Spring Planting regime

A few friends came round the other day. We decided to get together and try to organise the joint planting of the vegetable seeds in a slightly centralised fashion. We jointly bought the seeds from a variety of catalogues. I have ordered a load of seed trays. The poly tunnel has just been erected. The infrastructure for a watering system is being planned. We are nearly ready to go...

Having looked through the seed catalogues it seems clear that we should be able to harvest cabbages all year round. We should be able to get carrots ready to eat for 10 months of the year. We should be able to grow salad crops to keep us going from New year to Christmas.

Last year we did not do it quite right. I was campaigning for the local council elections during March, April and May. The old wooden framed greenhouse gave up the ghost at Easter. (I have chopped this up and made parts of it into an excellent coldframe.) Very little got planted last year, and what did all ripened in August when we were on holiday.

This year I am determined to do better.
I have a new vegetable patch, a new poly tunnel, a new watering system and a new attitude.

It should be a better year all round!!

Thumbs up for the heavy handed

I do not sit in an office all day; sometimes I have to do some manual labour in order to stop my brain from being compressed by electronic gadgetry. Living on a farm, I find that much of the manual work involves lift heavy old bits of machinery, fence posts and the like.
After a relatively short period I noticed the callouses on my hands getting worse and the skin hardening up on my hands. My wife noticed it too and I was instructed to use lashings of hand cream several times a day. I tried this from time to time but to no avail. A local friend supplies special aloe vera products that everyone swears by, so a couple of tubes were bought and given a thorough testing. Even the local vet buys the aloe vera products to keep sutures supple on animals that have recently had minor surgery. It feels great on your hand but just does not last very long; it becomes a very expensive business.
After a couple of months my hands were getting worse rather than better. Doing the washing up and bathing children made it worse still. I started using latex and PVC gloves to stop the dirt getting ingrained into the cracks in the skin.
These small cracks appear in the skin when it is really dry and as the skin dries further the skin shrinks and the cracks enlarge. They tend to get longer and more painful as the day goes on. Occasionally they bleed too.
I spent a few minutes on the web searching for a cure.... There appear to be none that are practical and actually work. There are endless ointments and potions (all of which cost a fortune). Shearing sheep is considered good as fleeces contain a substance called lanolin and shearers always have soft hands, but I can't give up the day job to shear sheep.
None of the ointments seem to last for any length of time. Twenty minutes to half an hours seems to about standard until they have evaporated or been absorped completly. Some ointents really make the cracks sting and none of them stop the dry skin from becoming dry again...short of putting on more cream every half an hour.

By accident I made a great discovery. By putting a tiny amount of Superglue in the cracked skin and bonding it together, the pain immediately stops. It prevents the cracks snagging, pulling or getting bigger when they get caught on a rough surface. And it provides instant protection in the form of an acrylic scab over the wound.
A tiny bottle of super glue would cure hundreds of cracked hands for a few quid, while those precious ointments do not work (in my view), last no time at all and cost a fortune.
However they do usually smell a good deal more pleasant than superglue!

Get your Canoe!...The River is Up!

Sam told me first thing this morning that the river was up and we would be able to go in a canoe. I was a little bit suspicious. I know about half and inch of rain had fallen over night but canoing seemed wildly unlikely. Once the sun was up (Sam is an early riser) I glanced up the field to the Water Meadows and, sure enough, the river was up. This needs to be put in perspective...
For 36 of the past 38 months the water meadows have been lush green pasture. In summer the grass went a shade of hay and in the winter the wild birds have found it to be a haven; out of the wind and with hedges stuffed with berries. It is only in the past two months that we have had sufficient rain to turn it back to water meadow. The stream flows off the top of the hills between two villages. The high ground is clay covered, but as it runs off the hills it comes over the chalk, where is starts to soak in. It will soak in until the chalk becomes saturated.
The picture shows the river as it starts its journey down the hill. It has come from about one mile away, and about 70m vertically up a very gentle slope. Watching the slow but inexorable progress of the stream making its way down the valley keeps the children entranced for ages. Then they have the opportunity of building dams and bridge for a couple of days if it does not dry up again and disappear until the next downpour.
So much for my canoe trip!

Painting Pylons

The National Grid own all the pylons that you see striding across the countryside. The pylon structures were designed to withstand ferocious weather conditions and to last for 100 years. But the cables will not last for quite so long.
We have a line of pylons that go past, us a few hundred yards away. They start near The Wash and go to Brent Pelham, on the way to powering eastern London and the surrounding area. This part of the grid carries 400,000 volts.
The pylons have now been up for 50 years and they are having their first major overhaul. This involves inspections and repairs, paining every bit of exposed metal with two coats of paint and then replacing the cables. It is a massive engineering excercise and has taken over year to date. Last summer they painted some pylons and changed the cables on the eastern side of the line. This spring and summer they will replace the cables on the other side.
Every road, farm track and footpath gets a scaffolding safety cage built over it. Many of the farm tracks (which are mainly mud) have been rebuilt with hardcore, so that the contractors vehicles can reach the pylons easily. Hundreds of sign posts have been erected directing the National Grid contrator to the correct pylons. And steepljacks can be seen climbing to the very top of the pylons like monkeys, with paint pots strapped to their belts.
Last summer there was a spate of thefts of equipment from beneath the pylons at night, so we had endless visits by security guards in red vans, many of whom stayed out in their vehicles, in the middle of nowhere, for days at a time. I can't think which would be worse: the soul destroying boredom of the security guard or the endless vertigo of the steeple jack.