Pilchardpower

After work I often sink into a semi-comatose state for an hour or so and yesterday it happened to be while GQT was on the radio. When I came to I could've sworn I heard Bob Flowerpower advising us to dibble a hole and put a pilchard in it prior to planting our sunflowers out. I wasn't sure if I had dreamt this or if it was a product of my sick imagination so this morning I had to go to Radio 4's listen again just to check it out. Seems I didn't dream it and the man really meant it. Waste of a pilchard if you ask me.

Talking of pilchard's,

I got a letter back from Clarence House thanking me for "bringing the plight (of Manor Garden Allotments) to Hrh's attention", written doubtless by a minion and more than likely consigned to the trash recycling bin shortly thereafter.

However, I note with great satisfaction that the matter is now going to court in a legal action supported by Friends of the Earth and that the closure date has been postponed until July and hopefully it will be put off forever and ever and ever, amen.

april come she will

We fell off the end of our assorted paint brushes, scrapers and plastering trowels long enough to get some serious seed sowing and bed preparation done at last.


It was a joy to be out in the fresh air, tilling this beautiful earth once more instead of breathing in wood dust, paint and varnish fumes.


The end of all that is hopefully not too far off now....well, maybe the end of this month will see it finished.


The seedlings all seem to be thriving and we've potted on all the tomatoes and have started giving them away as I don't see any reasonable way of fitting 60 plants in an 8x6 greenhouse.

hindsight

I now realise it is better not to fart while wearing a wetsuit

Bring The Sun To Me

Our Turkish friend Kamal asked us to team up with Nazli to play for an international society concert up at the Uni. Kamal plays the Baglama, a seven stringed instrument that looks for all the world like a big gourd with a long neck.

It was difficult at first for us to get our heads round the style of the Turkish rhythms and melodies but we got there in the end and managed to put four songs together.

There is nothing understated about the Turkish style; it is all about passion and emotional intensity, as Kamal says to us 'you have to feel it in your heart.' Here is one of the songs we performed called Günes topla benim için which means 'bring the sun to me'.

Seher yeli çik daglara
Günes topla benim için
Haber ilet dört diyara canim
Günes topla benim için

Umutlarin arasindan
Kirpiklerin karasindan
Döste biçak yarasindan canim
Günes topla benim için

Seher yeli yar gözünden
Havadaki kus izinden
Geceleyin gök yüzünden canim
Günes topla benim için

roughly translates as:

Twilight wind climb the mountains
Bring the sun to me
Let everyone know everywhere
Bring the sun to me

From the hopes
From the black eyebrows
From the knife bruises collect the sun
Bring the sun to me

From the eye of my lover
From the trace of the birds in the sky
From the sky at night
Darling, collect and bring the sun to me.

I'm happy to go along with that as spring is coming on although I suspect our lovestruck young Turk has it in mind to find light, love and prosperity in the dark eyebrows of beautiful young women. Well, looking at Nazli, who could blame him.... really?

Won't, Can't

I'm not going to make it this morning.

i'm a civil servant - get me out of here!

Tonights shift is just wall to wall loonys tosspots and con-men. I want out.

It feels like this.

tell it like it is clod.mp3 (4mgb)

tomorrow will be better.....won't it?

No Sferatus Here

We planted some elephant garlic as those flat-capped lancashire nosferatu just laugh at the ordinary stuff. Probably take an elephant to crush it too.
The reason crushing garlic is a good idea is because it breaks open the cell membranes allowing the enzyme allinase to start making those lovely anti-clotting compounds allicin and thiosulphinate. Ideally one should leave it to stand for a bit and then eat the crushed garlic raw. Oh come on! Yep, no kidding, cook it for longer than 6 minutes and the enzymes disappear quicker than a (insert preferred collective noun) of vampires in a sun parlour.

Meercat Manners

‘Well me lud, at the time the greenhouse was getting totalled I wuz busy looking for scorpions and consequently saw nufink and noone in that order guv, honest to God, would I lie to you?’
Ben must be desperate for some fresh eggs as he’s taken to hand feeding the chooks through the fence now.

All this paint stripping has aged me somewhat but yesterday we abandoned our scrapers and went up to the plot and built a nice big bonfire and cleared out the shed and sowed some leek seeds in trays in the greenhouse.

