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what the voices in my head tell me to write
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Its been a while
But I am back.
One of the main reasons I have been away is that I have a new job. No more being the webmonkey in the corner at ingenta. I am now the slightly more senior webmonkey in the middle of the room at Patersons.
Ingenta made the very generous offer of "move to Oxford to work, no extra pay and no chance of working from home or take redundancy". Let me see now.... I could barely afford to work for ingenta despite having hardly any bills when I was in Bath. So... "I will take the redundancy please".
So after a bit of gardening leave and a few very annoying interviews and experiences with recruitment agencies I am now working for Patersons developing material for their websites and internal tools.
It's been interesting so far with a lot of new systems to learn. Hopefully some of the experience I gained at ingenta will be useful too.
Of course the other thing to talk about is the garden. The gardening leave did come in handy and its looking really good. Had some great rocket out of it the other day as a first crop from the veggies and some of the other stuff wont be far behind. The flowers were great this spring too. Well last year it was basically bare earth in the spring but this year we had tulips, daffodils, crocus, anemones and aliums in profusion. The tuilps were especially showy but I really like the aliums they almost look like fireworks bursting. Hopefully we will have some more food to eat soon. I reckon either pea shoots, radishes, lettuce or maybe swiss chard will be ready in a week or so. Possibly even spring onions.
We have been using our ingenuity too. I bought a little drip feed irrigation system from Tescos for a tenner and use that to water most of the containers. Then we noticed a length of hosepipe that had been lying around for ages. No one wanted it so I stabbed lots of holes in it and its now laid out on the veggie bed as a soaker hose. I can do most of the watering whilst sat on the new bench or better yet laying in the hammock I got Rae for her birthday.
Freecycle really came up trumps too. I got about 1/2 a ton of gravel for free to go along the bottom of the garden so we dont get muddy going to the new greenhouse and the wormery. Then Rae picked up a 3 tier planter thing and some hanging baskets the other day.
The other big bit of news is that we are moving house. Without leaving the building though. Hopefully in the middle of August we will be moving into another flat in the school. Its bigger and also more private. No more living next door to a bunch of screaming schoolgirls. Rae already has plans for decorating and has sent off for about 100 colour samples, or so it seems. The interesting thing is it actually has a lightwell in the middle. Nick and Karen dont use it for much but we are going to use it for houseplants and bringing on early plants for the garden.
Well thats quite enough of all that for now.
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Friday, August 24, 2007
the bugs and nasties fight back
The caterpillars decimated the broccoli. I was just saying to Rae that they looked ready to eat and 2 days later there was virtually nothing left of them. Now blight has killed the tomatoes just as they were starting to bear fruit too.
Still its our only real disasters and there wasnt much we could do about them without using lots of chemicals.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Friday, August 24, 2007
Thursday, August 09, 2007
just when you thought it was safe to go back in the garden
Cabbage white caterpillars attack the broccoli!
I spent a lovely 10 minutes picking them off and squishing them yesterday evening.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Thursday, August 09, 2007
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
its all coming up roses
Except we didn't plant roses but if we had they would have come up.
The garden transforms itself every day. The flowers are going mad. Big pink things have appeared everywhere. We dug out some of the annuals that have gone over and replaced them with perennials and thats looking good.
The veggie garden is going great too. We have had carrots, lettuce, 2 sorts of onions, spinach, rocket, courgettes, peas and beans so far. The broccoli is nearly ready. The herbs are fantastic with the parsley, basil, mint and oregano standing out right now. We should have more coriander soon too.
The path area is looking great. The thyme is spreading nicely after looking sorry for itself to start with. (its great in cous cous too) The forget-me-nots will be great next year too.
The lawn has a few weeds in it but I am going to dig them out soon but apart from that its looking great.
The tomatoes and peppers are looking good too. We have tiny little peppers and tomatoes forming on the plants so it wont be long before we get to eat them too.
My favourite are the sunflowers. They must be getting up to around 8 or 9 feet tall. I had to construct a system of guy lines to stabilize the canes they are growing up. All from a little tiny seed.
Either gardening is very easy indeed or we have a natural talent.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Eating in
Time for an update about the garden.
Things have been doing really well lately. Once we identified the plantains as weeds it was easy to get rid of them by hand weeding. We had half a wheelbarrow full of weeds and gone over lettuce out at the weekend. The worms had a good feed.
Hopefully this week we will see the first flowers to bloom properly and I reckon by this time next week we will be eating carrots, peas and courgettes too and maybe spring onions.
The only real fly in the ointment are the weeds that have come up in the lawn and the slugs and snails eating stuff. Both to be expected I guess.
Plans are already afoot for next year. We hope to be a lot more organised and plant more stuff and not just plant loads of lettuce all at once. Hopefully we will have sweetcorn, raspberries, potatoes and more beans. We might even take over another plot of spare land.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Monday, June 18, 2007
Sunday, May 06, 2007
and our first meal using things from the garden
well the greens are from the garden. Fresh lettuce, spinach and rocket. Absolutely delicious. One day soon I want to have a mackerel salad where I have caught the mackerel and all the rest of the stuff on the plate is from the garden.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Sunday, May 06, 2007
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Our new toy for the garden
Our wormery arrived today. Its pretty cool. Everything about it is made from recycled material. (apart from the worms)
We set it up tonight and put the worms in with a nice feed of some left over lettuce and stuff.
