Sound man

Despite turning up on R4's Today programme and dissing the new Radiohead album because it lacks 'immediate appeal', the world is a better place now that Andy Kershaw is broadcasting again (Music Planet BBC R3 ). After an absence of several years, which at one time looked permanent, he's been allowed to do what he does best, namely, go to far away lands and report on the music and culture.

Independent article 2008

Poultry Profit

Amongst the very good reasons not to bother eating meat, there is now another: You'll encourage more couples to take part in BBC2's A Farmer's Life for Me, which is basically The Apprentice, taken out of the City and plonked in rural Suffolk, with Jimmy Doherty playing Alan Sugar.

Profit's still the name of the game of course and this week the contestants are challenged to devise schemes to make cash from poultry. It turns out that the ability to make a fox proof poultry run is not as important as plucking (sorry) a marketing idea 'outside the box', out of the box, as it were.

And no, I don't want your ridiculous dead bird stuffed into a jar for sixteen quid thanks and neither does anyone else in their right mind. Put your inseminators and incubators and slaughterhouses away. You're all fired, get orf the land and let me plant something. When will they ever learn?

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.

Ice Age Cometh

Despite the first harsh frost and sub-zero temperature, lobelia flowers are still hanging in there six months after being planted out, providing a smidgen of colour in an otherwise dormant and decaying garden.

The allotment yields a good supply of kale and winter greens and the ground is not yet too solid to harvest the last of the beetroot and some frost-sweetened parsnips.

Jam 57

Sixty teenagers had a rip-roaring party at Green Lung Towers this week, leaving much detritus in their wake. One of the things they did to amuse themselves was to count the number of pots of jam in the fridge - 57 apparently. Happily, it all stayed in the jars.

Shake the tree

Ice in the water trough, apples out of reach, a curled fox slumbering in sunshine. Kale ready, leeks on the way, onions started.

Pears for your heirs

"No, 'heirs' not 'hairs'," I explained to the bemused balding bloke on the checkout at Lidl, who'd just been struggling to wave a Doyenne Du Comice pear tree at a barcode reader.

Puzzled by the cosmos

"But why do you bring them to work?" she asked, delighted yet slightly suspicious of the floral display. Surprised by the question, all I could manage was a feeble, "It's what I do."

Propaganda

Turned off some nasty propaganda on Channel 4 tonight, 'What the Green Movement Got Wrong'.

Apparently, because people have been eating GM foods for ten years without any problems, GM technology is safe and necessary, a little like John Selwyn Gummer feeding his daughter beefburgers during the BSE crisis. They totally ignored the issues of cross pollination, monocultures, copyrighted seeds owned by global corporations exploiting poor farmers and famines caused by corrupt regimes not the inadequacies of nature.

The green movement also stood accused of allowing malaria to spread by encouraging the ban on DDT, even though they now wholly support its controlled use to tackle malaria. Again, greenies are maligned for opposing nuclear power, but James Lovelock came out in favour of it way back in 2004 and it's only because of the gobsmacking absence of major solar, wave and wind energy projects in the past twenty years that nuclear has to possibly be the reluctant last resort.

Had to turn it off before they said that the bicycle was wrong.

Watched Harry & Paul again instead ("'Ere mate! D'ya sell lottery tickets?") and listened to a smashing vintage album, produced by ex-Buggle, Trevor Horn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(band)

UPDATE

Good to see that the heavyweights like Monbiot have responded to the programme too, in a much more informed and scientific manner.
http://www.guardian.co.uk

Rootsman

Getting Chilly

Ta to Mr G for the plants ; )

Autumn Break

Chrysanths

Spot the difference

If you hadn't seen an old friend for ten months would you still recognize them? I'm not convinced that these are the same cats, although this morning I liked to think that they are. The one that disappeared in the snow last New Year used to spend a lot of time in the allotment shed, but the one I met this morning in the raspberry bushes wouldn't go near it.

Nasturtium

Tropaeolum

First & Last

Feverfew

Chrysanthemum parthenium

Oenothera

Lobsnip

Parsnip masquerading as a lobster

Repeat and fade

A lot a rent

Allotment rents up by 19% next year - that's 15.9% above the current inflation rate of 3.1%. Shurely shome mishstake!

Cortaderia selloana