Saturday 25 May 2013

Catch-up part 2

Not sure why I didn't post an overview photo when I did the end of April catch-up, so here's one now, on this beautiful sunny Saturday (as opposed to the freezing, hail & sleet of Thursday - climate change deniers need to look out the feckin window more often).

Look at that! Your genu-iiiine sunshiiiine.
 
This image was taken with Photosynth, so is several overlapping pics stitched together, hence the rather odd window frame sculpture.

Comparing with last year's pic, I realise these pics aren't very good at all! Hmm... I'll work on that.
 
The main difference between this year & last, not that you can see it very well here, is the fencing Hubby finished last week. A nice bit of horizontal structure, repeated in 4 locations:
  • 2 panels at the far end of the garden increase the privacy without making us feel boxed in, & give us some extra support for climbers.
  • 2 panels nearer the house, to reinforce the paving/lawn break, & help to break up the rather monolithic pizza oven/BBQ construction.
It was so sunny out there today that breakfast was taken on the bench under the living room window. The view was sausagey:

Cumberland sausages from Moorhouse Farm Shop. Mmm... tasty.

The pots around the bench are doing grand & the alliums (last of the Spring bulbs) are about to pop. Not all have fired, & we're light years away from Warmenhoven's award winning Pavilion display (as stalked by Alan Titchmarsh all this week on the BBC's Chelsea coverage) but it looks like we'll get at least 3 big glamorous flowers.

Pop goes the allium

This one & its companion are in a pot right under the living room window, so we'll be ringside when the blooms finally burst. Should be quite a show.

Monday 20 May 2013

The Late Shows with Moorbank

I love The Late Shows.

I work full time so having stuff open in the evening is spot on for me. Plus, as a hard-of-hearing non-drinker, I've gotta to say pubs are losing their appeal... But how about a visit to a gallery or the botanic gardens of a Saturday night instead? Now yer talking!

The Late Shows are in their 6th year & put on a defiant front in the face of the Civic Centre's vicious Arts funding cuts. The range of events & activities over last Friday & Saturday night was just amazing.

All aboard the culture bus

The venues where scattered throughout Newcastle & Gateshead, so the open-topped sight-seeing buses were drafted to ferry people from Moorbank Botanic Garden at the top of Claremont Road, to Ouseburn & over the river to The Baltic & The Shipley Gallery in Gateshead.

Attacked by a cherry tree on the open-topped bus back into town
 
Many of the events were free & visitors got glow stick - a really nice idea: as the night draws in & you walk from venue to venue, you can spy fellow culture vultures. You realise quite how many people aren't just out for the usual night on the lash.

Got me a glow stick!

1st stop for me was Moorbank. The Garden has had a stay of execution since I wrote about it last, & the Friends are working their socks off trying to secure the funding & the permissions to keep it open. All power to 'em!

It was a bit too dark for visiting the outdoor areas but the glasshouses were just magical in the evening light.

Totally Tropical

How orchids should look, rather than dead like mine

In the Tropical House the orchids were putting on a spectacular show. On my last visit the volunteers mentioned that most of the orchids are donations - folk buy them from M&S, but once the flowers die they've no idea what to do with them. Moorbank clearly do! I really should've donated mine rather than consigning it to the compost heap...

Gotta love pitcher plants

Moorbank also has quite a collection of carnivorous plants, & I do love them for their weirder shapes. I know they're quite difficult to keep but the ones here, like everything else, just look amazing.

Desert sessions

If you visit Moorbank during the day, the key atmospheric difference you notice between the 2 main glasshouses is the humidity: moist in the Tropical House; dry in the Desert House. But visiting in the evening you also get: hot in the Tropical House; cold in the Desert House. Ah yes, desert can get cold at night. I always forget this, even though we saw frost on Saharan dunes (& I froze my ass off) on our Tunisian daybreak camel ride (on holiday, a thousand years ago).

A number of cacti were flowering

After admiring Moorbank's cactus & succulent collection, you could mosey round to the Cactus & Succulent Society's stand & take a little bit of the desert home with you - on the walk up Claremont Road, it was so cool to pass happy customers proudly clutching their new pets.

