Roaming Zebra

No rain yesterday! Well, at the very least it was almost pleasant by the evening, so we popped up to the allotment for a couple of hours.

The courgettes seem to have recovered a bit, and look like they are might produce some more growth over the next week if the weather warms a bit during the day. The spuds are in desperate need of earthing up, but that will have to wait a bit still. The broccoli seems to have perked up quite well over the last few days as well, though the netting cage had blown over a bit and was lying on it in some places.

Finished digging over the bit below the fruit section and we now have the Sweetcorn in as well as a couple of my Balconi tomatoes - they should be fine outside, though they should really be acclimatised for a few days. Also popped the last pair of melons into a growbag at the allotment. They are in a glass cloch made from some spare greenhouse glass and some special clips my dad gave me last year. We also planted in the redcurrant bush. The redcurrant root stock I bought earlier and planted last week looks a bit healthier now, though the blackcurrent that did look fine when in a pot looks a bit worse for wear - I guess it got a bit battered around by the wind over the last week.

Spent some time weeding again, I guess a bit like painting the Forth bridge (though yes I know they are changing the coating soon), but I figure as long as I keep doing a bit each week, I should stay on top of it.

Some people from one of the other allotments mentioned they thought it was looking good and that we’d got a lot done, which is good that we aren’t getting complaints about the state of some of the plot! I think we’ll try to tackle the next bit which has been covererd for a while before going back to couch grass attacking. That bit is next to the corn where the soil has a completely different structure to further up the plot. I also read yesterday in one of my gardening books that outdoor tomatoes have been known to kill couch grass. Now I’m not entirely sure how this works, but I think I might try planting some in amongst the couch grass and see how things go….

Oh and I almost forgot, Thompson and Morgan have 1/2 price seeds at the moment… so I bought some stock for next year.

Well, the wind and rain over the bank holiday weekend meant we only got a couple of hours digging in on Saturday. Last week we bought some leek plants from Ashwood which we spotted whilst I was buying growbags (my preferred growbag at the moment, though they are more expensive that some places).

The leeks have gone into a bed in the middle of the allotment which has taken three digs over to make the soil vaguely usable (the last 1/2m x 2m section took hours the first time as it was filled with couch grass)… We went for the option of cutting the roots to an inch or so long and then trimming the tops so they are 6″ high. Hopefully they’ve survived the high winds over the weekend, as well as the beans which went in earlier in the week. I guess the courgettes may be a little worse for wear as well, but we’ll see.

I reorganised my greenhouse last week, moving the staging to the back “short” wall which has given a lot of space in the rest of the greenhouse. Got 6 moneymaker tomato plants into growbags and finally planted a couple of the Edonis melon into growbags as well. They’ve also had their growing tips pinched out as they were more than beyond the four true leaf stage. The final two melons are going up to the allotment at some point, into a cold-frame made from spare greenhouse glass. The cucumbers are also doing well now (mostly), though a couple of leaves have got white spots on, which I guess is downy mildew - I’ve removed them anyway.

Chillis and sweet peppers have all been potted on this weekend into larger pots (though I don’t have enough of the “correct” size pots, so they’ll just have to cope).

Planted out the blackcurrent we bought last year as well as the cranberry, blueberry and redcurrant root stock I bought in Woolies earlier in the year (they have some green leaves, so they have two chances). We also got a good sized redcurrant from Bridge End Garden Centre whilst off visiting people at the weekend.

And on a completely different note, now that the roof is secure and watertight, we moved a whole load of boxes out of our shed back into the roof space. The roof is pretty dusty now (not a big surprise given the state of the old slate!), so I’ve had to clear a bit of a path through. The upshot is that you can now get into our shed and to the back without having to climb over everything. I definitely think replacing the old garage with a big shed was a good investment last year.

Well, this week the roofer finished replacing the roof on our house. It was actually mostly finished the week before, but there’s a single story bit of roofing at the front over the bay windows and front door, and the scaffolding to access the top was resting on it i.e. they had to wait for the scaffolding company to take down the scaffolding before they could finish.

