{"id":2714,"date":"2021-07-11T18:38:03","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T18:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2714"},"modified":"2021-07-11T18:38:03","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T18:38:03","slug":"sunday-11th-july-2021-day-482","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/07\/11\/sunday-11th-july-2021-day-482\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 11th July, 2021 [Day 482]"},"content":{"rendered":"

My day started in the middle of the night, really, when I had a little\u00a0sleepless patch and had wondered what to do with my little\u00a0patch of 3′ x. 2.5′ when I decided to sow some beet seeds in it as beet is one of the few vegetables that you can sow as late as\u00a0mid-July and still have time to get a crop by October\/November. I really needed to acquire a packet of beet seeds but in the meantime, I reached for my hardback notebook in\u00a0which I record all my gardening and planting\u00a0activities.\u00a0Too my surprise, a packet of more-or-less in date beet seeds dropped out of the notebook (and what it was doing in there for the first place?) so I set about an old gardening trick that I know. Beet seed are actually a cluster of seeds with an incredibly hard husk so they can take some time to germinate. \u00a0The trick is to ‘scarify’ the seeds – this means rubbing them in between sheets of sandpaper to make the seeds a little more porous. You then soak them in warm water for a\u00a0period of 8-10 hours (too little and the water has not had time to do the softening, too much and \u00a0the seed starts to degrade) Then \u00a0I\u00a0discovered\u00a0another packet of beet seeds in the location in the garage where we keep our spare seeds and I scarified them as well and calculated that\u00a0the needed to be sown at about 3.00pm this afternoon. Whilst I was at it, I know of a location where there is an overhanging laburnum tree and I have it in mind to ‘liberate’ some of the seeds when I am by myself (probably first thing on a Sunday morning). I had in mind to take a little pair of scissors with me to \u00a0snip off some of the seeds I can see forming but when I did a bit of\u00a0further reading, it seems that the best time to sow laburnum seeds is September\/October. So I think I will wait a month or so before I start on\u00a0the particular venture. I did happen to have a jam jar with some of our own acorns in it (from an oak tree bought with us from Hampshire when we lived there and from an acorn actual collected in the New Forest) As you might have\u00a0<\/span>gathered by now, I quite like the concept of \u00a0growing a tree from seed (or, at\u00a0least, an\u00a0incredibly young\u00a0cutting) and although they will not come to fruition until the point of time when I am\u00a0pushing up daisies, I quite\u00a0like the sight of them developing\u00a0from a seed to a viable plant. As it was a Sunday morning,\u00a0I walk down on my own to collect the newspapers and treated myself to a fragment of J.S.Bach’s B-minor Mass<\/em>\u00a0and a later excerpt was a\u00a0cantata from Matthew Passion<\/em> so, as always, I enjoyed myself. Them we watched the Andrew Marr<\/em> show but I must confess to dozing through some of it.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the park, we met with our University of Birmingham friend and were soon joined by another regular with whom we have quite philosophical discussions. I had to make a confession that in the past few days when I referred to Fermi’s last theorem, I was actually\u00a0in error – it should have bee Fermat’s\u00a0last theorem (and Fermat is not to be confused with Fermi<\/span>, the Italian\u00a0physicist). We evidently turned to a\u00a0discussion of football and the\u00a0various ways in which England might either win or lose the game, the role of the referee, of the VAR system and so on. Then we left for lunch as I knew I was going to have a fairly busy afternoon.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

My jobs this afternoon were essentially quite simple. The first was\u00a0to get my beet seeds sown in the 8′-9′ of space that I had allocated\u00a0<\/span>to them. This task seemed to go OK – I had previously\u00a0spread ‘Fish Blood and Bone’ organic\u00a0fertiliser and worked it into the tilth so now, we shall just have to see how many days it will take for my own seeds to germinate. If I am lucky, I might some evidence of germination within about 3-4 days – if, of course, I am unlucky I might get a complete plot of failures (it happens sometimes in gardening) Then I needed to take all of the clutter out of the mini greenhouse which was lying in tatters. I got the\u00a0various contents and associated garden implements and utilities spread out on the lawn, deconstructed the old greenhouse and got it\u00a0disposed off (apart from some metal bits) and constructed the new one which is just a tad deeper than the previous one (which may or not be critical by the time I start to put some\u00a0germinating seeds with in it) Then my luck\u00a0changed and it started\u00a0gentle raining. So I had to race around, doing a\u00a0rapid ‘keep it or junk it’ before I came home to prepare for tea, write this blog and get ready for the Euro Cup final this\u00a0evening.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My day started in the middle of the night, really, when I had a little\u00a0sleepless patch and had wondered what to do with my little\u00a0patch of 3′ x. 2.5′ when I decided to sow some beet seeds in it as beet is one of the few vegetables that you can sow as late as\u00a0mid-July and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2716,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714\/revisions\/2716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}