Shoots & Leaves

Comfrey


Redcurrant

So

That time of year again; out with the seed packets, pots, propagators and compost. First off, in the flowery corner, French marigolds, cosmos and Canterbury bells and for the veg box, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and more broad beans.

Pong

Difficult to propagate and extreemely slow growing, Daphne Odora is in flower now, giving off the most incredible scent.

Flash Geek Talk

Couldn't get the BBC iPlayer to work today, after having to reinstall Mac OSX on my PowerBook, a shaggy dog story in itself, made all the more challenging by not having a working CD drive at the time.

Although some things are back to normal, I lost all my email addresses, despite backing up the Address Book, which now refuses to be imported into the new system. So if you haven't heard from me in a while, drop me an email so I can get your address back.

The physical installation of a new CD/DVD drive, with which to attempt to reset the unrecognised administrator password with a system disk, having tried and failed to do this by entering commands in the terminal window on startup, appears to have resulted in a mishap on the logic or motherboard, causing the Level 3 Cache to fail: Only one of the two 512MB memory cards are now recognised, which at first I thought just meant that one had come loose during the operation, but having swapped them both around, it's evident that the problem's deeper. I bore you with all this, because for a while, I wondered if this was why I couldn't watch telly on my iPlayer.

After some poking around I found that the minimum version of the Flash plugin required for the iPlayer is 9.0.115 and I only had 9.0.46. (There are a few handy sites that can tell you what version you're using, like this one at Adobe)

Except of course there are always weird exceptions and somehow, I got some of the large screen version of the iPlayer working in 9.0.46, which made me erroneously think for a while that it was iPlayer's fault, not mine.

It was tempting to follow the links and try to install the latest version 10.2, which is what Channel 4/4OD requires now (even though last week, like the iPlayer it worked fine with 9.0.46 or whatever I had installed then) but on closer inspection, that doesn't work on older PPC Macs. Instead, you have to download a whole collection of old versions from Adobe and select and install the relevant one, but before you install a new version of Flash it's recommended that you uninstall the old version, which requires an uninstaller that you have to download from Adobe too.

Half a dozen restarts and a few hours later, most of the iPlayer functionality is back, but along with the other pre-Intel Mac users out there, I'm now excluded from watching 4OD.

Spud U Forgot

Making the most of some sunshine and clearing a patch of ground, I came across half a kilo of potatoes from last year which were perfectly edible and enough for a meal.

Prima rosa

First Up

Catch The Pigeon

Double drat. Don't know how all of the brassicas have been pecked to within an inch of their life, considering they're all under netting. It's possible that birds - most likely pigeons - have been getting in at the sides, or cleverly using their weight to trample the netting until the leaves are reachable.

Back To My Roots

Finally, the ground has thawed enough to enable another parsnip harvest.

Signs Of Life

Unsurprising, as it originates from Siberia, that the rhubarb is one of the only happy plants around at the moment.

Worms In The Carpet

Daisy (not her real name) next door, who's 93, has been hallucinating: Orange worms in the carpet, birds and flowers in the room, garden netting attached to the doctor's head and other weird garden related stuff. They weren't, as I thought when she was telling me, the side effects of radiation therapy or any of the pills she's on, but symptoms of what she called a 'water infection', by which I guessed she meant cystitis. I had to google it afterwards to find some confirmation because it all sounded so bizarre.

Although understandably a bit frightened at the time, Daisy was alright and had been rational and sensible throughout. She'd mentioned the visions to her visiting hairdresser, who'd called the doctor in. At one pont, she hallucinated her late husband in the chair next to her: "I thought he might be trying to tell me something."

Antibiotics cleared it all up in two or three days, which Daisy found remarkable: "To think that six tiny pills could make it all stop." Her generation is largely unused to the possibility of distortions in reality from taking just half of a tiny pill, but the path back to reality is longer than the path away from it.

Trish Keenan

Guardian obituary

Allium ampeloprasum

Basket Case

I had thought that the term 'basket case' alluded to psychiatric patients and the therapeutic pastime of weaving. Apparently it's worse than that and was originally British slang for a quadruple amputee during World War I.



With all limbs intact, what else to do with some prunings from a willow, but embark upon a new hobby. Can you tell what is it yet? Me neither.

60 Not Out

In the recent 60th anniversary episode of The Archers, posh boy Nigel Pargetter fell from the roof of his stately home while trying to take down a banner. The last that listeners heard was a blood-curdling scream as he plummeted earthwards.

Amongst speculation about Nigel's fate on The Guardian website, mygreenlung posted the following :

Wait for it! We haven't heard Nigel hit the ground yet. My bet is that they've left the trampoline out and Nigel bounces back, colliding with David, who's peering over the edge, knocking him to the ground instead. Oooh nooo

Sorry, perhaps I've been watching too many cartoons ; )

Some replies:

The trampoline bounce-back is up there with Hancock's (OK, Galton & Simpson's) disused mine shaft. Brilliant! - Neobor

... really enjoyed all the alternative storylines here (trampoline bounce-back my fave, just) - elisabethmahoney

@mygreenlung oh please, please, please can they use your trampoline idea, that would be brilliant - toonbasedmanc

Bouquets

Not so much brussels sprouts as brussels bouquets: Apparently, if the soil around the base of the stem of the plant isn't firm enough, instead of tight buds you get loose open flowers. Of course they're still perfectly edible and they make a nice change.

Fire up the tree

Indoor Pursuits

-5°

The cold snap continues and the brassicas suffer.

G.C.C.C.