Our roof was suffering from nail fatigue (where the head of the nail rusts through) - hardly surprising given the house was built in the 1930s, before galvanised and copper nails were around. The old slate was also breaking up, which is apparently caused by a lack of roofing felt or torching, and then freeze/defrost cycles. I’d already been up last year and reseated a number of slate, and earlier this year we had a number of slates come down from the edges in high-winds.

We had a couple of quotes for the replacement of the roof, the cost varied dramatically between people, in fact there was a difference of about 3k between the cheapest and most expensive quote we received. I strongly advocate getting at least three written quotes and comparing them carefully.

The company we chose was called Securaroof, who advertise in the local paper. I found the guy who runs the company to be friendly and not pushy when he came out to quote for the replacement. He was also quite happy to give me a couple of options for roofing material. I was impressed that every day during the job, the ground was swept before we returned home - the first day I was wary there might have been nails or shards of slate on the driveway, but everything had been carefully collected.

In terms of roofing material, we opted for a Spanish Slate - La Roca, over a man-made concrete based replacement material. Generally I think that the natural look of the slate is much better than the mechanically cut lines of the replacement products, and though real slate is more expensive than a man-made product, it wasn’t prohibitively so…

Well, I haven’t posted about plants for a couple of weeks. But I have been busy both in the greenhouse and at the allotment. So has the couch grass as well mind, and I also found we have an invasion of convolvulus which looks like its come from the paths between the allotments. This has really brittle root structures and seems to go on forever! So something else to keep digging out. To be fair though, the sections we’ve cleared of couch grass haven’t come back with avengence - mostly a few tufts of grass (probably not actually couch) some annual weeds (to be expected) and some thistle/dock has reappeared, though I’ll just keep digging the roots out on that ’till it gives up. I’ve also dug a trench part way down the allotment to separate the area which has been cleared to try and stop re-invasion whilst we get around to clearing the lower part. I’ve also found its necessary to dig the soil at least twice when preparing areas for plants - the first time breaking up the big lumps, the second making them into smaller lumps (though I still don’t really have an area where I feel seeds could be sown direct.

(Incidentally I’m writing this whilst fighting with a Virus Scanner on a laptop, so blame that if the sentence structure gets broken up)

I did take some photos last week of the seedling progress, but didn’t actually get round to uploading them, I’ll either post a few here or just take some more as everything has grown on quite a bit since then!

We now have courgettes in at the allotment - a combination of All Green Bush and Parthenon - the latter I think was supposed to do well even with a poor summer, we shall see! The broccoli has also now gone into the allotment site, I was waiting until I’d got hold of some anti-bird netting - I was strongly recommended by the site treasurer to put something up “as the pigeons don’t share anything”. I also added some Perlka, which the treasurer gave me last week. Its not organic but is supposed to help prevent club-root and needs applying 7-10 days before planting out occurs.

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So on Saturday evening, we decided to go to Satay in Lye for dinner. Its an Malaysian-Indonesian restaurant on Lye High Street. This is the third time we’ve been, the restaurant itself is quite pleasant with modern decor and the food is excellent quality. On the two previous times we’ve visited, its been quite busy - the first time was Valentines night and was a set menu, the second with a couple of friends and it was very busy. This meant that the food took a very long time to come out - its a good job we weren’t in a hurry! We’ve also ordered take-away before, though only once, and it took a very long time to arrive and wasn’t particularly hot by the time it got to us (we had to microwave some of it to warm it back up).

That said, I’d still recommend people to go there as the food is excellent … when you get it.

