The lyf so short

I might whine about how the mother-in-law demanded help in booking tickets for a concert at the local theatre in two weeks time. (The theatre has opened yesterday in compliance with regional opening laws, allowing an audience of 100 (rather than 600) people for any single event. But still?)
I might whine about how Jörg feels that his need for a beach vacation in France in July is more important than... IDK. Not travelling abroad while the pandemic is far from over? Don't ask me.

But I don't want to whine all the time, so instead, I will subject you to another garden picspam. Gardening tends to be grounding and therapeutic for me, and while looking at my gardening pictures may not be as useful for you, I will probably enjoy rambling about them, so here we go.

( Or you can just scroll away if you're not the gardening type, of course. )

And that concludes this month's tour of the garden! Tune in next month (?), when the lettuce will have gone to seed, the peas will have contracted mildew, and the brambles will, as usually, strive for world domination...

Right! Last time, I left off in Exeter college. There were still lots of other things to do in Oxford -- all the other Open Door colleges and the Botanical Gardens and the Witchcraft exhibition at the Ashmolean and the Pitts-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and, and, and -- but there was pressing business to attend to. As you may or may not recall, I discovered and read and re-read and re-read Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy last year, and this year, the Royal Shakespeare Company had turned it into a play (two plays). And guess what? The final performances were on... *dun dun dun* September 8.
So I didn't look at anything else Oxford had to offer, but went straight to High Street and took a bus to the capital - with one auspicious and one drooping eye.

( Cut for the pictures )

Dear LiveJournal, the castle one village over has new owners, should I worry?



(Actually, it was just a little convention going on, everything's fine)



(The Morgoth cosplayer tried to have some photos taken but people constantly needed to squeeze past and then other people behind them started to blow soap bubbles their way. It was funny? Well I found it funny.)



(Also, some of the souvenir stalls were in the middle of the museum so I was tempted to ask for one of them fancy goblets from the showcase. I thought that was funny too.)



(Didn't know our local castle has a connection to Hogwarts... convenient!)



Jed Brophy and Royd Tolkien explain who their favourite Silmarillion characters are (Royd: Beren and Lúthien, predictably. Jed: "Finrod Felagund Hewer of Caves" - pretty much the way I imagine you first reacting to yet another Fin-, dawn_felagund!). They might be back next May for the Middle-earth Special Edition of the convention, squeeee!

And how was your weekend?


(We also went to the fair with the kids afterwards so I am actually pretty exhausted, but I still needed to get rid of these pictures.)

Having rambled at length about the greenhouse, I feel compelled to ramble about the garden a bit, because it's been a long time since I've done that and I don't want this journal to fall completely silent.


Besides, there's so much to ramble about. It's been a good gardening year so far. In the past years, we generally had a false spring in March, and then another cold period in April and May. This time, March was cold - uncommonly cold, in fact, with several weeks of severe (for our region) sub-zero temperatures for several days, and April started out just as icy, but when Spring finally came, it came and stayed. This was a bit difficult because processes that usually take place across one and a half months were now rolled up in two weeks, but on the plus side, no trees blossomed only to freeze a few days later. Sure, it all started later than normal... but it caught up.



Mid-May to Mid-June. The incredibly stable scaffolds are meant to provide the pumpkin plants with an opportunity for growth. The wooden frames (no longer visible in the second pic) in theory enable me to twice the number of potatoes that would normally be possible on a patch that size. You can add another frame whenever the plants grow out of the earth (as often as geometry and your arm length allow).



Brussels sprouts look ridiculous when they're going to seed. (OK they always look ridiculous.)



The kids are getting into mischief and snacking on the first ripe currants.



In theory, this is the patch for herbs and medicinal plants. In practice, I'll probably have to move them because I need more veggie patches. Garden planning is four-dimensional...



I keep trying to grow broad beans because they're such a classic, but they're not doing particularly well in my garden. The leafy goosefoot is finally doing well though. (What an ugly name. In German, it's called strawberry spinach, which describes it a lot better, because it's like... a spinach plant that grows red berries?) For years, I treated it as a weed until I read somewhere that it was an old vegetable plant, and then I tried to get it to grow again and it was sulking. But last year I got a few plants to grow and ripen, and their offspring clearly feels welcome again.



Yeah, you know what plants have coped really well with this year's Himring winter? Figs. Szechuan pepper. The mulberry tree.
You know what hasn't? Leeks. Beetroots. Most cabbages. The irony is not lost on me.



