Farcebook

Author: james

  • DofE 2024

    DofE 2024

    Where I probably walked more miles than the children, and everyone got very very muddy.

    Last weekend was the annual Duke of Edinburgh silver expedition, and once again I was herding children around the Yorkshire Dales. There wasn’t any snow this year, but it was raining and there was plenty of boot-sucking mud.

    Normally I spend the weekend bored, sat in a car watching kids roam the countryside using a Spot tracker in each groups’ bags.

    This year, they decided they wanted to go off-piste and discover the wilderness by themselves. And I got to do my steps stomping about trying to find them.

    Some of these miles were earned simply walking around the campsites, or trekking off from a convenient carpark to find a path junction where I’d planned to meet the kids. You can do a lot of steps if your toilet is a five minute walk away. It kind of shows how sitting still at your desk really isn’t a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to stride off across the countryside to get some exercise, just put things out of arms reach so you have to get up and move a bit more.

    You also see some quite amusing things on your wanderings. I wonder what the story behind this road sign is…

    These lot probably know… They know everything. They’re probably reading this blog post right now.

  • Tech bubbles are so annoying

    To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. I remember when next door’s kid was learning to talk and form his own opinions, everything coming out of his mouth started with “daddy”.

    The tech world is just as bad. AI is the new hotness, we’re actively encouraged to use it at work, and it’s creeping into everything from summaries of Amazon reviews to spam comments on my blogs. Can we get over it, figure out it’s crap for writing thoughtful content, but very good for writing summaries of existing text and move on?

    I was looking for a plugin for WordPress and everything now seems to have AI shoved into it, even if it’s not a sensible idea.

    I’m not saying AI is bad, going to murder us in our sleep or turn into Skynet, but I wish the tech world would stop latching onto the new shiny thing and jamming it in every orifice regardless of whether it fits or not.

  • Planting more than food

    Planting more than food

    After getting sent a letter about the state of my plot, I went and read the rules for what I can and cannot do on the land. It turns out I can grow more than food. Flowers are acceptable too.

    Poundland were selling packets of wild flower seeds bound into a layer of paper. I’ve got a raised bed that used to be at home and I literally plopped it onto a bit of weedy ground with some weed fabric under it to keep the bindweed and dock plants at bay. Inside I filled it with some half decomposed compost made from food waste.

    It’s all been covered with some old compost I found in a bag in the back of the shed. I tried growing wild flowers last year but could never tell them apart from weeds. Hopefully now that they’re contained in a box I’ll know what’s growing.

    I also bought another box of seeds, these ones are mixed with sawdust and some fertiliser. The area next to the pond is a bit weed strewn so after a quick go over with the rotavator just to remove the surface weeds I’ve sprinkled the seeds all over that.

    The last thing to go down was a liberal sprinkling of mustard seed green manure in the front plot where the car goes. I’m going to put down more green manure to smother out the weeds on the unused parts of the plot.

    I’ve got some fodder radish that supposedly grows over winter which might save me a lot of effort next year.

  • General Plot Tidying

    General Plot Tidying

    Now the shed is in a better place I’ve been going around the plot unearthing all sorts of rubbish, items I’d forgotten about and random pieces of broken glass. I’m now piling things up in different parts of the plot ready for a run to the tip at some point.

    Something I’ve discovered while tidying and organising is that there’s often a “correct” place to put things. The plot works so much better with the shed behind the greenhouse, and the bin store thing next to the side of the greenhouse. There’s enough space to get into the shed and I’m trampling all over a big patch of brambles which might help get rid of them.

    It’s quite important doing this now, before things start properly growing. I always make the mistake of leaving things too late and end up visiting the plot one day with the intention of doing something useful, and instead spend all morning clearing weeds, only for them to grow back the next week.

    I have no idea what to do about the old shed or the bathtub full of crap. I have even less idea what to do with the pile of carpet behind the shed. I think I’ll ignore it and pretend it’s not there.

    While digging around to get rid of the greenhouse I remembered there’s a section of weed fabric I laid with gravel. Since there’s no greenhouse there any more the weed fabric needed to come up.

    I think weed fabric should be banned on allotments just like carpet is. Sure, it smothers weeds, but after a while a new layer of soil builds up on top of it and the grass just grows on top instead. And then its roots get into the fibres.

    While moving some plastic sheeting around I found a rather large toad, and under the weed fabric (that’s been down for about 7 years) I found one of our spoons from the kitchen. I have no idea how it got there.

  • Creating a covered planting area

    Creating a covered planting area

    After moving the shed I was left with a patch of ground that is relatively low in weeds and planned on using it as just another area for growing things. However, after getting rid of the other greenhouse I was also left with a greenhouse base that either needed giving away to the local metal fairies or reusing somehow. So I had an idea…

    If I removed all the grass, flattened a lump of grass that I built up after last year’s wasp incident and dug in the remains of a compost pile, I’d have a nice area for growing more delicate plants.

    Also it’d thoroughly dig up the ground where the wasps were, so future ones didn’t get any ideas.

    My trusty battery powered rotavator chewed the ground up fairly well, and after some mildly dangerous antics with the greenhouse base, I had an area that was enclosed which should help keep the weeds out.

    The next step was to actually plant things in there. The Range were selling strawberry plants, and after the demise of Wilko they also seem to have bought all their stock and are selling it off cheap. So Wilko’s 99p seed packets were 50p.

    The second photo is for my reference too. There’s two rows of beetroot, two rows of carrots and then several rows of parsnip. The ground had a really good chewing with the rotavator and now actually resembles something you could grow plants in, rather than a field that’s had the grass ripped out.

    The final stage was to set up a small plant cover I’d bought off Amazon. It’s one of those kits made from the tubular metal and plastic connectors that tends to last a season at best before something fails or the wind takes it away. I’ve tried to buy a more robust one so maybe it’ll last all year if I’m careful?

    It was a bit bigger than I expected too…

    The only irritating thing is the plastic cover doesn’t have many straps for tieing it to the frame. I hope it doesn’t explode in the wind the next time we have a storm.

    To prevent this I got creative. I was tempted to attach it to the greenhouse base, but once the parsnips and carrots have grown a bit I’m intending on moving the cover to another part of the plot to cover something else.

    Here’s the finished thing