At home I sowed two trays of tomato seeds but isn’t it funny that always, when this time of year comes round and you’re looking for suitable window sill space, they’re every one of them chokkablok with rubbish. This is what I removed to find space for my trays of toms:-

1 pot full of chalk
1 basket of miscellaneous pens and pencils
7 cassette tapes
1 camera obscura
1 tin of Zigity cards
1 Dr Who sonic screwdriver
1 pod for Thunderbird 2 filled with snooker balls
4 paint brushes
2 pots of (mostly useless) felt tips
1 A4 pad
2 address books
3 jack plugs
3 pads of post-it notes (yellow)
1 pad post-it notes (white)
1 capo
…….and a variety of other bits and pieces. Is anyone else like this? I think it’s in the genes; we’re all as bad as each other. You don’t want to come round our house. I tell you.

Who's Got The Conch?

I keep saying to myself... 'must sow the tomato seeds and put em on the window sill'.... and nothing seems to happen. Well, not nothing exactly. We decided that before spring sprung properly we would set to and redecorate the hall stairs and landing and so I find myself every spare or not so spare hour stuck on the end of a paint scraper with an overblown hair dryer in the other hand trying to strip this horrible cream gloss off architraves and banisters and skirting boards. Once the scraper has clogged up with a molten glutinous mess of vile smelling paint it seems to set instantly to concrete with the adhesive powers of a limpet. Then there's the wallpaper. I thought I might get lucky but no, underneath the woodchip there's a layer of plasticised mock wood panelling and underneath that there's another layer of mock wood panelling and underneath that there is, or was, some plaster. I do not see this project ending anytime soon so at some point, possibly the next available sunny day, I will have to decamp to the allotment to restore some semblance of sanity.

Must spare a thought for the less fortunate amongst us though. Victoria's major problem seems to be how to find her way from Malibu to Santa Monica. Gosh, don't some people have it rough!

It's sad (but no great surprise) that the UK is way at the bottom of the list in the child well-being stakes. Somehow it seems that Brits have almost abdicated parental responsibility now. We gave up the conch years ago and now the kids won't give it back and they seem to despise us. We, in turn, look on them (youth) with a mix of fear and suspicion and dare hardly say boo to a goose for fear of getting bladed. I know it's more complicated than that but we'd better put some effort in where it counts or it really will be Lord of the Flies territory before we know it.

We're All Domed......again!

Looby is right. We're heading for another gigantic, farcical, incompetent and idiotic and yet somehow typically epic British fuck up aka the 2012 Olympics. How do we do it? Is it something in our psyche? Is it all horribly inevitable? If it does happen, the concreting over of the Manor Garden allotments will be the saddest part of the whole sorry tale. The initial estimate of £2.375 billion for the games has already risen to an estimated £8 billion with no budget ceiling in sight yet. £400 million in the revised budget is to pay for consultants to help keep the costs down!!!

Manor Garden Allotments

While answering a query from Lois about growing achocha I was alerted to the plight of the 100 year old Manor Garden allotments in London which are in danger of being buldozed to make way for a footpath leading into the 2012 olympic games area. Can I urge my readers to visit their site and sign the petition and do whatever else you feel is possible for you to do to help stop such monumental insanity. Thanks.

Cyberid

Elsewhere in the blogosphere there is a discussion taking place about virtual as opposed to 'real' identity. I find this quite interesting from a number of angles. In some cases people worry around what they write and who they are becoming public knowledge and in some cases they are right to be worried as I imagine it is not that technically difficult to out a bloggers real idendity with unhappy consequences.

Probably for the majority of allotment bloggers there is no real problem here; we tend to write mostly about how our tomato seeds are doing and how crap was our garlic last year and about the clarty soil and the sun and the wind and the couch grass and the club 18-30 root. In most cases our blog does exactly what it sais on the tin and that's fine. Some of us (me included), follow our whimsical natures and from time to time go off on one. This amuses some, annoys others and probably most don't really care one way or the other. Sometimes there is a bit of political sniping here and there but nothing to get too excited about. By and large we stick to plants and seeds and spuds and weeds and we inhabit our own polite parochial backwater of the blogosphere quite happily thank you very much.

This does not make us in any sense 'better' than the Let It All Hang Out Blood Guts & Thunder Boardroom or Bedroom bloggers who publish every nuance of their inner lives for all to read. That's fine too. All bloggers just need to bear in mind that if it's an open blog then it's public domain full stop and really so is your identity, even if you delude yourself into believing that you are blogging annonymously behind a stuffed muppet in a tutu called desmond.

