{"id":302,"date":"2009-09-30T21:13:10","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T21:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/09\/30\/on_harvest\/"},"modified":"2009-09-30T21:13:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T21:13:10","slug":"on_harvest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/09\/30\/on_harvest\/","title":{"rendered":"On harvest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Face\"<\/a>
\nCan you tell what it is, yet?<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThese 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.<\/p>\n

\nThis 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<\/em> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nYou might remember that I used coffee grounds to keep the slugs and snails at bay, much to Jenny’s amusement<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\nFirst, 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<\/em> my runner beans. And as they were the plants I wanted to protect, this was rather self-defeating.<\/p>\n

\nHow 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?<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n

\n\"Beans\"<\/a>
\nBeans<\/em><\/p>\n

\nYou see? I’m still thinking about experiments.<\/p>\n

\nWhen 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<\/a> fame) dig the allotment and plant several rows of seed potatoes, aided by my young assistant, Sophie.<\/p>\n

\n\"Request<\/a>
\nSophie<\/em><\/p>\n

\nMuch 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.<\/p>\n

\n\"Toms\"<\/a>
\nTomatoes doing well<\/em><\/p>\n

\nI also scored some cucumbers from up North. And this isn’t scientific at all, but I thought it was pretty:<\/p>\n

\n\"Tears\"<\/a>
\nCucumber<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}