Hopefully by the end of the summer we will be producing our own worm poo compost. If my Dad finds out you can use it to breed worms for fishing there wont be any left within a couple of weeks.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Thursday, May 03, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Blood and sweat certainly
I was looking through our pics on flickr today. The three below really caught my eye.
These are more or less the beginning middle and current progress of our garden. We went from an unmanagable tangle of coarse grass and weeds to a nice neat well ordered but still developing garden between May 2005 and nearly May 2007. Of course the wedding took up most of 2006 so we didnt get much done apart from getting dad to spray everything with agent orange to kill everything more or less stone dead last September. In fact the last two pictures are just under a month apart
We have rotorvated, built raised beds, raised plants from seed and planted others, put in a "shed" to store all our stuff, put together a mini-greenhouse, terraced one bank, built two paths and even made a scarecrow. All in the last month. We still have to terrace the other bank, move the arch and some of the plants to better locations and plant a few more plants out. Then we get into mowing the lawn and harvesting our veggies whilst admiring the decorative plants. Tonight I did my first bit of hoeing... first of many I think.
It gives both of us a real sense of satisfaction to do something that you can really see. Make a small but significant, to us anyway, contribution to the school, our lives and in a tiny way the planet once we start eating our own food.
Stop the presses! we have just bought a wormery to make our own compost for us.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Monday, April 23, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
a great weekend
We had a long weekend in Titley just outside of Leominster over the weekend. The weather was amazing. 25 degrees plus in the middle of April cant be sniffed at. The only problem was that it was really hazy so we couldnt really see the views.
We spent some time exploring the "black and white" villages of Herefordshire, lots of chocolate box houses and nice pubs.
We both really liked Hay on Wye too. Lots of very nice second hand bookshops. Rae managed to get some collections of Simone de Beauvoir's letters she has been keeping and eye out for. I got loads of random stuff including a book on how cool and amazing the Internet is written in 1993.
Then when we got back things have really started to look up in the garden. We have the beginnings of a lawn! Green stuff is coming up everywhere. Some of it isn't quite where we planted things... we will have to be vigillant.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Friday, April 06, 2007
forget SL, forget coding, forget games
Gardening is far more sastifying.
Spent all afternoon working on the garden. Spread lime on the veg bed and dug it in. Rae built the arch for the clematis and we put it up. Planted all the perennial flowers. Raked and leveled the lawn area one last time before we seed it tomorrow. And we have more stuff coming up in the mini greenhouse!
Tomorrow we sow the grass seed for the lawn and plant lots of veggies. Its all coming together nicely and will look great by the end of the summer hopefully.
Tomorrow is the last really big hard day at it with any luck. The rest of it should be watering, weeding and picking stuff to eat.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Friday, April 06, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
ouch my back hurts
And my legs, and my shoulders and even my hands ache. There is a small bit just to the left of my navel that seems to be ok but everything else hurts.
Yep, we spent the weekend in a frenzy of gardening. We hired a huge rotorvator and blitzed everything in sight back to completely bare soil, and stones. Lots and lots of stones. We are still finding more. Every time I went over any part of the garden we turned up more stones. I think the area must have been used as either a dump for rubble when the extension was put on or possibly its from the original construction of the house. Rae spent most of Saturday morning picking them up while I grappled with the rotorvator.
Then on saturday afternoon we started construction of the shuttering for the raised beds. This was a good mixture of trial and error and actual uses for geometry and trigonometry. Pythagoras was right after all. I always wondered what the practical application of all that stuff in maths lessons was. We used 3-4-5 triangles and other stuff like that to make things more or less square and even. Sadly we ran out of charge on the drill and a few other problems meant we didn't get it quite finished on Saturday.
On Sunday we got my brother and as many bags of well rotted horse poo as we could fit in the car. We finished off the construction of the shuttering with David moaning all the time. (OK we were a little off at times) Then we spread the poo around in the raised beds and took soil off the high spots in the lawn area to make the inner level of the bed to the top of the shuttering whilst mixing in the poo. I got that lovely job.
Then we rotorvated again as walking around making the beds etc had compacted the soil again.
Another trip to Wickes and the poo place gained us more poo, yes more, plus gravel, grass seed, hose pipes etc. When we got back I dug in the poo for the flower bed. I always got the job of digging in the poo. Rae moved the stones we had dug out to make one path and we laid the gravel to make another. One last raking to make it look pretty and that was it.
One long hot bath and a good nights sleep later.... and I still feel like I am 70
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Monday, March 26, 2007
Monday, March 05, 2007
Gardening is fun
The more I do the more I like it.
Labels: garden
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Monday, March 05, 2007
