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.

Reeeeeeeally sufferin' succulents :(

So when I plugged yesterday's sufferin' succulents post on Facebook last night, one of my friends said:

Careful with the succulents in really cold weather - all that water freezes and just kills them. Wish I'd wrapped some of ours last year :-((

I'm guessing you knew that anyway.

Erm... nope. But I should have.

When I was in the garden centre, I was using the modern marvel that is mobile Internet to check out the plants on the RHS website before I bought them. "Finally!" I thought, "No more shall I be seduced by fabulous but flaky floral floozies!"

When I get my new recruits back to base, I've been trying to use Evernote to track what I plant & where I plant it:

Keeping it all together in Evernote

As you can see, I've got a combo of notes, links & photos all on the same page, which is great for keeping all my plant research together. This is a vast improvement on my normal method of hmm... What's that growing there again...? I'm sure I've read something about something that looked like that... now where did I put it...?

But the thing is, you do have to actually do the reading bit. & the bit I was supposed to be reading (but didn't) was the bit about frost hardiness. & it was right there in front of me on the RHS Echeveria secunda var. glauca page I "read" in the garden centre:

Right there, in black & green

So what happened? The whole point of getting the phone out in the garden centre in the first place was to catch this kind of mistake before splashing the cash. The same italicised before we saw earlier, that's how much planning there was meant to be.

My conclusion is: retail madness - the old, old problem of seeing only what you want to see, when you really really want the shiny thing. The same madness that has me giving heels "one last go" despite: not needing them (I'm 5'10"); not being able to walk in them (lack of practice) &; not wanting to practice (waaaay too painful... truly mystifying to me that anyone overcomes that one).

Enough moping though. When my comfy shoes get me home I'll pop the chicks into the greenhouse for the Winter, that should see them right...

Oh hang on...

What's that white fully stuff outside the window...?

Oh snows!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Right, that's it, I've had enough. You lot, inside, NOW!

So, as I type, the chicks are on the hallway window, thawing out. That window is not too hot, not too cold, not too bright, not too dark, so I hope... I hope... they'll live.

In the meantime, I'm off for a little lie down.

Sufferin' succulents

Earlier this Summer, I had a splurge down the garden centre...
(Insert your own Frankie Howerd/Kenneth Williams utterance here)

On succulents, madam. Titter ye not.

They looked amazing: each had a large rosette of fleshy leaves; one green & spiky, the other grey & rounded.

Sempervivum Calcareum

Echeveria Glacuca

Having not long created the eye-shaped bed in the middle of the garden, I'd already been pondering if I should theme it.
Low lying stuff? Certainly.
Alpines? Maybe...
Gravel garden? Could do...
These'll fit right in :)

Fend for yourselves

I have no experience with succulents, but I figured they'd be OK in our garden. Why such optimism? Well...:

• Some random interlopers have self-seeded into bits of the greenhouse frame, & seem very happy there,
  Plus
• The eye-bed is slap bang in the middle of the garden so it gets the most of whatever sun deigns to shine on us,
  Plus plus
• Our soil is ridiculously free draining - All that rain we've had these last few years? No flooding... well not in the garden anyway. The doors on the other hand...

The soil is not at all sandy. It's very dark. But the colour isn't from lovely composty loaminess, oh no... It's coal dust. They're still mining round here & I pull out a chunk of the black stuff every time I go weeding.

Will they cope? Who knows! Best bung 'em in & see how they do.

Some time later...

I checked on the succulents from time to time, & they seemed to be doing fine. Then about 2 months after planting, I was having a little weed of the eye bed, so gave them a bit of a closer inspection.

The green spiky one seemed happy as Larry. But the grey one.... the grey one was a different story...

Oh... now that's not right...

Oops. Now this pic doesn't do me justice - if it had looked like this I've spotted something was up immediately. No, what happened was: weed, weed, weed, fettle, hoe, hoe, knock, oop a leaf's fallen off... & another... oh dear... the whole top's off...

Clearing away all the loose leaves, the extent of the carnage became clear:

Food for worms... sadly

Yep, when the clean-up squad have moved in, such as those stripey grubs right & bottom of the main stem there, it's time to cut your losses.

I believe that children are our future

You might've noticed from the pictures at the top of the post that these plants both had a large central plant, with lots of little plants around the edge. The common name for these plants is Hen & Chicks - a bit of a leap of the imagination, but this is no time for semantic quibbling - Mum has died, I've got to think of the children. The children! Oh the humanity...

So, how does this work? Well the chicks sit on an umbilical cord of a stem from the mummy plant. But I've seen this sort of thing before, with the strawberries. They send out long runner stems, & then where the stems hit the ground, roots spring out & a new baby plant starts to grow.

Gingerly turning one of the babes over, I see this:

Lots of leaves, teeny roots

Woohoo! Roots! They might be teeny, but they're there alright. Which means I've got a fighting change of saving the babies. Right then, best get them rehoused.

Moving on up, moving on out

So what's gone wrong? Well I suspect that even though the eye-bed is so well drained, the plant was still just too soggy. & yes, this is pure guess work on my part, but I figure if I don't act now, all is lost.

The plan:

Move the kids into a pot

I can put it by the yard door so I can keep an eye on them. Plus pots dry out ridiculously quickly. Normally that would be a problem, but not with these fellas.

Make sure there's plenty of drainage

I took a pot & filled half of it with stones, crocks & pebbles. Not just the bottom inch or so; half the depth of the pot. The theory here is to provide the water to no excuse to stick around.

Then mixed some compost 1:1 with sand; yep, half compost, half sand. To be honest I think it should've been more sand, & may be the poor border soil rather than the compost, but I really couldn't send the babies to their new home on an empty stomach.

Sand & compost mix, plus lots of drainage

With a sharp knife, I careful cut the umbilical stem on each of the babies. Well, all but 1 as it had already broken free of its own accord - it clearly knew it was time to leave home.

I levelled the soil in the pot & then created a little depression for the base of each of the chicks, gently pressed each plant home. The fleshy leaves are deceptively fragile so I was extra careful so as not to damage them.

For the final bit of drainage, I surrounded the chicks with gravel. I figure that if they're up to their necks in pebbles, they'll be less likely to end up sitting in a puddle.

Rehoused, & happier..?

Hopefully they'll be fine. They've got a cold wet winter ahead. Fingers crossed they make it out the other side intact.