In case you were wondering, I keep my crops mixed on purpose. Firstly, because I don't have much space and if I used every patch for a monoculture, I wouldn't be able to grow half the stuff I want to grow. Second, because a lot of plants actually influence each other in positive ways, either because they use completely different nutrients or use space differently or exude hormones that the other plants need or discourage various pests. Mind you, there are also plants that vage war on each other. Onions don't do well next to (or right after) legumes, for instance. I have made a long and clever list (not my own research! I'm relying on the work of the Benedictine nuns in Fulda, because they've got the time for this kind of stuff) of good patch partners and bad patch partners and necessary crop rotations. But there are always surprises that the good nuns haven't listed. Probably because they work more tidily than yours truly and don't accidentally leave potatoes in the soil in autumn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



I love my heritage peas. It is completely beyond me why people ever thought it was necessary to breed edible peas with boring white flowers, and inedible sweetpeas with lovely colourful flowers. Get you a plant that can do both!



Potato pyramids. As you can see, the wooden frames are by now completely covered in potato foliage.



The beans are coming along OK (they only germinated two weeks ago). The beetroots are more interested in growing foliage and flowering than making nice round bulbs this year. Pffff.



Chickpeas and amaranth, because sometimes I am an experimental gardener (TM). Visible in the back: two nectarines that started growing in the compost a few years ago. I put them into the regular garden with no protection other than the wall behind them, and they've been dealing with our harsh (TM) climate just fine so far. Sometimes I suspect that a lot of plants are a lot more versatile than agricultural lore lets on.



Yeah, I grow some cereal on my tiny patches. It started as an accident (some oats started growing after I used horse droppings as manure; some barley and buckwheat started growing around the bird feeding station. Yeah, I know buckwheat isn't a cereal, but it's used like one, so whatever), but now I'm doing it on purpose. It's not enough for any serious kind of use, but it's fun and decorative and I can waste my gardening space in whatever manner I see fit, so there!



As you can see, not all of my patches are doing so well.



Being done with the currants, the kids are now looking for woodland strawberries. - I'm still super proud of what I did with what once used to be a grassy slope that was next to impossible to mow. No more lawn-mowing necessary on the perennial patch! Take that! (And yeah, we still have to restore those stairs... and the wall.)



The kids didn't want to wait until Drachenfest to go camping, so we pitched the tent in the backyard. Why sleep in your bed when you can sleep on the lawn? (To be fair, during the hot past weeks, the night air was a lot more pleasant in the tent than it was in our living room. And we were treated to an absolutely spectacular light show when the heat and humidity finally exploded in a nightly thunderstorm!)

- - -

There, wasn't that fun! For me. Hurr hurr.

In other news, I'll be teaching ten hours of English and four hours of Geography at the Secondary School after the summer holidays. Pretty sure this was the right decision. It's only half the classes (and thus, half the money) I would've done at the Elementary School, but let's be honest, the latter would probably have been five times the stress at only twice the pay. So it's probably the right decision. (Feeling guilty on behalf of the children at the Elementary School though. Damn it.)

... or make that "rotaway". A.k.a. this month's pic of the... month post. How my crest has fallen.

Oh well.

Having lived in this house for ten years now (and it actually is ten years this May, time flies!), one should think that we know everything about it and its surroundings. But we don't. We discover something new whenever we start something new. And even when we're walking in places we already know... there might be a surprise.

( Cut for length and pictures - only six this time, but still )

The pics still look rather bleak and wintery, but spring is actually in full swing. Two-digit temperatures by day, no more frost, the sun is shining more often than not, it hasn't rained in two full weeks, the garden's a riot of blossoms and I already have to worry about the bees swarming. So back to work it is!

A pic a day is not feasible for me, but in order to keep posting, I'll try to do a picspam (or at least a single pic to ramble about?) per week. We'll see how that goes!

We've been having snow, on and off, all year (haha). That is, it's been snowing, then it's been staying for a day or two, then it's melted away, then it's been freezing, and then it started to snow again. No big cumulative masses of snow, just enough to delight the kids, powder the landscape and cause a couple of unnecessary accidents on the roads.

Today is another snow day. But as I've already posted several snow picspams in past years, I won't do one (now, anyway). Instead, have some pics of the cold spell that hit us last week. We weren't hit as badly as some other regions - never less than -10°C - but we've had some very pretty frost in the garden. Which is as good an excuse as any to show off my measly attempts at keeping a garden in the first place. ;)

( Here be lots of pics )

Things are looking very different today, all underneath a nice cover of snow (like so). But showing you snow wouldn't have allowed me to ramble about the garden so much. So yeah. Now I'll go fetch firewood because while it's warmer than last week, it's still pretty cold...

