Burra Maluca

Remember that apple tree we were planting in the first post?

It flowered for the first time this year, and it does look like it might have set its first fruit!

This video seems to be a pretty good introduction...

The sun is getting stronger, which gives not only brighter light but deeper shadows.

The parsley is bursting with life and throwing up flower spikes, which means it will likely soon die. Its crisp, vibrant stems have dollops of white froth, each concealing a tiny froghopper nymph. Or maybe, just maybe it has something to do with the cuckoo singing incessantly up on the hill behind me. I swear he comes down and spits all over my parsley to clear his throat before he starts driving us all cuckoo with his calls.

Of course, I find myself singing back at him. This is the song we all learned when we were kids - it starts about 30 seconds in to the video - Y Gwcw - Dafydd Iwan

And here is a page with the lyrics, including an English translation. Though all the translations I've seen seem to completely miss the point of the chorus. Holi means searching. It's about searching for the cuckoo. Searching as in the sort of search you do on google, looking for answers.

Here's a short video about cuckoo spit.

And a little ditty I learned as a kid...~

The cuckoo comes in April.
He sings his song in May.
In the middle of June
he changes his tune.
And then he flies away.

Though he arrives a bit earlier in Portugal than he used to in Wales and he's already singing in April here.

I used to have a pulley airer at my last place and I'd love to have one here too.

What I really, really want is a little extension to the house that doubles as an outside kitchen and a place to start seeds and cuttings, with a roof, a low wall and a good bug-screen filling in the gaps. Then a clothes airer on a pulley so that it doesn't matter if it starts to rain, and it doesn't matter if the sun is so strong that it will damage the clothes, I can just hang stuff out when I feel like it and fetch it in when it's ready. And it's out of the way and not cluttering the place up.

I love this.

It's short, it's sweet, and it shows the transition from organic to something very permaculture-ish.



And remember, always eat from the garden...

Yeahbutt my son has inherited my total utter tightwad genes...

He won't buy a replacement shade if the one he rescued is still functional. He'll just take a perverse delight in the pink frilliness and wind people up about it if they say anything. He already has a supply of pink paint he puts on all his tools because it's the only colour that none of the other workers will be seen dead with so there's far less chance of any of them ending up in the wrong home.

I suspect the only scenario in which he'd buy another shade is if one of the ones on the chandelier itself gets broken, then he can use the one on the lamp to replace it and he might need something to replace the one on the lamp. But then, my own tightwad genes might kick in and I might make him one out of bits of bent wire and paper and pressed flowers. If I'm feeling sensible, which is unlikely, they might even not be pink ones!

I think the one lesson I really learned from all this is why they do NOT recommend that you use borax in your grey water system. A regular dose of just a teaspoon or two is soon going to add up in a small garden!

4lb is approximately 1.8kg

An acre is 4047 square metres

So 1800/4047 is 0.44, so that's the number of grams you need per square metre. Which isn't far from 10 square feet, assuming you don't really mean 10ft x 10ft.

I'm guessing a teaspoon would weigh around 5g, so you'd probably only need fraction of a teaspoon around your tree.

Or maybe I'd just wash my glassware with some borax to shine it up a bit then sploosh the greywater around the tree.

Edited because some days I'm a total dumbass...

Sometimes I'm so grateful for the metric system...

OK so one 65 litre barrel lasted two people and an occasional visitor a little over six weeks before we had to change it.

In the same time we would normally have used ten 20-litre buckets, so there is a very definite space-saving going on using a larger container.

We're still going to have to source more barrels though...