We're back! Polytunnels, early spring planting

We're back, after an extended time away from the online world. Much of the past year-and-some has been spent getting the land back into a usable state, which has mostly involved clearing of unwanted growth, quite a lot of digging and turning of soil, watching some horses eat grass and fertilise fields and other slow-moving tasks that don't exactly lend themselves to exciting blog posts.

Tunnel, post assembly,

The polytunnel finally went up last autumn... in related news, plastic sheeting is really heavy, commercial polytunnel kits are poorly documented, and however securely you think you've planted the tunnel arches' feet, it's not secure enough. But! It went up, and it's stayed up, even in the face of 150kph winds.

 We've been getting cracking on spring planting -- the ground temperatures are still getting down to below freezing some nights, so there's lots going on in trays, propagators and pots on raised shelves.






The shelving units are made out of the remains of a mini plastic greenhouse frame (this item was not designed to survive a gusty breeze, let alone serious winds), while the shelves are mostly made out of some scrap wire mesh. Shelves are incredibly useful. There is no such thing as too many shelves.

Some peas are just creeping out (and some peppers... or possibly strawberries -- labelling clearly isn't our strong suit -- aren't yet).

You end up reusing and repurposing a lot  of stuff if you have any sense.

Spare box planter trays plus egg cartons are ideal propagators, with the added bonus of being biodegradable.

Old fromage frais tubs are great mini compost containers.

Cut off the bottom of a plastic water bottle to make a handy scoop for use in giant compost bags.

And almost anything can become a pot with sufficient imagination.

The Mundane and the Magic

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

I have an interesting relationship with the concept of faith and belief in the unprovable, the unlikely, and the downright improbable. The human gift for doublethink and early exposure to books about chaos magic has left me entirely happy with the notion of simultaneously subscribing to the idea of both a rational, scientific universe and an irrational, magical one in which gods and monsters dance at the corners of perception.

Similarly, I have no problem with what other people may choose to believe, as long as they don't use it as a weapon against others.

Literal, immortal, blood-drinking vampires? Sure, why not?

Monotheistic creator-deity based belief systems? No problem.

Humans imbued with the spirit of a mythical creature? That's really interesting, actually.

The notion that one day humanity will be able to pull together and go two minutes without murdering bits of itself? Let's go wild.

I may not personally subscribe to your beliefs - I may even think them odd - but I'll at very least try to be polite about them and I'll probably be quite sincerely interested. I feel that the things we believe say a great deal about us as both individuals and as parts of culture.

It's my observation that humans need to believe in things - religions, ideologies, a certain fixed idea of how the universe works; it's as if we've evolved a place in our mind to populate with the fantastic and the unverifiable. That old saw about how, in the absence of a god, we would certainly invent one* is relevant here, as is the vast importance of the human penchant for story-telling to our social and cultural development. Both individually and culturally, we are made of stories.

Tolerance for my own unlikely opinions is also something that I generally appreciate. And here's a thing: I set great store by my personal, subjective, perceptual experience, but I don't necessarily believe it to be a true or accurate representation of the universe. And that isn't a problem.

I periodically believe that I've invoked ancient pagan deities (and Bugs Bunny), worked dramatic effects with magical energy in groups and pairs, believe myself to have manipulated the nature of my own personal reality just as I would re-structure a narrative, and to have jumped from one strand of reality's web of probability to the next.

Is any of this real? Is group energy work a mere reading of cues and enthusiastic brains filling in detail to meet everyone's assumptions? Is work with deities a matter of literal independent beings, some kind of Jungian collective unconscious, or a projection of my own subconscious? Is a belief in results magic merely solipsism of the highest order?

All interesting questions. All worth thinking about.
Not actually important per se.
I'd call you a damned fool if you went for a walk in traffic and decided to see how far you'd get by determinedly not believing in the cars.
I'd think myself an idiot if, when seeking new clients, I made a pretty sigil but sent no emails and gave out no business cards.

When it comes down to it, most of my operating parameters for life line up more closely with old-fashioned "soft" atheism or agnosticism than anything else. (The kind we had before it went weird and evangelical.) I'm not about to trade the laws of physics for a world full of gods and monsters. But they're very welcome to dance at the corner of my eye. My beliefs, whether they are folly, superstition, or a flawed inkling of something that respectable, peer-reviewed science has yet to put its finger on, rarely affect the way I behave in the world, at least no more than any other irrational whim or opinion. Instead, they reflect the opinions I would hold and the behaviour I would adopt anyway. I don't honour the Earth because I am pagan. I am pagan because I honour the Earth. I perceive myself as the kind of person who would honour and respect it even were I not inclined to my strange sort of animism.