Actually, the best of these blogs are fabulous. Well, sometimes beautifully written, witty, insightful, gritty and startlingly honest accounts of personal lives or perceptive comments on culture or society that should (possibly do) leave the professional commentators and lifestyle columnists green. Your blog is what you want it to be. It's your tin, fill it however you like and if it doesn't do exactly what it sais on the tin then so what exactly? I think the whole blogosphere should be celebrated BIGTIME in all its gloriously insane messy entirety. The notion of blog 'awards' is a meaningless anathema. PEOPLE are writing again! YIPPEE! Expressing themselves as freely or as guardedly as they see fit, free of the agendas set by media moghuls, spin doctors, celebrity gossipers or whatever.

They can present themselves with as many cyber identities as they want. They can put out or shut out and I don't give a fiddlers fart who they really are and don't most of us have some sort of filter to sift the real from the contrived anyway? Oh well, clearly I'm running out of steam now, but can I just leave you with this little muse....If Anne Frank had had a laptop and a blog in her silent tiny attic hideaway instead of just a lonely diary with which to share her quiet desperation.....well, maybe the outcome would not have been different but I don't need to spell out what it might have meant to her.

Three Sheets

Three sheets to the wind again. No, not me... the greenhouse. Still, I suppose I got off relatively lightly losing only three sheets from a side panel. The winds on Thursday and Friday were tremendous and caused a fair amount of damage on the allotments including blowing a whole greenhouse over a few plots further down. I am so glad now that I invested a lot of time building good foundations for both the shed and the greenhouse last winter.

Monday on the other hand was glorious sunshine and we spent a couple of hours on the plot putting the new glass in and pottering about and then we went off to the Mammoth Onion where we bought:

Pink Fir Apple (salad potatoes)
Pentland Javelin (earlies)
Sante (main crop)
Elephant Garlic
Spaghetti Marrow
Hysam onion sets
Jolant leeks
Robinsons giant cabbage
Igor brussel sprouts
Show Perfection peas
Robinsons lettuce
Parella green/red lettuce mix
Mammoth Long beets
Exhibition Long parsnips
Marian swede
White Dream radish
Big Max pumpkin
Genovese courgette
Squash onions

The seeds we requested from the Heritage Seed Library have also arrived and I think we got everything we requested:

Arany Alma tomato
Szechuan aubergine
Devoy beetroot
King of the Ridge cucumber
Egmont Gold carrot
Soror Sarek pepper

Now all we need to do is find space to put everything. Ideally, we now need another plot as this one is pretty much in order and we will be full to overflowing when everything is planted out.

I thought I might keep a vague sort of record of how much the plot costs us this year and so far the tally is:

57.60 for seeds
10.50 for glass

It would also be good to value the crops we take off it but I know I won't get aroundtuit.

5 Things Then

Ok then.......
1. My real name (in the old Cornish language) means
head or top of a valley. (they were tin miners there
back in the 17th century).

2. I used to work for Marconi Marine and am a black
belt in morse code (honestly) dah de dah de dah.

3. My dad died when I was four as did his brother. I
have been a complete barmpot ever since.

4. When I was little, a wild bird 'adopted' me and
used to sit on my shoulder and follow me everywhere I
went. You can just see him in the picture sitting on
my left. I don't really remember it.

5. Likes: Dogs, Marmalade, Brinjal Pickle, People Who Call A Spade A Spade And Use One, Dr Who, Anything by Joanne Harris, Misfits & Eccentrics, Full Moons, Snow Patrol, The fact that the first word in my dictionary is 'a' and the last word is 'beer' (in a foregn language of course, can't remember which one), Jimi Hendrix, Tin Tin.....etc

Dislikes: Cats, Celebrities, Horseradish sauce Yechhk, The Tweenies, Passive Agressives, Chavs & Bling, Country Music, TV Soaps, Soap, Religion, Margarine, Horsetail, Anything Made Out Of Plastic, Capitalism, America, Spam....etc etc

A Question: Does this tagging meme thingy have to go to allotment bloggers or anyone?

