post!

There are a number of techniques for getting the maximum crop out of a kitchen garden. In "Catch Cropping" as soon as a crop has finished, you clear the ground and plant something else. 

I take it one step further. I don't wait for crop A to finish, I sow seeds for crop B during the last few weeks of crop A's life. Here's an example:

Mid February: Sow Broad Beans
Early July: Sow Dwarf Beans seed under the still growing Broad Beans. For the first half of July, the Dwarf Beans stay underground doing whatever Dwarf Beans do when they only just been sown.
Mid July: Broad Bean harvest finished, cut them down. Dwarf Beans start to show
Autumn: Harvest Dwarf Beans.

Disadvantages? Yeah, there's a few:

• Those of an organic bent will know that you are supposed to dig in Broad Bean plants after harvest. With this system you can't do that directly. You'd have to dig them in on some other part of the garden or just put them on the compost heap.


• The books tell you that the main harvesting period for Broad Beans is July and August. If that's when yours area ready, this system won't work. I've found that mid-June to mid-July is the season here. I've tried to move it without much success.


• You "should" sow Dwarf Beans much earlier. My system gives a somewhat smaller and later crop. Consider using cloches towards the end of their life.

Another crop that lends itself to this technique is overwintering onions. Here's the system:

Previous autumn: Plant overwintering onion sets
May/June: Sow/Plant Crop B seeds under the still growing onions
June/July: Harvest onions. Crop B starts to show
Whenever: Harvest Crop B

"Crop B" can be any of the many crops that you put in the ground in May or June - check your seed packets and gardening books. I've used tomato plants and plan to use Radicchio this year.

It was the beavers

The place used to be called South Cerney Gravel Pits but the marketing guys changed it to Cotswold Water Park. It's a fair name though - if you scoop a load of gravel out of the ground, water seeps into the void and pretty soon, you've got a lake. Or, in the case of Cotswold Water Park, 133 lakes.

If was the beavers that made me go and have a look. There's a place called Lower Mill Estate where they've reintroduced Castor fiber. I didn't get to see them though because called Lower Mill Estate turns out to be an exclusive "gated community" and I had to stick to public footpaths nearby. Took some photos….

Rebellious duck.

One of the houses on the Lower Mill Estate. Odd!

More upmarket houses? Or a student campus?

Resident

Economic Models Explained

So I found this on the Net somewhere:

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

...but the one I really love:

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

:-)