My perception of the world is just that - a perception, filtered through a limited selection of sensory inputs and an even more limited brain which estimates, fills in, concocts and applies rules of thumb to make up for its inability to process and store everything that its inputs throw at it. We're all wandering around in our own bubbles of perception, with many of our responses and assumptions so pre-programmed (be that by experience or biology) that basing serious conversations about the nature of reality on what we feel, perceive and believe is a baldly ludicrous idea. Of course, we do exactly that, all the time. It's not like we have much else to work with.

*Apologies to Voltaire, who actually said: «Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer».

HOWTO: Paper restoration and de-moulding

I have an interest in old books, big box computer games and other paper ephemera. In the process of combing through and restoring a few items to a more usable state, I've experimented with a number of techniques for getting rid of damp residue, mildew and unpleasant odours from paper products.

These tend to result from long-term storage in sub-optimal conditions, which you'll encounter both in things you've stored yourself (if you're unlucky) and in items bought at car boot sales, flea markets, bric a bracs and so on.

Please note that I am NOT a trained restoration expert, and that we're totally not responsible for any damage that may result from attempts to reproduce these techniques. They're just what seem to be working for me so far. For similar reasons, I welcome feedback, comments, and suggestions based on your own experience.

This stuff basically runs on witchcraft

I use bicarbonate of soda for loads of things, from treating nettle stings to scrubbing down walls. It's a great natural deodoriser, de-acidifier, and de-humidifier, which makes it ideal for this task. The only reason I didn't use it in the first place was because I'd run out, and even the smallest of these jobs will require a lot of the stuff.

I started with a kilo, which I divided between two smallish plastic boxes that I'm using for this proof of concept. The one below contains two glossy-paper game manuals that smell of mildew but have no visible spores. They are otherwise clean and in good condition.

The next box, shown below, contained two books, one of them fairly rare but in terrible condition, that I rescued from a mouldering box of a friend's possessions during a storage clear-out. They're on standard paper, which is easier to deodorise and dry out than anything with a glossy finish, but which is also more prone to absorbing smells and moisture. In addition to being kept in an outdoor storage locker for years, they were previously exposed to cigarette smoke, various flats full of less than entirely house-trained cats, and sundry other environmental hazards, as well as simply being very well used in the course of things.

Small items are buried in bicarbonate of soda and sealed into an air-tight box

The technique for both glossy and standard paper books, leaflets, and game manuals was the same: bury them in bicarbonate of soda inside an air-tight box , seal the boxes, and gently agitate them to get the soda between their pages.  Larger items, such as computer game boxes, are carefully stacked into a larger box with a layer of bicarbonate of soda on the bottom. A layer of bicarbonate of soda is poured into the open half-boxes.

Large items get much the same treatment, only in a storage tub

Results of this technique have been excellent. After a little over a week, some very musty glossy manuals and game boxes smelled like new paper. The books no longer smell damp or of cigarettes, but they're still a little musty and I'm pretty certain they've have essential oil dropped on them at some point, unless someone's worked out how to make paper out of geraniums.


Addendum: things that don't work

Crystal cat litter is made of silica (the same stuff that goes into those moisture-absorbing bags marked "do not eat" that come with every item of electronics you've ever bought). A technique frequently recommended for de-ickifying (technical term) paper is to take two plastic boxes, one larger than the other, place litter in the large box and the item in need of deodorising in the other, inside the bigger box, without a lid. You then place an airtight lid on the larger box. I can safely confirm at this point that this does not work in the slightest.

Silica cat litter: doesn't work

Experiment two involved burying a few items in the same cat litter. This was slightly more successful, but not remarkably so. Over a period of around three weeks, I've seen some decrease in mustiness of a cardboard "big box" game box, but little improvement to some glossy manuals.

I also wouldn't be happy using cat litter for anything with particularly fragile paper, as the crystal chunks are a little on the hard and pointy side. The small amount of resulting dust was easy to clean off, at least - I'd definitely not try this (or even the box-within-a-box technique) with other kinds of litter, and I don't think that the technique provides any advantages over the bicarbonate of soda method detailed above.

In future instalments, we'll look at cleaning box exteriors, plastic items, and floppy disks.

Celebrations for dead years

If you have any involvement with the wide umbrella of modern paganism, then today, Samhain, the most popular term for the 31st of October, is supposed to be kind of a big deal. For that matter, Halloween in general is kind of a big deal in anglophone countries, while here in France, Toussaint, All Saint's Day, on the 1st of November, is a national holiday.

