Compact and Bijou

SomeBeans has been busy. As we are giving up half an allotment and concentrating on the one allotment, we have had to do a little shed building. We bought a new shed, as we aren't big into skip diving, and so can't easily get hold of the raw materials to build your traditional allotment shed. So, a flat pack shed doesn't have so much character, but it does the important stuff, like keeping rain out. Hopefully.

The current shed on the half allotment has some character and enough internal iron bracing for it to withstand hurricane force winds. Not quite so sure about the new one.

Old shed - no, I'm not stood on one leg, it really does lean like that

The new shed has had quite a hard life so far - being too big to fit in the car, and not having the time to hang around the allotment to have it delivered straight there, SomeBeans had to take it to pieces, and then reassemble it when it had been taken down to the plot. So, the boards were prised off, the floor cut in half, the sides taken to pieces, carefully labelled, and then put back together again. Hopefully at some point in 2009 it will be dry enough to put some preservative on it. But I'm not holding my breath.

So, behold - a shed we can actually stand in, if not quite large enough for a garden party...

New shed - not quite such a character, but room to swing a cat. At least a relatively patient cat, who doesn't mind a few cracks round the head

We're just waiting for the spring winds, and fully expect to go down the plot one day and see a pair of stripey stockings with ruby slippers at the end sticking out from under the shed.

Thank you SomeBeans!

Great British flavour combinations

Part 1 in a series of 1.

Chicken and Leek

ARKive

I've been a bit remiss on the blogging front recently - both posting on my own blog, and also visiting the blogs of others. More the Infrequent Gardener than the Inelegant Gardener. Work has been getting in the way of the important things in life. I hope to catch up on peoples' blogs over the next few weeks, so expect my normal service of banal comments on your blogs to resume shortly!

I'm not even going to post about gardening now, but about a website I discovered a while ago, and rediscovered yesterday evening, when I should have been working. Needless to say, once I rediscovered it, I didn't get much work done. The website is called ARKive and describes itself as ..." a unique collection of thousands of videos, images and fact-files illustrating the world's species."

It is an amazing collection of images and information on a whole host of animals and plants, which is continually being updated. It covers most animals you'll have heard of, and many, many you won't have heard of.

Some favourites chez Mouffetard include:
- Goodfellow's Tree Kangaroo (otherwise known as the Ornate Tree Kangaroo, which suggests the creature is decorated with curlicues and perhaps patterned with paisley). The tree kangaroo may have evolved to take advantage of an empty ecological niche, but it doesn't look particularly at home in its new niche.

- The Pangolin - how cool are they?

- Allen's Slippery Frog - you can just imagine the conversation between the people who discovered that as they decided what to call it. Dave: "what shall we call it?"; Allen; "Argh, I've dropped the darn thing".

- Flightless Scaly Tailed Squirrel. why they had to specify its flightlessness in its name, I don't know. I know that there are some 'flying' squirrels, but flightless is pretty much the default setting for a squirrel. Perhaps it's related to the Flightless Hippo and the Flightless Aardvark.

- Maputaland Cannibal Snail - I could do with a few of those to put the fear of god into the many snails in my garden.

- Satanic leaf-Tailed Gecko - amazing looking creature with a wonderful name. Its species name is phantasticus, which it most certainly is.

Edit: I've added Verreaux's Sifaka - which bears an uncanny resemblence to Barry Cryer

Another edit: I wasn't going to add another one, but I challenge you to guess what a Tasselled Wobbegong is before you look. Half animal, half bath mat.

I could go on listing them forever - every time I look I discover lots more wonderful organisms.
Please do have a look at this wonderful website, and if you come across something fun or fascinating, let me know!

Ivy - a study

It has been sunny this afternoon, so I have been playing with the macro lens again. There aren't many flowers about, but plenty of buds and new shoots - the hellebores are just about ready to burst into a floral chorus ion the next week or two.

The best photos of the afternoon, however, have turned out to be of something which I haven't planted - wild ivy growing up a cherry near the end of the garden, and a visitor from next doo, which clothes some of the fencing. The sun brings out the beautiful colour of the stem.

A useful plant for wildlife, flowering late in the year when nectar is scarce, and providing berries. Natural England lists the animals which use ivy.

New Year Inertia

I think that we have safely passed the point in the new year when we all rush to make resolutions, only to feel like failures when we fail to go to the gym/lose weight/be nice to small kittens and so on.

I don't make resolutions.

So, this year, I wish to celebrate New Year Inertias - the things I do wrong or fail to do every year, each time vowing that next year I'll do it properly.

