Farcebook

Month: February 2023

  • Making a Basic Raised Planter

    Making a Basic Raised Planter

    Part of my garden doesn’t seem to support plants very well. The grass doesn’t grow well and other plants seem to grow really slowly. It’s also a bit too boggy. I think the neighbour’s plants on their side of the fence are crowding out the ground.

    My lawn is trashed, reseeding it will happen later.

    To fix this I figured a nice raised planter would do. The Internet is full of random designs but buying them is never straight forward, so I went off to B&Q to see what they had.

    After disregarding the various plastic things that look like they’d fall apart, and not wanting to build my own I found what B&Q call “raised bed kits”, the rest of the world might call them “Pallet collars”. Four bits of wood with metal hinges at each corner.

    The bags of compost must be full of matter harvested from a black hole, it weighs so much!

    Building them has just the right amount of effort for a Sunday. First I needed to remove some bulbs that’d been forgotten about. They should come out soon if moving doesn’t mess them up.

    After clipping the bits together, and manhandling some of the heaviest substance known to people into the resulting hole, it all looks nice and fresh, just waiting for some plants.

    Since it’s still technically Winter and nothing is really growing, we might still get frost and there’s no point trying to plant anything – not that there’s anything available to plant yet anyway.

    Bulbs are a thing though, they’re due to pop out pretty soon, so I bought some more of those and rehomed the rescued set from the clods of quite poor soil they were living in.

  • Preparing for Spring

    Preparing for Spring

    It’s been pretty windy here again, so I went to the plot to see if the shed had tried to escape again…

    It hasn’t quite done a Wizard of Oz this time, but did seem to have moved a bit which is surprising given it has about 30 kilos of water sat on its roof. Also the plastic box next to it has been obliterated, and the wooden cold frame clearly needs something heavier inside it.

    The actual point of today wasn’t to tidy up, but to do some tidying. Grass is an annoying thing, it grows quite happily all over the plot, especially if you don’t dig it out. At home, my lawn is all thin and patchy.

    Managed to get the majority of it cleared before the batteries gave out on the rotavator. It’s certainly a lot better than doing it by hand.

    This bit is next, It’s full of grass and junk that has grass growing over it. I’ll need to give it a mow and attack it with the strimmer a bit first to get it short enough the rotavator can chew it up without getting tangled.

    The wind wasn’t all bad though, I somehow gained a giant sheet of plastic from somewhere, and two large builders’ sacks. The plastic will keep the weeds down on the end of the plot I dug over earlier, and the sacks will be useful for gathering up rubbish.

    I’ve made an attempt at tidying, I’m sure the wind will help reorganise things soon.

  • Accidental Fruit Tart

    Accidental Fruit Tart

    Attempted to cook a fruit pie, but the pastry I’d made was more like biscuit dough and didn’t want to stay together. Ended up turning it into a giant fruit tart thing instead. Worked out pretty good.

    The trick it appears was to leave it to cool down after over cooking the fruit into a sort of jam-like consistency.

  • “Good” Morning?

    “Good” Morning?

    I sleep with my FitBit on. Every morning it tells me how well I slept. For those with other devices (or none!) the way this works is by monitoring my heart rate, motion and blood oxygen level. It then does some magical maths to arrive at a score out of 100.

    In FitBit land, a score of “80” means you had a “Good” night’s sleep. In the real world, 80 is not a good night’s sleep. Ever woken feeling like someone filled your head with sawdust and you put the kettle in the fridge? Yeah that’s 80.

    Supposedly I also sound like a warthog that’s being strangled. FitBit doesn’t tell me this, my other half does.

    So I did some Googling and amongst all the snake oil quack medicine websites out there, and websites for apps trying to sell you a subscription to their dubious systems I found the good old NHS website.

    Feed it your height and weight, it spits out “you are overweight, lose five kilos”. It also shows you a free app you can use to help with that. I probably should cut out the excessive sweet things, and I’m quite sure if I went to the doctors about this their first advice would be “get more exercise, lose some weight”.

    That doesn’t solve the bit where I feel like death in the morning though. It might do in six months, but not tomorrow night. One website I found did mention propping yourself up on pillows. It also recommended stupid things like sticking a tennis ball to your back – the snoring happens when I roll on my back. I’m not taping a tennis ball to myself every night. I’ll forget to take it off and go to work looking strange.

    I can use more pillows though. It was a bit weird the first night, but last night seemed more comfortable. And also reports of their being a warthog in the house have gone down.

    I feel less like I’ve been resurrected against my will too (this is why zombies are angry, they were woken up too early) and my mouth doesn’t feel like the cats have used it as a litter tray, so maybe it spent most of the night closed.

    Further testing will continue. I have apps that collect data and make graphs.

  • Hoarding water for the summer

    Hoarding water for the summer

    I promise that this blog isn’t just a log of my attempt to cover my garden in plastic barrels of water, but it rains a lot in the winter, it doesn’t rain in the summer, I have a water meter and spraying chlorinated water on plants doesn’t seem like a good idea.

    I’ve replaced the small water butt next to my garden shed with a bigger one. The small one was full of some rather horrible smelling brown water. I think this is from the roof garden, but I’d have thought all of that would filter out the fine bits of soil up there by now?

    I managed to find enough bits of random drainpipe lying around to make things neatly flow into the water butt. It’s a bit awkward because there’s two pipes and only one hole in the lid.

    I then half filled the water butt using one of the others. I now have something like 700L of water storage now. Should help in the summer when it stops raining and I need to water things. Also when I water the roof garden and it starts to run out, it’ll go back into the water butt and not be wasted.

    In attempt at containing the mud and helping the lawn grow I’ve given it a good stabbing with a lawn aerator and then covered it in a layer of sand. The ground is full of clay and very sticky. I noticed that when it rains water runs over the surface of the ground instead of soaking in.

    I also put a bag of gravel on the slope behind the shed to control the rain that hits it. I’d like to find a few large stones and put them down too.

    The grass will be fine, it’ll come back. I’m planning on re-seeding it anyway with some grass that copes better in shaded locations.

    Finally I was getting tired of tracking mud into my shed, so found two paving slabs and just put them down as stepping stones. At the moment they’re lying on the surface of the ground. If I like where they are I’ll put them into the ground in a more permanent way.

    A typical British lawn with straggy grass, worm casts and the odd bit of moss.

    A job for warmer and drier weather is to sort out a more neat looking path.