"Not everybody is permitted to go to Brest", as the learned old pirate in the Asterix comics sagely observes. As it happened, we actually made it to Brest - whereas other places of interest, such as Quimper, Concarneau, Pont-Aven or the previously mentioned Douarnenez, dropped off the agenda. On the whole, it felt to me as if we weren't doing anything culturally relevant at all. This is not wholly true (as this picspam will show), but compared to the high amount of educational sight-seeing that I normally enjoy on my holidays, this year the most I seemed to get was a Japanese-style photo stop (rather than the extensive study of ruins, let alone leisurable strolls through museums). I now feel with my father, who began to chafe when my brother and I insisted on a beach day during family holidays back in the day! Now I, too, have become that sort of restless traveller! No wonder I resorted to repetitive photographing and competitive sandcastle-building!

It needs to be said that it wasn't only the kids who sabotaged my educational ambitions; it was also extremely hard to get the mother-in-law and Marc to express interest (let alone delight) in any sort of activity beyond the daily grocery shoping. But they didn't say "No walks or excurses for us, please", either. So Jörg and I made suggestions, they agreed without much enthusiasm, we went, and sometimes they seemed to like our excurses well enough, but it was like pulling teeth. Having to push both the kidlets and half of the grown-ups, all the time? Are you not interested or are you just insecure? Aaargh. No thanks.

Nonetheless, we managed to see a few interesting things. And now you will, too.

( Here goes another cut for length and picture-heaviness. )

Oof, that's again enough for one post! Some hiking, the Holy Mountain of Menez-hom and our journey back (incl. Le Mont-St-Michel!) will follow some other day. Hope you enjoyed!

... I'm just incredibly, absurdly busy. I try to keep up with the f-list, but most of the time I don't have enough dimes* to comment, let alone type up an entry of my own.

So, while real life (TM) holds me firmly in its claws, have two shots of the kids. (Sorry if you don't like kiddy photos.)


Minion and Minion.
(ysilme and anybody fluent in Elvish is going to get the joke at once. For the others, minion is "first-born son" in both Quenya and Sindarin. Couldn't pass this one up, could I.)


The other mini-person!

Incidentally, these pictures also show some of the other things that have been keeping me busy. Happy guessing, or something? Or just have a nice Sunday, as you wish!

---
* the "spoon" imagery puzzles me, because if you have any spoons, you can clean them up and then you have as many spoons as ever, right? But dimes, those run out. Like, in the old days, when you needed dimes to make public phone calls? And some days maybe you have enough dimes to make an hour-long call to Tokyo, but other days you don't even have dimes enough to call home from school? That makes a lot more sense (to me) than "I don't have enough spoons". Not judging you if you stick to the common saying, just refusing to use it myself.

I resisted the urge to check on the fledgling colony... until today. (My excuse was that after one week, I would be able to see whether they were trying to breed a new queen; and if they weren't, I still had time to give them some new brood from the donor colony.)

( Bee talk and pictures under the cut; if you don't like stinging insects, you may give this one a berth )

So, still (even more) optimistic! :D

I tried to take pictures of yesterday's partial lunar eclipse, but you can't really see much of it. But it still turned out reasonably recogniseable for a moon photo without special equipment or even a tripod.

( Moon, clouds, trees if your screen is extra-bright )

If you're looking reeeeally carefully, you may actually see the shadow-dent.

( Someone bit a chunk outta the moon )

In completely unrelated news, I also took a photo of our "roots 'n' spices" drawer. Just because it amused me.
( Roots and spices, just as it says on the tin )
Why yes, we totally always have four different kinds of potato and three different types of onion. Allll the time!
Haha. No, nonsense. I'm the type of person who always ignores the "use this kind of potato for chips and that kind for soup and that other kind for salad" advice. This is the super-exception because it's springtime and I want to grow blue and red potatoes, so I had to order some. So now they're sitting there while I wait for them to germinate. Same, really, with the cutesy lil' onions. The teeny tiny potatoes I found while turning the compost. Ex-tenant-lady clearly threw away some supposedly rotted potatoes last year...

In other news: Is Lyra's LJ slowly turning into a Tumblr? STAY TUNED. :P