Not so starry night

Folks from Kielder Observatory were also a Moorbank for The Late Shows. The Gardens back onto part of the Town Moor & so are in one of the darkest areas of the City, so the plan had been to do a little stargazing... No great surprise then that we had the foggiest night so far this Spring. I have this kind of track record with astronomical observations: I made the trip to our nearest event for Stargazing Live a couple of years ago & of course it was cloudy. We got luckier in 1999 after hauling ass down to Cornwall for the eclipse - it was cloudy but we were at Mullion Cove on The Lizard, one of the few places in the UK where the cloud lifted right on cue. Pretty damn cool.

So instead of looking at Saturn & Jupiter, the lads from Kielder took us though some beautiful photos from the Cassini probe (& others). Check this film of the Huygens lander floating down to Titan:



It's liquid methane down there & the surface was described as like "crème brulee" - crispy on the top & squidgy underneath.

Is there anybody out there?

The Kielder chaps also spoke about the potential for life on other planets, & about waterbears. These microscopic chaps are a tough as they are tiny - this from Wiki:
Tardigrades can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, as well as pressures greater than any found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation — at doses hundreds of times higher than would kill a person and have lived through the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for nearly 120 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.
Why did they need to evolve this battery of superpowers to survive life on earth?
Well, maybe they didn't.
Maybe they.... CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!!!

Summer breeze

With my mind well & truly blown, I hopped onto the culture bus to hit the Laing Gallery & their current Sunlit Pleasures show. Ahhh... virtual Vitamin D... mmm...

The Late Shows - here's to more of them.

Monday 6 May 2013

Rhubarb!

Our rhubarb has plans for world domination. Like most plants in our garden, it is ignored most of the time. Maybe this is why it's so big - it's craving attention. We took 2 chunks out of the crown last year for friends - you'd never know.

I love the look of the rhubarb - big leaves, interesting stems, a good bit of green structure. It's like a Gunnera for small gardens. But I don't like the taste of it. Hubby does, but bless him he's only 1 man with a mountain of rhubarb to climb... eat... whatever.

Psst... want any rhubarb?

We were in the Farmshop the other week, idly mentioning that the rhubarb's 2013 campaign was well underway (none of this "don't harvest when there's an R in the month" stuff for us) & the fruit & veg lady said:

"If you have any spare, we'll take it."
"Really?!"
"Absolutely! We're always looking for local suppliers."
"What? But we grow it in our garden!?!"
"Fine with us!"

How odd, we thought. Schurely sche can't be scherious.

A couple of weeks later we checked again, partly cos the rhubarb was now trying to push down the new fence (it shall not be contained!). And the shop staff were still keen.

So this Friday morning, I harvested just under a quarter of the stems from the plant & shipped them to the shop on my way to work.


One quarter gone - tis but a scratch
(the sorrel bottom right is picking up too)


2 kilos once the leaves are off


Knock, knock

The guy stocking up outside the shop was a little surprised to see me rock up with an armful of rhubarb, but once I'd explained the deal, he looked it over & was really keen:

"Ooh it's really good quality!"
"Really?"
"Oh yeah, really nice."
"Cool! Glad you like it."

He then found a snail on the underside of one of the leaves...

"Yeah, there might be a few of them..."
"No problem"

& so ensued a short conversation on snail species identification & edibility...

We're (sort of) famous!

On the weekend we were back at the Farmshop & there by the door was a sign saying "Homegrown Rhubarb". That's us!

Mind, not all the rhubarb in the box is ours - some of it was a bit green in the stem, & I definitely didn't pick any green stems. To be fair, as soon as they saw me they 'fessed - they'd put some additional rhubarb into the same box, sourced from the nurseries in the next village. Still local, but a bit cheeky, given the 'homegrown' label.

Fruit & veg lady was very enthusiastic about ours tho':

"It was lovely. Most of it sold really quickly.
If you have any more, we'll happily take it."

How cool is that! & when we got to the till, we got some cash off our bill to the tune of the trade-in price of 2kg of rhubarb. Yay!

So, bartering is back! It all went so well we'll doubtless do it again. Our compost bin won't see much rhubarb mulch this year, which seems much less of a waste. Plus, we now also have an alternative outlet for our annual gooseberry glut - bonus! Jury's still out on the snails tho' - I'm not sure the region is quite ready for fresh Northumbrian Wallfish.

p.s. If you know me in real life & want any free rhubarb or gooseberries, shout up before we ship it all off to the Farmshop.