This visit however, the restaurant was only about half full and both the service and food were excellent. You seem to get Kurpak Udang (prawn crackers with a spicy tomato/chilli dip), these have always come out shortly after ordering, so in the past despite the long wait, we haven’t starved. The tomato dip is quite pleasant, though can be quite hot. We ordered the lamb and chicken satay starters (swapping half each) which are grilled pieces of chicken of lamb served with a peanut satay sauce. I really like them… however I’m still not sure about the chilled rice cake that comes as part of the starter. For main course, I ordered the Kari Kambing on the recommendation of the serving staff. Its a Malaysian Lamb curry and it was really nice - excellent flavour and the lamb was slowly cooked meaning it was very soft to eat. As accompaniment to the main, we ordered the coconut rice. Its a “Thai” rice, which is a different type of rice to the pilau rice served in curry shops. In terms of price, it has gone up since our last visit (some dishes by £1.50 or so), but even so, it used to be very cheap and now I still think the pricing is quite reasonable. I’d also give it extra points for being a place where they don’t try to rush you out with the bill as soon as you have finished your food.

One other thing to watch out for (and caught us out on our first visit) is that its not licensed - i.e. take your own alcohol. Luckily there’s a mini-supermarket at the other end of the High Street.

Overall, I highly recommend a visit to Satay, particularly if you’d like a change from visiting a Curry house (of which Lye has a number!).

Satay now has a website - www.mysatay.co.uk which has photos of the restaurant and copy of the menu - though at the moment, the prices on the website are the old prices (its gone up), and then the take-away pricing was always different from the “eat-in” pricing, so I wouldn’t assume the pricing is correct.

Yesterday was I spent the day on an ITIL course, “Apollo 13 - An ITSM case experience“. The course was arranged by our central IT quality team.

It was an interesting and amusing day - its not intended as a serious day and you are supposed to have fun learning whilst learning about the principles of ITIL. Basically you get to play part of mission control for the Apollo 13 mission. The aims are to develop business processes and to see how they can help you achieve your business goals in IT provision. How do teams interface and communicate? How can you escalate and track problems? How do you effectively manage change?

I can see how some of the priniciples can be applied to a general IT provision in a University, though in a University, I think you need to be careful not to apply to much metrics-based testing, particularly when you think about problem solving rates and solving times - its all very well solving large numbers of easy problems, but in a University there are likely to be a number of hard problems which take a long time to resolve and these are probably more important to consider, and probably more difficult to assess with metrics.

Well, just before leaving for work this morning, a large SIG roofing lorry arrived to deliver the new slate for my house roof! So we now have 758 slates sitting on the drive waiting for the roofer to come and install.

Now I wonder if I can get him to leave the pallets behind…..

So I was browsing the stats for my blog recently, which give details of the referring web-page and search details from people coming in from Google et al.

Its most amusing how easy it can be to get to the top of Google’s search results with a couple of keywords. I suspect there’s a few people who have got less than helpful information after searching for “Calabrese tendergreen” and even “beware of the agapanthus” (which was coming out #1 at Google a couple of days back. Apparently that is a well known saying, and has been used as an alternative to “Beware of the dog” - the agapanthus having an extra sting in its tail.

Given that Google clearly trawls the RSS feeds regularly, maybe we should be using more of them at work to encourage Google linking to us…

I see I also got referenced after commenting on Joe Swift and his allotment antics. Having spent some more time digging the clay soil on my allotment, I can see why a rotovator could be tempting…….

This seems to be a bit of an ongoing thing at the moment… wet weather.

All during the day, it’ll be fine and then around 6pm, it starts to pelt down with rain. And then of course, the soil at the allotment just ends up as one lump of heavy clay. I think its a cunning ploy to stop me managing to dig the plot over!

And why can’t any of the weather sites decide on the weather for the weekend? Though clearly as its a bank holiday, it has to rain.

Beware the agapanthus … Just got back from a week at the Isles of Scilly - it was quite pleasant, if a little breezy! Evidently handling Agapanthus causes an allergic reaction, so my advice is don’t, though they do have pretty blue flowers. Of course they aren’t frost hardy, which means its going to have to live in the Greenhouse over the winter (and no doubt most of the summer!)