Halloween per se  is rightly regarded in France as an abominable import supported only by people who work in marketing. However, traditions originating from the same root beliefs exist. In Brittany, a Celtic region not far from us, the department of Finistère has historic traditions of costumed processions in honour of L'Ankou, the Breton personification of death. There are even customs of children carving faces out of beets, illuminating them with a candle and placing on them on their heads as they play in the dark at being creatures from the other world.

Image of l'Ankou in Finistère. Source: Wikipedia

In terms of the farming year, it's all about preparation. As I type, I can see one of our neighbours spreading lime to de-acidify his soil. On the other side of the stream, trees were felled today, while we've taken advantage of the fine weather to clear weeds and take down impinging tree branches in preparation for tilling our vegetable patch early next week. On the subject of the weather, the end of October provides a guide point as to when you can expect the climate in Central and Western Europe to start going really sour.

The European farming year is intrinsically linked to the notion of late October as a liminal space, where the veil between life and death thins. The end of harvest and approaching dormancy of winter make for a rich metaphor, even in regions where the origins of the traditions have been masked by Protestant Christian doctrines that celebrate Reformation Day, suitably detached from either popish or pagan trappings.

In countries with different climates, the celebrations and meaning shift. I'm originally from the Greek-influenced Near/Middle East (geographers have consistently failed to pick a regional designation for our small half-island, although now we appear to have fossil fuel, we're usually described as Middle Eastern). As is the way of island cultures, we got a bit of every passing sailor's religion, but like our neighbours Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt, we have a climate that bears little resemblance to that of Western Europe and its cycle of spring-to-autumn fertility.

Inheriting copious elements from both classical paganism and Byzantine Christianity, Greek Orthodoxy celebrates its All Souls Days at various points in the year, mostly in Spring, although the celebration of Saint Demetrios of Theassaloniki and the All Souls Sunday (Demetrios Sunday) which precedes it fall at the end of October. Conveniently enough, this roughly lines up with an ancient Greek festival of Demeter and Persophone (Kore), the Thesmophoria.

While, like Samhain, the Thesmophoria is a festival of fertility and farming, the nature of its celebration is almost opposite to October's Celtic festival. As you travel east around the Mediterranean, the summer months become increasingly harsh: too arid to grow crops and potentially dangerous to all but the hardiest of livestock. The Thesmophoria celebrates Persephone's return from the underworld, having spent the summer months with Hades, during which period Demeter mourns the loss of her daughter by denying the world the bounty of her fertility.

Persephone and Hades. Source: Wikipedia

The Thesmophoria were a women's rite, bound up in mysteries, fasting, sacrifice by burial, and ritual foodstuffs. The latter most notably included pomegranates, an intrinsic part of the Persphone myth and also a key ingredient of κόλλυβα (koliva), a ritual food used in Greek Orthodoxy in All Souls and memorial celebrations. In the Orthodox church it's specifically representative of the relationship between life and death, that which is planted and that which is harvested. Plus ça change...

The autumn celebration of Thesmophoria precedes and is intrinsically linked to the sowing of corn (as in grain in general, rather than as in maize), stored through the infertile summer in πίθοι (pithoi)... also used to bury the dead. It's certainly not Halloween, but it is all about death and fertility.

The notion of a relationship between death and life is intrinsic to human cultures. As creatures that are above all interested in themselves, we can't help but be entranced by the two greatest mysteries we'll ever experience. As natural pattern-seekers, we lay our mysteries upon those of the natural world and of agriculture, its domesticated manifestation. Nature dies back at times, only to rise again, renewed. A global history of reborn gods speaks to the power of that idea, and even those of us who live in cities far from nature can't resist the urge to mark the changing of the seasons, whatever form those seasons take.

Getting things done

Like many humans, I'm lazy, insecure and easily distracted. This combination isn't exactly optimal when it comes to motivating yourself to achieve anything. Unfortunately, I also suffer from an over-abundance of (admittedly somewhat unusual) ambition, so I've had to develop some tactics to work around commonplace failings such as the tendency to click pointlessly around the internet instead of doing something useful.

WRITE LISTS
It took me a long time to come around to keeping lists, and the process of persuading me to do so has driven more than one of my former editors mad. Having tried methods including random post-it notes, scraps of paper and "I'll just remember it", I finally started getting my act together with online to-do list HabitRPG  - it has collectable virtual pets, armour and XP. What's not to like? As my needs outgrew my gameified to-do list, I began using a slightly modified BulletJournal.

