I am slowly catching up with my gardening related activities: the allotment, my horticulture course and the blog.

Today I made a big order at Garden Organic: some seeds (but not too many, as you know my collection is of a size it might save the world from famine already), the fantastic aluminium tubes and connecting balls (the cage I made for my brassica is successfully keeping the birds off, it is sturdy and easy access), gloves (which never seem to last much) and a few other bits and bobs.

The charity seems to be struggling, and they are not the only ones, as the Soil Association have also been asking for more money lately. So I hope the oder was a little help.

Another thing that I did and got me a bit of excitement back (after the last three very weak weeks) is enrolling in the Garden Organic experiments 2010. There are four:

• compost as a growing medium;
• growing tree spinach;
• surveying butterflies;
• slug barriers (which I most definitely would love to do)

and I signed up for three as it seems most appropriate for a horticulture student – I left the one on compost as I do not feel confident enough of my composting skills yet, and similarly I left the one about helping the University of Plymouth on a study on invertebrates in compost heaps.

Tonight I promise I will sit down and make a graph of all the plants’ organs. I keep procrastinating on this, as is seems an unwieldy, enormous task, but it’s no good: I am falling behind with my study schedule!

Studying science after some 20 years of humanities only is trying, and weird. On one side it is very schematic and logical as you would expect, but unexpectedly to me so many things are not known – i.e. the taxonomy of plants keeps changing as more knowledge is acquired: Kew magazine this month mentioned one such re-classification of plants based on DNA research has just completed.

It’s fascinating, though, to learn more about such an important resource for humankind as plants are. It set me thinking again about nature and ecosystems versus science and technology and human ambitions. Maybe I will write more about it.

Another weekend of miserable weather has gone, and my stored onions are rotting already.

Not much to say.

— Post From My iPhone

I had a roast with my own potatoes (after a laborious cleaning of all the slugs’ and varied other holes) and turnip Rapa Bianca Lodigiana… the only non-allotment ingredient was sweet potato from my vegbox.
It is always very rewarding when you can cook most of a meal with your own stuff.

Despite the mud, I decided to sow some rocket and salad under fleece in front of the greenhouse where the sun reflecting on the panels should make the area warmer.

It was too waterclogged to try and sow garlic or onions, and I made a call to delay broadbeans at least another week. Instead, I cleared another couple of beds and planted the chrysanthemums that had overspent their time in pots and last year’s bulbs, the ones I did not like in my garden at home.

Inside the greenhouse, the tomatoes are still growing and ripening, even though more and more are getting mildew. The cucumber is sadly no more, and I will have to plant the artichoke from the pot as it is starting to suffer.

Such a pity it gets dark really quickly.

Not the best year for my sowing, isn’t it?

But I managed a couple of hours on Saturday and cleared another bed, on one side of the greenhouse, which I will use for winter salad and maybe my one artichoke.

Study is progressing: I am now on fruits. There are plenty of new terms to learn, and I desperately need some time to sit down and make tables and graphs, as it seem that’s how I learn best.

For example, I learned this morning that the strawberry is a false fruit, as the flesh does not come from the ovary but from the receptacle. The actual fruit of the strawberry plant are the little beige seeds you can spot on the surface, dry fruits of the type achenes.

Just occurred now that, besides my graphs and tables, I may make special plant cards for the most significant examples…

— Post From My iPhone

I have no pumpkin to show you for Halloween. Just some more or less ripe tomatoes, a handful of raspberries and a good amount of spinach beet. And a pretty un-spooky picture of the plot at sunset.

Moreover, I am afraid I am not in too good a mood to write either: stressful times with the builders at home, and I had to spend my week nights writing recorded letters in reply to their bullying.

After studying the flower *yes, I mean the flower stamen pistils and all* in the library this morning while it rained, I went to the allotment this afternoon as soon as the sun came out, all eager and hopeful for a relaxing time.

My first sight as I passed through the allotment’s gate was a child running around my plot and suddenly disappearing. You have to know that my allotment is sunk, the path being some twenty centimetres above it. That was not a good omen. When I came close, the reason for the disappearance was clear: my blooming neighbour, whose party the child belonged to, had as usual left all his blooming stuff in the path and the blooming kid had fallen in my plot, leaving a nice footprint in my leeks’ bed. Not only that, but his blooming mother took my plot for the blooming path and just felt free to use it to walk in.

You might have understood I WAS FURIOUS – but a select few may also appreciate my sense of humour. So furious was I, that I thought the time was come finally to tell Keith it was unbelievably annoying that he treated my allotment as his service area. He had the cheek to rebut that he did not know I was coming and mutter he has to pick his crops (what that implies in terms of how he moves around when I am not there I cannot quite bear to think)… I was too angry to utter anything sensible so I kept quiet. I should have told him that he was supposed to use the space on his plot to move around, leaving some walking and working space around the beds. I should have said that if I had walked on his blooming beds he would not be blooming happy, would he?

We were talking just last week with Nikki and Tom about people who take a lot of liberties, even as crop-damaging as walking dogs on seed-beds, with other allotment holder’s plots.

Anyway, I just gave up sowing my broadbeans (which was the plan for today), and demarcated the boundary with a line instead. I will have to buy a thick and colourful rope as some other people did (wonder why ;-p). There is a naval shop near my office, come to think of it.

After that, my sowing mood had gone, so I cleaned the shed from top to bottom. It was relaxing in a way, I had a good time after all, and I made sure there were no rats in the shed, which was fear.

But I could have done without that just today. Maybe the weather will keep tomorrow… tomorrow is another day.