Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read or just sparked my interest in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
Why don’t we treat climate change with the rigor we give to terror attacks? [The Guardian]
Britain’s got talons: the writer raised on raptors [The Guardian]
Make a honk for rare geese [The Guardian – Patrick Barkham]
The week in wildlife – In pictures [The Guardian]
This has to be another sign that spring is on the way, the potatoes are out in their egg box holders chitting!
Why chit potatoes? Well simply when growing at a small scale (commercial potatoes farmers rarely chit potatoes, due to the space constraints), it helps the potatoes to get a little bit of a head start before they go into the ground. The aim is to encourage the potatoes to start to sprout, and ideally we’re looking for small (normally) dark purple sprouts. This is achieved by leaving the potatoes in the light at room temperature for a couple of weeks before planting.
I use cardboard egg boxes, as their ideal for supporting the potatoes, and preventing them from rolling around, and potentially damaging the sprouts that I’m trying to encourage. You can also use seed trays or seed modules – horses for courses folks, it’s whatever works for you!
As I mentioned in my video update (6th Feb) below, folklore says that normally you plant early potatoes at Easter and then harvest 100 days later. Now I’m using the term folklore advisedly here, because it certainly is good advice and last year proved exactly true. I planted my spuds on Easter Saturday and exactly 100 days later dug the first plant to an excellent crop!
This year Easter Saturday is the 26th March, which as I said in the video feels a little early given the potential for there still to be frost (our last predicted frost day is normally mid April, but again only a prediction), however having checked last year’s calendar, Easter Saturday 2015, was April 4th. So on that basis only 9 days later than it is this year. So perhaps not as early as I felt it was.
For now I’m not going to make any decisions either way. I’d certainly like to get my potatoes in the ground on Easter Saturday; as it feels like a milestone in the growing calendar. At the moment however, the ground is too wet, and the risk of them rotting in the ground is probably greater than any risk of frost, so there’ll need to be a dry spell between now and Easter anyway if that’s what I’m aiming for!
Sometimes it is the little things that make the difference when it comes to having an allotment. All the wet weather recently has meant that in total I’ve probably only spent one full day on the plot since the start of the year.
In practical terms that’s not a huge problem, I’m ahead of where I need to be with digging and the soil is still too cold to sow any seeds, but it was nice to see that the Purple Sprouting Broccoli is just starting to show some florets.
Looks like there’s already a good meal there, and the start of a few more besides.
A brilliant little mix & match guide for making raw energy balls, from our new cookbook ‘Energy Bites’. These were the first type of energy balls that I ever made and they’re still my favourite snack! Incredibly quick and easy to make, really good for you and very tasty too. Yay!
This guide will get you started on a simple dried fruit and nut version. Choose one ingredient (or a combination of ingredients) from each column and whizz in a food processor until sticky. Shape into balls and roll in yummy stuff like chia seeds, cacao powder, bee pollen or crushed nuts. Firm up in the fridge for 1 hour (if you can wait that long!) and then eat. They freeze really well too. Simple…
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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read or just sparked my interest in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
Antevernals in the Anthropocene [Last Word on Nothing Blog]
Swansea tidal energy scheme faces ‘disastrous setback’ from government review [The Guardian]
Fracking in Lancashire against locals’ wishes would be a terrible injustice – Mark Ruffalo [The Guardian]
Your Dog Needs This Basic Operating Manual. So Do You. [Brian Beker – Citizen Times]
‘Phony peach’: the disease that threatens to devastate Britain’s trees and plants [The Guardian]
Europe’s climate change goals ‘need profound lifestyle changes’ [The Guardian]
The innovators: how your coffee can light up your barbecue … and boiler [The Guardian]
EDF under pressure to abandon Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project [The Independent]
Flint isn’t alone: America has a coast-to-coast toxic crisis [Grist]
The Week in Wildlife – in pictures [The Guardian]
Coming soon (11th March 2016) to Amazon Prime, based on the bestselling novels by Michael Connelly.
I think this weekend was the first reasonable block of time that I’ve been able to spend on my allotment this year. We’ve had weeks of consistent rain, which has left the soil too damp to work without the fear of compacting it, so there has been a limit to the jobs that I’ve been able to get done. The mild temperatures however have meant that the weeds have continued to grow, and on some of the areas that I had already dug, they have been starting to show through. Spending some time weeding ahead of the forthcoming sowing of seeds was therefore important. If the weather holds mild, and dries up a bit more, I should be able to start sowing a few crops under cover in the near future – I hope!
Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read or just sparked my interest in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
No More Strawberries At Wimbledon (Edie Blog)
Elephants are being killed on a massive scale. There is a way to stop this [The Guardian – Patrick Barkham]
We’re drowning in cheap oil – yet still taxpayers prop up this toxic industry [The Guardian – George Mobiot]
The Misadventures of Garbage Dog [Last Word on Nothing Blog]
This Week In Wildlife In Pictures [The Guardian]
Mark Ruffalo message to David Cameron on fracking
As long term readers of this blog will know, I’m a fan of crime fiction, both in terms of the written word, but also on TV. The last few weeks of TV have been particularly good, with there being something new to watch nearly every night of the week (barring live FA cup matches and other sporting interludes).
It set me thinking that with all the crime shows on TV, does it really reflect real life, or is it perhaps a bit of gratuitous entertainment?
So picking this past week as an example here’s what’s been on the main terrestrial channels and the body count:
Sunday: Vera (ITV1): 2 murders
Monday & Tuesday: Silent Witness (BBC1): 6 murders
Wedesday: Midsummer Murders (ITV1): 3 murders (nearly 4, but Ch. Insp. Barnaby saved the day in the nick of time).
The BBC is also showing Death In Paradise and Shetland on Thursdays and Fridays respectively, both great shows, but for the purposes of this calculation I’m going to exclude them. The reason being is that the data from the Office for National Statistics covers only England and Wales and therefore the two shows are outside of that jurisdiction. I’ve also excluded repeats and reruns on other channels because they technically are in the past, the above are new / current series never shown before.
So fictional body count from above = 11 (in under a week), so rounded up (11 x 52 = 572). Compared to the figure of 534 for “homicide” in the above ONS statistics (Year April 2014 to March 2015, the most recent stats available).
So gratuitous entertainment? It doesn’t really feel like it is, although the numbers whether they are fictional or actual are quite shocking. Given the ebb and flow of the TV crime shows, the numbers will go up and down week to week, as shows come to the end of their run and are off air before new ones start.
Obviously some longer term analysis might be useful, but as snapshot it appears that perhaps the numbers are not far from reality, and compared to ten years ago when the number of actual homicides was 868, and the number of crime shows on TV probably less, perhaps it’s not a bad reflection (sadly) of real life, if it is somewhat over dramatised for entertainment.
Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read or just sparked my interest in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.
MIGHTY MINESTRONE & OTHER WINTER WARMERS [Hole Food Family Blog]
Analysis: The UK’s ‘looming’ electricity supply gap [Carbon Brief]
Don’t knock dead whale selfies [The Guardian]
The Week In Wildlife – In pictures [The Guardian]
Chicken Cordon Bleu for the Regular Dude
Electronic Scrapbook 