Roaming Zebra

It rainied soooooo much on Saturday that we didn’t see the point in going to the plot on Sunday – the soil will be just solid clay wetness and impossible to dig.

There was a Gardeners World special on Friday night on peat and compost. With mention to peat-free alternatives. New Horizon grow bags have been tested to be the best peat-free product for growing seedlings. Will have to see if we can find any in the local stores.

The local B&Q didn’t have any, but it did have the highly rated Westland peat-free product so we bought a bag of that to try it out.

As there was no allotment trip, cleaned the greenhouse and trays (at last!).

Sowed a load of seeds, on a window sill inside the house:

• Tasty red peppers
• Meek and Mild chilis
• Jalapenos
• Tomato moneymaker

And in the greenhouse

• Onion squash
• Comfrey
• Celery monarch
• Redbor Kale
• Broccoli
• Sweetcorn – Bounty & Swift

Moved some red peppers from the windowsill into the greenhouse.

Where are our courgette seeds? All the seeds are packed into monthly sowings, but I can’t find the courgettes!

Today was the first time the lawn at home has been mowed. The cats have been crapping in as usual. Its always a problem when it gets too long!

I also got to go on a trip to the tip taking cardboard for recycling and just general accumulated junk from around the garden.

Soo much stuff to do that I only got chance to drop stuff atthe plot – 4 bags of home-brewed compost from the bin at home (two years worth!). Not sure where to spread it, but its quite a nice vintage compost now though!

Most of my allotment time recently has been spent clearing the weeds and digging the soil.

My dad popped up last weekend and spent several hours with me digging up at the plot. This meant we got some quite large areas of the plot cleared and forked over. I still need to run over these bits with the soil miller, but it should have dried out a bit and should hopefully be easyish to mill. Going to try and get a bit of time in there on Saturday to finish pre ping the soil for planting.

There’s still a large bit in the middle with couch grass, but I think I’ll save that for a bit later – I’d like to get some things into the bits that are already clear first!

At the very bottom of the plot, the weeds are getting a bit out of hand, so I think a purchase of some large, black plastic sheeting is needed to keep them down for the time being.

Certainly helpful having an extra pair of hands!

Well, I haven’t been updating very much recently – been kinda busy.

Have been repainting the doors from the kitchen cuoboards, which is a right pain. The doors were waxed, so I’ve had to get a lot of that off them before I can start painting. A combination of a hard work with wet and dry sandpaper, and a got with both white spirit and methlylated spirit with wire wool. As well as a go with some special wax remover seems to be working OK on them.

Having stripped off what I thought was all the wax, I started priming with a Farrow & Ball eco undercoat/primer. I noticed in a few places that some of the wax was coming thorugh, so ended up buying a shellac based paint (B.I.N.), which is supposed to stick to anything & block stains coming through. Its not the cheapest paint in the world (£15 / L), but seems to have done the trick. Its also useful for painting onto the formica type cupboard surfaces, as it sticks to anything to give a good base coat.

A couple more coats of undercoat and I was ready to start top-coating. Again I’m using a Farrow & Ball eco paint (eggshell) in tallow. The primer for this is the white F&B primer. I purchased this from my local paint store (a branch of Brewers), for some reason they stock a full range of eco paints, but not the undercoats, so I had to order that specially. It only took a couple of days to arrive, but you’d think that having the range of paints would mean they’d have the undercoats as well!

Anyway, both the undercoat and eggshell were quite good to work with, drying quickly and with very little smell (hence the Eco status of the paint). The eggshell is very low sheen (listed as 20% I think) and is “fully washable” according to the data sheets. Hopefully this means it will be easy to keep clean and won’t object to the odd splash of water from the sink!

The Eggshell paint has a very rich colour – I could probably have got away with just the one coat, but I wanted to make sure the cupboards have a hardwearing finish, and there were a few places I missed with the first coat.

I opted for applying the paint mostly using a foam gloss roller which gives a very fine finish and no brush marks. There’s a few places where a brush was necessary, like into the mouldings, but the paint is quite thick and the brush lines disappeared into the finish themselves.

I’ve finished phase 1 of the re-paint, that is to say I’ve done the doors from the ground level cupboards, kick-boards and some end-panels. Still have the drawer fronts and wall cupboards to do … must get around to starting on them soon!