Diary

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Saturday, February 10, 2024

I appear to have lost nine days of entries. Sigh!

I bought five supposedly over-ripe pears for $0.99 at Swyers, thinking to munch one each day. The first was not ripe! They had ripened only at skin level, so this morning I diced the remaining four and am bottling them for desserts.

The five cores are each in their own tin labeled “Bartlett 2024/02/10” sitting in wooden trays in my porch.

There they will chill, as the kids say, but once the long cold weather has departed, out they go with the other five dozen tins filled this winter.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

I reach this stage two or three times a year – Running Out Of Bottling Jars. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been cooking batches of vegetable soup (Jerusalem Artichoke, onion, carrot and tomato paste) and this day was reduced to using the half-pound sizes, having run out of one-pound jars.

This means that I am preserving food faster than I am consuming it. Which means that my shelves are full of soups, stews, jams, chutneys, and the other good things. I have several options:-

(a) Because I am bottling nine jars of vegetable soup today, pull the nine oldest jars from my shelves and leave them on the kitchen counter. Eat the contents in the coming weeks.

(b) Continue making soup, but hold it in strong plastic sacks (such as those that held frozen peas) and freeze them.

(c) Start making vegetable pies, wrap them in plastic and freeze them.

(d) Just stop trying to preserve my vast stock of Jerusalem Artichokes.

More diced Jerusalem Artichokes heading into the soup.

I have been seeing what happens with beetroot juice and a molasses solution for meting ice on the driveway, or perhaps preventing it from forming.

Here I am not sure whether it is the solution, or the heat of the solution that has caused it to sink into the snow.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

I have neglected my seedlings. I should have been inspecting/checking these every two days. Nonetheless they all seem to have made some sprouts.

My seven seeds of sage (06) show small white roots.

I cover them with one centimetre of soil and recover them with paper towel, and elastic with the label.

The same with the Purple Daisy (14)

Likewise the “Michaelmas” daisy (52) thing.

And the “Yellow Weed” (09)

My ginger nodes too show rootlets. They too get a cover of soil and back into the container.

Friday, February 16, 2024

I had marked in my calendar for Monday “Start Wandering Jew”, because last year I amassed about three dozen hanging baskets, and want this year to fill them and give them away.

So today (grin) I attacked the living-room table with a sharp knife and a large bowl. From which I obtained about fifty cuttings, stripped off the lower leaves (foreground) and set up just two wide-mouthed jars with tap water.

One of he study window-sills has several small jars of a third type of leaf, these will be planted in rich soil as soon as possible and may have enough time to start a few hanging baskets.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

We are having what I think is a rare spell of warm weather; we had 6c a couple of days ago. The three days 27-29 of February are forecast as 3c, 8c, and 7c.

We have had low snowfalls this winter, and so my driveway path is clear And Dry, and the 24’x16’ raised bed is showing bare patches.

Last autumn I strung cords across the bed to make 4’x4’ areas, forcing me to think of “A beet plot” and “An artichoke plot” and so on.

This morning’s photo shows bare patches in eight of the twenty-four plots.

I can therefore say that 33% of the plots are exposed.

But then, not one plot is completely exposed.

I can say therefore that 0% of the plots are exposed..

That’s statistics for you.

Nonetheless, if each day I recorded the number of totally-bare plots, that record would give me an idea of when I can start sieving, for the bare plots absorb sunlight and send heat energy into the soil!

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

A ninth plot has a small area uncovered. I record this in my Gardening calendar as 0/9/24 meaning “Zero plots are totally bare, Nine plots are partially bare, from a total 24 plots.’’