Farcebook

Author: james

  • Welcome to the frozen North

    It’s a bit cold now, and I’ve not been to the allotment for a few weeks. I’m only here now because the food waste bins are full and starting to smell nasty.

    The recent frost has killed all the weak plants that were fooled by November’s mild weather.

    This rotavator continues to impress me, chewing through slightly frozen ground with no real trouble providing I went slowly.

    I don’t care if it takes three or four goes to get this broken up, it’s much better than digging by hand!

    In addition to hoarding rotten food, I’ve been storing cardboard to put down. It should keep the weeds away and also rot down to improve the soil.

    Next time I need to bring the strimmer and remove the long grass and tougher weeds that the rotavator can’t manage.

    This is all stuff I normally do last minute in March, so the fact I have the plot cleared by December is a novelty. Maybe I’ll get my plants in at the right time next year!

  • Social media sucks, so I’m going back to blogging

    I’ve been putting random stuff online since sometime in 2000. The online world was different back then, it hadn’t turned into this API driven walled garden mess. It was a non-API driven walled garden mess instead!

    My first site was an exercise in learning PHP and HTML

    Did you join LiveJournal for blogging, or subscribe to a mailing list instead? Maybe you were on AOL or Compuserve as they gasped their last. Failing that you could enrol on a forum or live chat on IRC.

    I decided I’d start my own blog, on my own site and put my thoughts and opinions on that instead. Then, like most people as social media took off I went where my friends went, and slowly switched from long-form posts to short random thoughts.

    Facebook likes to remind me of past content. Some of the really early stuff is a mixture of entertaining and “why the hell did you write that?” as I figured out what this new social media thing even was. Was it a blog? Was it chat? what do we say here?

    You’d never get away with saying this today

    So I’m going back to blogging again, and being able to write longer and (hopefully) more thoughtful content. If you’ve been here in the past, you might notice it’s a bit blank. This is a reset, I’ve kept my old blog safe but nobody but me needs to read content written in a time where online security was less of an issue, and where “let’s stick your name in Google to see what comes out” wasn’t a thing.

    I’d tell you to follow me on an RSS reader of your choice, but do we even do that any more?

  • Mr Rotavator

    Mr Rotavator

    Since getting this allotment one of the more tedious jobs has been digging over the plot each year. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – by the time I get to the end, the start is overgrown.

    I’ve always wanted a rotavator but they’ve either been too expensive, bulky to store, or built around crappy two stroke engines that don’t always start.

    Not any more! While browsing Amazon I came across this. It’s a battery powered tiller / rotavator. It’s light, easy to carry and the batteries actually last a decent amount of time.

    I gave it a good test today. My plot is overgrown with lots of grass and weed, but it managed to turn this…

    Into this…

    With minimal effort from me. Normally this would have taken several hours spread over two days. I’m tall, the ground is far away, I hate digging.

    Then it managed to also do this…

    It doesn’t like long grass, so I need to mow or strim that first, but that’s not much effort either.

  • Monsoon Season

    Monsoon Season

    Seems the weather has switched from hot and dry to “wet”. It’s a bit hard to do anything on an allotment when it’s raining.

    I did notice the water butt on my shed at home was full though.

    And the small one on my other shed was looking a bit full too.

    So I figured I’d buy another water butt from Wickes and set it up to fill from the overflow of the first one.

    I also moved the water pump into the new butt. I’ll use that to water the roof garden in the summer.

    The finished setup looks quite tidy, although the second butt is half full already. I need to sort out an overflow so it doesn’t flood the area around my shed. The drainage isn’t great and a shed sat in a pool of water isn’t the best.

    Also out of curiosity I went to the allotment to see how the water butt there was doing. It seems to be filling up and holding water OK.

    At some point I’m sure I’ll add a second butt there too.

  • Shed roof garden maintenance

    Shed roof garden maintenance

    The roof garden on my shed needs sorting out, a lot of giant daisies grew this year and while they looked nice at the time, their dead remains need trimming.

    It’s not too difficult with a ladder, but some areas required a bit of climbing about on my fence.

    Once trimmed I moved some random bulbs I had in planters and tipped the remains of the planters on the roof to add some more soil.

    There’s quite a lot of different plants up there, some I didn’t put there. Also found a few small trees trying to grow and snipped their shoots off.