So it turns out the RGBW LED light strip in my living room has some almost-UV component to its blue light. It is almost UV enough to make some things fluoresce quite vivid colours.
Author: james
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According to Fitbit, gardening is cycling
One of FitBit’s more useful features is its ability to automatically detect exercise. I think it uses a combination of your heart rate and how the device is moving.
The pattern of motion and heart rates must be categorised by FitBit so the app can tell the difference between “swimming” and “running”, etc.
It’s not a precise system though. Yesterday I went skating for a few hours, and then spent the afternoon working on my allotment.
I can see how walking and skating are similar. They both take relatively low amounts of effort and have a rhythmic stepping pattern.
Gardening and cycling though don’t seem that similar. Then I remembered I spent a while using my awesome battery powered rotavator to turn over some of the ground, and I guess the shaking of my arms and the effort of trying to stop the thing escaping looks a bit similar to a bike rolling along a dirt track.
This is a bike now. Probably not comfortable to sit on! -
Planting Fruit Bushes
Poundland sells cheap fruit bushes, and if you pick the ones with leaves on, they tend to grow fairly well and make a nice hedge type thing. If you pick the ones with no leaves on… they’re dead, you’re buying a dead plant… They’re also not a pound each, but never mind.
I’ve put them along the edge of the plot to make a sort of fruity hedge. I had a few spaere, so they’ve gone at the end of the plot next to a new rhubarb plant.
The other job this week was to turn a big grassy part of the plot back into land I can grow things in. It’s an area of the plot that’s always been a messy lump of grass and rubbish. And not little tufts of grass, but great big mounds of the stuff. Clearing this has always been hard work and takes weeks of effort. It’s usually summer by the time I get parts cleared.
However since I now own a rotavator, it was about half an hour’s work to get it all nicely turned over. The rotavator gets clogged easily on mounds of grass so the trick is to sneak up on them from the side. After a while the blades rip the grass clump out the ground.
Before 
After It needs a bit more work, but the ground is more level and all the rubbish has been picked out.
Since the batteries in the rotavator weren’t dead yet, I went over the other half of the plot to give the weeds a gentle hint they weren’t supposed to grow there, and cleared some space to plant the rhubarb from earlier.
All the chopped up leaves and grass will rot down once the weather warms up. It’s between 2 and 7c during the day still, so not a lot’s going on. Except that onion, it’s already been mown over once by mistake, so I’m leaving it alone. You’ve survived my cack-handed gardening, you can live.
The other jobs I did was to move the bin store from home to the plot, it can be another shed thing to store junk in. And then I attacked the triffids multiplying around the greenhouse. I don’t mind brambles, except when they snake off across the ground, rooting as they go. If chopping at them with the strimmer doesn’t make them go away they’ll be getting sprayed with weed killer.
Yeah I know, it’s bad to spray nasty poisons on your garden, especially when you’re going to eat the produce, but you try removing brambles by hand using a shovel. Sure, you can cut them up but they’ll grow back a month later. There’s a reason they grow everywhere…
And all of this was supervised by next door’s chickens and other feathered creatures. I like next door’s little zoo, he’s done two very helpful things
- Removing the weeds from his plot – chickens and ducks eat anything green looking
- Building his chicken pens using my fencing. Last year the fence blew down. Now it’s part of a chicken coop, it can’t go anywhere.
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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.
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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.
