Can you tell what it is, yet?
These mornings, my alarm runs ahead of the Earth turning to bring the sun above the Thames; and the sky is already dark by the time I emerge from the Tube in the evening. There is a smoky, leafy scent to the air; hazelnuts litter the paths and I shoof through the drying leaves of red-haired Autumn.
This weekend is my church’s harvest festival. We’re having a shared lunch after the service: unfortunately I think that my vision of long oaken tables and marrows and carrots and whole roast pigs and raucous singing and lusty young wenches serving foaming mead Ed: does mead foam? Please check from pewter mugs is likely to remain unfulfilled. It does, however, remind me that back in May and June, when the year in bright blues and greens danced to an altogether less sombre tune, I set to my own little garden and tried to defend it against the Axis of Gastropod.
You might remember that I used coffee grounds to keep the slugs and snails at bay, much to Jenny’s amusement. And I remember that I never reported back on the long term effects of that experiment. So, the coffee grounds did keep the little bastards away, although I am not tempted to use that method routinely in future, for two reasons.
First, the power of coffee waned rather quickly, meaning that I had to replenish the Maginot Line every week or so. Although it was tiresome, this wasn’t a major problem because we managed to persuade Kate’s lab to give us all their coffee grounds. More worryingly however, I think the coffee was actually poisoning my runner beans. And as they were the plants I wanted to protect, this was rather self-defeating.
How do I know the coffee was poisoning the beans? I don’t have direct evidence, but my plants were rather pale, spindly things (and one just upped and died), until I stopped giving them coffee (maybe they couldn’t sleep?). Then, from the top down, they started to go a darker green, and indeed flourished (although still behind everyone else I knew who grew runner beans this year). Next year, I’m considering protecting some plants with coffee and others with metaldehyde, to see if it really does make a difference.
Beans
You see? I’m still thinking about experiments.
When I came over from Australia, I spent a bit of time with my parents in Lincoln. There I helped my mother (her of Chilean Potato tree fame) dig the allotment and plant several rows of seed potatoes, aided by my young assistant, Sophie.
Sophie
Much to Sophie’s delight we’ve been eating some of those potatoes for a month, now, and there’s no end in sight (which is good, because the few I planted here won’t keep us in wedgies for very long). But more excitingly, the tomato seedlings my mother gave me did rather well. ‘Excitingly’, because for three bloody years in Sydney I had no luck at all with them.
Tomatoes doing well
I also scored some cucumbers from up North. And this isn’t scientific at all, but I thought it was pretty:
Cucumber
Nuke the bastards. That cohort doesn’t deserve having a control group.
While I agree with you as regards the slugs, I am quite curious to discover whether it was the coffee that made the beans sick.
Wedgies? That used to be something horrible that public schoolboys did to each other.
Now that you’re back in England you have this stuff called soil in which to grow potatoes. I imagine the potatoes didn’t much like the Sydney sand.
Shoof? Shoof?
I envy you your green fingers. Our garden is still a disaster from building work done last year, which isn’t quite finished…
Did you ever try tea leaves? I remember learning in high school that they were meant to have some sort of beneficial effect on plants… Don’t recall what effect that was though. btw, was lovely to see you and Jenny last week 🙂
Tell them about the strawberries that are descended from your previous strawberries!
That may be Sophie, but she’s certainly not in Lincoln in the photo.
The strawberries! Yes. Another time, my little ones.
What’s wrong with ‘shoof’?
Reminds me of how I’ve been absent from both The Network and Albion’s hallow’d shores.
Lovely opening para by the way
Slugs are a pain. My mum used to collect them from ou garden every evening and put them in the freezer to kill them. And perhaps to keep me out of the ice-cream box – I was horrified to meet slugs instead of chocolate icecream in there. I don’t know if it actually put any significant dent in the slug population though.
Hmm. That’s kind of like Special Forces slug control, isn’t it? Rather than nuking everything, going in and taking them down individually. Reduces collateral, I guess.
Thanks Ian. Hope to see you here soon.
Ah, Special Forces! I’ll tell her that, she’ll like it 🙂
Nothing wrong with ‘shoof’. Nice, woody word. Eating the croquet hoops.