Amongst my many inertias that I will continue this year are:

• failing to label seedlings and rows of veg properly, meaning that I have no idea what I've planted. I'm always certain that I'll remember what I've planted. I always fail to remember what I've planted.
• Not putting fleece over the carrots, thinking that the carrot root flies will magically forget their raison d'etre and fly over my carrots. I'm doomed to tunnelled carrots forever.
• Not promptly planting out new purchases, but leaving them to languish on the patio until I eventually get around to it.
• Failing to sow veg successionally, so that I have a huge glut for a fortnight, where we eat solely one vegetable, and then have to wait a month for another veg to mature.
• Failing to plant out delicate young seedlings at the right time, so that they become angry, contorted seedlings desperate to escape from their pots.
• Not thinning out seedlings, as it just feels wrong and evil to pluck out healthily growing plants, just bcause they're too close together. This is despite the fact that I know that they grow much better when thinned.
• Buying too many seeds. I have enough lettuce and carrot seed packets to keep Chester fed with these veg for the next 10 years.

To mis-quote George Satayana: "Those who do not learn from their foolish gardening mistakes are doomed to repeat them."

Happy 2009 - may you learn from your mistakes.

Cold spell hits Cheshire - alpine wildlife move in

No, it hasn't been quite that cold in Cheshire, but not far off. This handsome chap is made of bronze and can be found at the top of a mountain in Obergurgl, Austria.

Just in case anyone has been wondering, the pork pie has now disappeared.

A seasonal message

May your gardens flourish,

Every seed germinate,

Rain fall, but not too much;

Roses never suffer from blackspot,

Your tomatoes be blight free.

Colour always be in your garden;

Hostas never nibbled,

Rudbeckias shine as bright as the sun,

Irises as blue as the summer sky.

Summers warm and autumns mild

Tulips bright as jewels;

May the coming year be good for you

And healthy for you and yours;

Spring will be with us soon!

Season's Greetings from the Inelegant Gardener.

A vision in turquoise and russet

Taken by my father at Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust on Wednesday.
No need for tinsel and fairy lights when nature supplies the decorations.

Cockney Sparrers

No, not a post about Martine Mccutcheon and other former Eastenders actresses, but about the various accents of British birds.

This post is an elaboration of a comment made on Baklava Shed Coalition about the accents of vegetables. Somebeans and I have long agreed that different birds speak in different accents.

Obviously, the house sparrow speaks with a cockney accent - this goes without saying. But have you considered that the starling is in fact a Brummie? Blackbirds have a soft Worcestershire accent, and song thrushes the closely related but rather more rural Herefordshire accent. Robins have a relatively neutral accent, but are generally rather cross about life.

Seagulls all speak with a German accent - I think this one is due to having watched Watership Down at an early age. Crows are rather posh. Magpies have a Black Country accent (subtley different from the Brummie starling accent). Mallards are from Norfolk, and wrens from Newcastle. I'd argue that wood pigeons come from Dorset, but Somebeans says they have 'village idiot' voices - I won't comment on that, as Somebeans is from Dorset...

However, this may not be quite as far fetched as it seems - research has found that species of birds do have regional accents (as do dolphins, frogs and cows).

Farewell to the imaginer of childhood dreams

Today, as I was driving in to work, I heard that Oliver Postgate had died. As a child of the 1970s, I was brought up with many of his creations. The Pogles of Pogle's Wood taught me about table manners (or rather, how not to hold my knife and fork). I got my passion for reading from our family's fortnightly visits to the library, where I read the sagas of Noggin the Nog. I avidly watched Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss (where I first found out what a butterbean was). And best of all, those knitted extra-terrestrials - the Clangers.

With the Clangers, I learnt about the important things in life. Mischief, blue string pudding, dustbin lids. And environmentalism - even in the early '70s, Postgate used to compare the dirty factories on earth to the carefully nurtured environment of the Clanger's home world. I was slightly scared of the scolding soup dragon. And I shared the fears of
Small Clanger when he became lost in the caves beneath the surface of the planet - I cried as he folded his ears over his eyes, as I cried when the Hamish pincushion went back to his lost tribe in a story in Bagpuss. I'm almost welling up thinking about it now. Such are our lives shaped.

But Oliver Postgate was also a political creature. Grandson of the Labour politician George Lansbury, he was a conscientious objector, spending time in prison because of this. He continued to write political commentary up until recent years. If you're a fan, read his autobiography 'Seeing Things' - a story of a fascinating life, including when he was summoned to the head of Children's Programming at the BBC who wanted to censor The Clangers, as Major Clanger had clearly sworn.

Oliver Postgate - you will be sadly missed but cherished in the hearts of a myriad of children, both young and old.