Tag Wrestling

Now Paula's, (from Petunias Garden), gone and done it. She's tagged me and it hurts. Now I am supposed to reveal 5 things about myself that nobody knows. So why is that hard when there are millions of things about me that nobody knows? Actually, not quite true coz Jane over at Horticultural knows who I really am because she asked me! It's that easy. She wanted to use a quote from my blog in her book which should be on my bookshelf by now but isn't coz I want a signed copy and Amazon don't do that sort of thing. Allotment Lady is kindly enticing me back away from my holiday over at the Chasms of the Earth where we are having and engaging discussion on the merits or otherwise of Dan Brown's novel 'The Da Vinci Code', a ghastly, terrible book (so why is it so successful)?. But this, of course is just me being a black belt procrastinator and avoiding the ghastly truth that I have just not written a mote worth reading for a long time. This usually changes when the long shadows of winter begin to depart and the black dog takes himself off for a walk somewhere - who cares where? And the sun starts to creep into the bottom of the garden once more and slowly work it's way up towards the house as spring draws near. Anyway I have been spreading muck for England this winter and it's got to stop I tell you.

See how good I am at avoiding the five things.....I can go on for hours like this honestly.

Well anyway, we've got a bit of a busy weekend ahead as we're playing for a Swedish dance thingy over in Derbyshire and have to leave tonight so I will think about the five things and reveal all when I'm back next week. Now what do you want? Sauce.....Raunch......Cultural Embarrassment (you've never died till you've died onstage).....Hottest Fantasies (Phew!).......An IQ rating (don't go there)......Professional Disasters.......(no, my boss might read this blog, I don't know).......Relationship ***k ups...(Plenty to choose from).........Most Embarrassing Moment(s) in a Co-Education Playground Setting......What Did I Eat For Dinner Last Night?......Have You REALLY Lost Your Camera Again?

What. what, what.....you choose and don't be nosey you Allotment Devils You!

Vacation

Happy New Year Everyone. Clodhopper is currently on vacation mostly over at Cultural Snow and The Chasms of the Earth where the weather is fine, the going good to moderate and the language fruity. Anyway, I'm still waiting for my seeds from the seed library and otherwise I'm just spreading muck.....you know me. Tchhh! Roll on Spring......but is this REALLY a winter?

Yule Blog

Yuletide greetings one and all.

PG's last comment set me thinking about my wish list. The twenty billion sterling we have spent on Xmas this year would make a good start. I daresay Santa would welcome a year off; the poor chap has his work cut out. 378 million children in 91.8 million homes (leaving out all the hindu, muslim, buddhist and atheist children etc). Parcel tonnage reckoned at 321,300 tons and delivery logistics requiring Rudolph and Co to travel at 650mph and allows Santa approx one thousandth of a second for each delivery (source: The Independant).

He seems to have managed the feat once again magnificently - even taking into account the re-direction notices we left in our fireplace and involving him in a 157 mile detour (sorry Santa). To be sure, we did track his progress using state of the art Pentagon military technology at www.noradsanta.org. Would that that was all it was used for!

The three wise men started it all off though they didn't have the luxury of online shopping nor of choosing the super saver delivery or gift wrap options. Do you suppose they would have wrapped the gold, frankincense and myrrh anyway? Were they in any sense 'wise' to set this consumer madness rolling into the future? Surely this is not what they intended it to become and maybe it is time for us to come up with an alternative strategy for next year. If that 20 billion could make some inroads into my wishlist, then that is a Christmas I'd be happy to sign up to.

Holiday suggestions for Santa on a postcard please.

Wishlist

I was bathing Ben tonight and he said 'Dad, what do you want for Christmas?' I told him I'd like all the people in the world to have what we take for granted; clean water to drink; a warm roof overhead; knowing where our next meal is coming from; adequate health care; not to be afraid that we'll be shot up or bombed tomorrow etc etc. He thought for a bit and then said 'Dad, it's not an option. It has to be something you can wrap up." Which about sums it up really doesn't it?

Oh ye of Liddle Faith

The Trouble with Atheism C4 Monday 18 Dec

Oh well, they really shot themselves in the foot with that one didn't they? For some reason I expect better from C4 than an hour long piece of drivel that probably infuriated the believers just as much as it did the other believers. And as to his final and naive question as to why the believers and the non believers can't just 'get along' does the man really need to be told that beliefs have consequences?

Gary Wolf did a better job here, C4 should do better. Rod Liddle should take his dog for a walk and think things through a bit.

Seasonal Nose Picking

Little voice from the back of the car on the way out to the School Xmas Fair on Saturday......
"If anyone wants to do some seasonal nose picking, do it now!"

Sunday....force 10 gusts smash two sheets of glass from the greenhouse roof and turns compost bin lid into a frisbee. Probably somewhere in Blackpool by now.