It was a good tomato year indeed.
And coffee does affect plant health. We had expensive potted plants in the foyer in front of one of our lecture halls and the plants kept dying because students and visitors had a habit of pouring the leftovers of their coffee break coffee in the pots. Now the pots have a sign reading “These plants do not like coffee.”
If you want, I can repeat your experiment in our greenhouse – we’ve got place for several trays of seedlings (peas, beans, whatever) which can be treated with or without Coffea Eco-slug Repellent TM.
Brilliant! Outsourcing experiments, I like this idea.
@raf
You wrote greenhouse but you probably meant core facility.
@ Richard: I’m envious of both the garden and the cool autumn weather. We still have temperatures in the 90s here, and the only harvest from my garden has been eggplants. Not that there’s anything wrong with eggplants (and I put them to good use), but I hated that the tomato, zucchini, and cucumber plants succumbed to extreme hot weather.
Your first paragraph made me re-experience, briefly, autumn days in London. Thanks! 😉
Lovely post. “Shoof” had me puzzled as well, though. A quick Googling reveals the following meanings (among others):
– a word used to express displeasure or in the place of an obscenity
– a TV network, “Arab Media Group’s latest venture into new media”
– a supplier of “a wide range of animal husbandry equipment”
and one or two less savoury things.
Lovely bokeh on the cucumber too. Hm, how many times have I said that this week?
Shoof is teh onomatopoeia.
And I had to look up ‘bokeh’. I just do it, I don’t talk about it much.
Kristi, you’re welcome to visit anytime 🙂
Sorry, should have said “DOF” instead.
Now that I got straight off.
And coffee does affect plant health. We had expensive potted plants in the foyer in front of one of our lecture halls and the plants kept dying because students and visitors had a habit of pouring the leftovers of their coffee break coffee in the pots. Now the pots have a sign reading “These plants do not like coffee.”
Everything in moderation. I mean, milk is instantly lethal, if you get run over by a milk tanker.
Is the time of drink an teh!
As soon as Alejandro shows up the drinking begins 🙂
@RW: Thanks for clarifying – I was just about to google it myself!
My dear Anna, you do not thinking that I’m an drunkard. Is only a cup of
tea, sorry teh.I didn’t even notice “shoof” until people started talking about it. I did read the sentence, but I just understood what it meant without considering that I didn’t know the word.
Now I’m starting to wonder if I speak English at all. If maybe all words mean something different to you, and it’s just a coincidence that we seem to understand each other. (Or maybe that’s not so much my problem, as…no, I won’t finish that thought.)
Anyway. Semantics, yay!
Dear Alejandro – of course not! Tea it is – cheers!
Metaldehyde runs in my veins. Don’t discourage the slugs — melt them.
Heh, Eva: maybe we’ve gone beyond language to straight in yer brain stem understanding?
Wait till the Daily Mail get hold of that one.
@ Richard: I hope to make it back to England in the near future; I thoroughly enjoyed my visit in February of this year. I’d really prefer a prolonged stay, even if it was a working visit to teach or do research, but, alas, sabbaticals are not part of the academic program here.
For this blogger (I’ve knitted several of her patterns), the key to combating slug and insect damage appears to be to plant a very large vegetable garden.
Rotherhithe will greet you 🙂
I’m late on this, but those tomatoes look beautiful!
Why, thank you blush
Kristi, thanks for that link. Now I have freezer envy.
@ Jenny: I love reading that blog. It has knitting prøn AND garden prøn.
I think having a separate freezer, even without such an abundance of home-grown produce, is an excellent strategy. I plan to buy a small one soon, so I can cook or bake big batches of chili, curried vegetables, spaghetti sauce, corn muffins, etc. on the weekends, and have an easier time of preparing dinner when I get home from the lab late.
Separate freezers FTW. Lived in Sydney for three years with only a small top-of-fridge freezer. But then, as I say: couldn’t get tomatoes to grow properly (not potatoes, Nathaniel).
A chest freezer got me into the half-pig-at-a-time market. Non-industrial pork tastes better.
Um, I blogged about that somewhere, too.