Chirp!

If you haven't seen it already, click here, watch and marvel. Pictured above the pheasant(?) at the end.

In The Castle Keep

... I assemble my stores; everything over and above my daily wants that I capture inside the burrow, and everything I bring back with me from my hunting expeditions outside, I pile up here. The place is so spacious that food for half a year scarce fills it. Consequently I can divide up my stores, walk about among them, play with them, enjoy their plenty and their various smells, and reckon up exactly how much they represent. That done, I can always arrange accordingly, and make my calculations and hunting plans for the future, taking into account the season of the year. There are times when I am so well provided for that in my indifference to food I never even touch the smaller fry that scuttle about the burrow, which, however, is probably imprudent of me... I find a certain comfort in having all the passages and rooms free, in seeing my stores growing in the Castle Keep and emitting their variegated and mingled smells, each of which delights me in its own fashion, and every one of which I can distinguish even at a distance, as far as the remotest passages. Then I usually enjoy periods of particular tranquility, in which I change my sleeping place by stages, always working in toward the centre of the burrow, always steeping myself more profoundly in the mingled smells, until at last I can no longer restrain myself and one night rush into the Castle Keep, mightily fling myself upon my stores, and glut myself with the best that I can seize until I am completely gorged.

The Burrow Kafka

Signs of BonkerDom

Packets of sugar and mustard from the hotel breakfast room. As usual, click on image to make readable.
P.S. I'm not the only one that reads the fine print. More allergy advice here.

Signage in Yorkshire

Squash Map

TKK - Thai Kang Kob, FU - Futsu, BB - Bush ButterCup, LWP - Luxury Winter Pie, TSSP - Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato, CWH - Chicago Warted Hubbard

Key to the Cabbage Patch

Four out of the six 'Couvé Tronchada' have run to flower prematurely and were removed, unceremoniously, by me this weekend. Apart from that the brassicas are all looking rather picturesque (see below). The cabbage white hasn't found her way into the netting yet.

Midsummer Update

Cucumber 'Kaiser Alexander', Squash 'Buttercup', Sweet Pepper 'Doe Hill', Cucumber 'Bianco Longo' and Squash 'Winter Luxury'. Meanwhile the weather remains very hot and dry just like last year at this time. Phew!!

XXXL

This week Doris squoze out an extra big egg, with two yolks! Here it is next to a normal sized egg.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

'Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo' coming to a cinema near you?


Found this one loitering around the back door.

Indolent Piles & Incipient Quinsy

"A Capsicum ointment, or Chilli paste, will almost invariably serve to mitigate the painful stiffness of chronic rheumatism if rubbed in topically for ten minutes at a time with a gloved hand. This paste is to be made with 'capsicin', the oleo-resin of the pods (half an ounce), and sheep's-wool (lanoline), five ounces, melting the latter, and after adding the capsicin letting them be stirred together until cold. Indolent piles which have extruded, and the circulation in which is stagnant, can be stimulated to reduction by the use of this ointment when so diluted as to cause only moderate smarting.
For incipient quinsy, before the tonsillar abscess breaks, a basin of hot gruel well seasoned with Cayenne Pepper, if taken soon enough, will often give ease, and resolve the swelling."
Meals Medicinal W.T.Fernie, M.D.


First chili peppers (Black Hungarian and Jemez) are already forming! Relief is at (gloved) hand.

Dead as a Dodo

I found him/her(?) on the way home. A baby pigeon but you can see the family resemblance.

Committing To The Seedplot

"When you sow your peas, when you sow your beans, when you sow your potatoes, when you sow your carrots, your turnips, your parsnips and other root vegetables, do you do so with punctilio?...


...No, but rapidly you open a trench, a rough and ready line, not quite straight, nor yet quite crooked, or a series of holes, at intervals that do not offend, or offend only for a moment, while the holes are still open, your tired old eye, and let fall the seed, absent in mind, as the priest dust, or ashes, into the grave, and cover it with earth, with the edge of your boot in all probability, knowing that if the seed is to prosper and multiply, ten-fold, fifteen-fold, twenty-fold, twenty-five-fold, thirty-fold, thirty-five-fold, forty-fold, forty-five-fold and even fifty-fold, it will do so, and that if it is not, it will not."

Watt Samuel Beckett

Happy Walpurgisnacht

Squash-Thing-Unbound

Just eating the last of last year's.

Squash-Thing-Bound

"In preparation for planting, we first sprouted the seed. I cut out a piece of tanned buffalo robe about two and a half feet long and eighteen inches wide, and spread it on the floor of the lodge, fur side up.
I took red-grass leaves, wetted them, and spread them out flat, matted together in a thin layer on the fur. Then I opened my bag of squash seeds, and having set a bowl of water beside me, I wet the seeds in the water- not soaking them, just wetting - and put them on the matted grass leaves until I had a little pile heaped up, in quantity about two double-handfuls.
I next took broad leaved sage, the kind we use in a sweat lodge, and buck brush leaves, and mixed them together. At squash planting time, the sage is about four inches high.
Into the mass of mixed sage-and-buck-brush leaves, I worked the wetted squash seeds, until they were distributed well through it. The mass I then laid on the grass matting, which I folded over and around it. Finally I folded the buffalo skin over that, making a package about fifteen by eighteen inches. We call this package kaku'i kida'kci, squash-thing-bound, or squash bundle."
Advice from Buffalo Bird Woman


Squash germination has been very poor (see above), I guess due to the cold weather in our back room. I've started some more seeds in the airing cupboard. If that fails I'll be looking for a tanned buffalo robe.

Hoverflies on the pebbledash alash.

Twitching

We went along to the Barbican yesterday to see the zebra finch installation. Great fun, see it if you can. Click on the link and there's a little film that will give some idea of what to expect.
And another ornithological sighting here - Owl Hats !!

Fluffing Out

Everything is finally leafing out, a little later than usual. I know that the apples and pear have been in blossom before now in past years, but they look to have another week until they blow this year. Peas 'Uncle Fred' are about an inch and a half out of the ground and 'Egyptian Turnip Rooted' beets have just germinated. Inside though, the peppers and aubergines are about half a foot tall and ready to be potted into something bigger.

This Year's Beans

"I was determined to know beans."
Henry David Thoreau who went on to sow 7 miles of bean rows

A Sticky End

Well, our bees didn't survive the winter after all. They expired sometime between January 17th and the end of February. I suspect their numbers were not great enough to generate the necessary warmth. The queen was not a good layer and it was still quite a small colony in the autumn so I left them all the honey they had made and put in an extra dummy board to decrease the area that they would need to warm. Maybe in a normal winter they would have managed. Anyway, we weren't the only ones. I'm cleaning the hive, putting in fresh brood foundation and getting my name on a list for a swarm.
Meanwhile there is some bee-inspired art to see at the Contemporary Applied Arts. (sample below)