Month: June 2016

Algorithm Armageddon?

On By TontowilliamsIn Life1 Comment

2016-06-03 11.25.19Sometimes Amazon’s algorithms make me smile, other times they make me cringe. Now I know that Amazon uses your purchases and those of people who have also bought the same thing as you to make recommendations. (I know I can manually “tune” my recommendations, but sometimes it’s fun to discover new things).

The other day I ordered some more plant clips (see picture above), they’re handy things to have in the potting shed and the allotment, but they wear out and break eventually. As I had seemingly broken the last of our old ones I ordered some more. Now it seems Amazon wants to sell me horse blankets and no we don’t have a horse, but obviously someone out there who also buys plant clips does.

It begs the question however that with all the consumer tracking (and other tracking) that goes on out there, what happens if one day some I buy something, also bought by someone else who also has some other less than savoury delectations? Does anyone screen these things, or is it all automated? My guess is the latter.

Potting Shed Update

On By TontowilliamsIn Fork To Fork, Garden / Allotment, Self-sufficient

The potting shed is now fully over to it’s “summer” set-up, with all the troughs for peppers and tomatoes full. I’m not growing cucumbers in there this year, as I’ve switched to outdoor cucumbers on the allotment this year as an experiment. I’ll have more tomatoes than I originally planned too, as I’ve lost the first trough of peppers to the snails!

I’ve sown some radish seeds in some of the spare space around some of the plants too. I want to see if I get better luck with a more frequent watering regime, than I have so far on the allotment. The radishes there are coming up very woody, and not very big and I think that might be due to the infrequency of watering.

Short video update below on the potting shed.