I am slightly journal dependent. I've slightly modified the BulletJournal format to make it work with these pocket-sized books -in the second, closed, book, the calendar page has split columns. Also: green pens or GTFO

Some people just have a natural handle on the tasks that need doing. In my case, if it's going to happen, it has to be on a list, and I find it remarkably satisfying when I cross items off my list for the day or month. On top of that, my pocket-sized journal  gives me somewhere to note down everything from feature ideas, to which plants were sown when and where, to my weightlifting progress.

USE A CALENDAR
My Google Calendar records deadlines, meetings, vet appointments and gives me sunrise and set times. It's synced to Touch Calendar on my phone, while critical dates are also copied into my journal's monthly calendar. I've also reached the conclusion that I'm going to need a wall planner to keep track of sowing and harvest times.

FORM HABITS
I'm what you might call a straight-line thinker. I don't multi-task well, I'm not brilliant when put on the spot about something unexpected and I benefit from routine. To make up for any lack of adaptability, I form habits. I get up at around dawn and try to get to bed before 02:00. I train and then I drink coffee. I get dressed and go to my office to work, because I rarely get much done if I just sit around in a dressing gown in bed, even though I have a computer there. I try to stop work at a sensible hour and create a division between work and recreation. I make sure I go out and do something on the farm or around the house every other day - if I'm busy with work, I just do a very small thing.

Pick heavy things up. Put them back down again. Repeat every day. Also: learn to fill earthen floors

I do these things regularly. I started flossing regularly by doing just one tooth in the morning (hat tip to James Altucher there). I think of myself as "the kind of person who lifts weights", "the kind of person who writes every day" and "the kind of person who flosses". Every repeat of the routine reinforces that perception.

BREAK THINGS INTO SMALL CHUNKS
I'm currently terrified by the amount of work involved in deconstructing this decaying, godawful, and inordinately solidly built old shower in our bathroom. But I've got a cold chisel, and I'm going to start by removing a 50cm square section of tiles, if I can. I can think about the next section tomorrow, or later.

The same applies to writing a story or group test, or to restoring some of the farm's neglected fields to a plantable state. Large tasks can be irrationally panic-inducing, even if you have all the skills required, but in small enough elements, almost anything seems manageable. Bringing a mothballed farm into working order sounds massively challenging. Yesterday's task of cutting away and removing old black mulching plastic from a field? That was hard work, physically, but certainly possible. Just as clearing and tilling the ground beneath it will be. As will sowing seed be. And on to the next field.

JUST DO IT
At the risk of sounding like a sportswear advert, the most direct approach to getting something done is just getting on with it. Okay, that sounds stupid, but let me continue. This is all about making a decision and acting on it. The more you do this, the more you'll create a positive feedback loop, and a picture yourself as "the kind of person who gets shit done".

Start small, by all means. When you think of a minor task that needs to be attended to, and you have no good reason NOT to do it immediately: do it immediately. You can even write it into your to-do list and tick it off straight away, if you like that kind of thing.

I really didn't feel like working on the day I took this. I had to clear thick grass before I could even start tilling this section of field. Three hours later, I'd got further than I'd ever imagined. It was massively satisfying. My most likely alternative activity would have involved dicking around on social media.
Also: avoid over-long captions

If there's something you plan on doing, whether it's getting fit, learning a language, or writing an article, you'll get better results by making a start now than by making a plan to start next week. You can refine your methodology as you go, but no amount of planning and research can be as effective as actually starting the process.

There's a proverb I rather like at the moment, not least of all because I can take it literally as well as figuratively: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the next best time is now.

Big, green, spiky balls

The fruit and nut trees here seem to ripen late - the redcurrants were on time and we've been eating well on stewed quince, but the pears are still a little hard and most nuts are taking their time. If we'd had a press set up in time, we'd have had more than enough cider apples to feed it, but that's going to have to be a task for next year.

The sweet chestnut tree has only this week dropped mature nuts. Unlike many nut trees, such as the hazel, you have to wait for chestnuts to fall to the ground. When ripe, their spiky green balls fall and split open, revealing the brown seed inside. Early fallers are likely to be unfertilised, with shrivelled nuts filled with a small amount of inedible stringy flesh.

The spiny protective fruit surrounding the nut often splits when it falls, particularly if you've got a properly ripe nut. This makes it easier to get into the thing without being prickled, but you'd still be well advised to wear sturdy gloves.

Before either cooking or planting your chestnuts, check them for pin-sized holes indicating that the larvae of one of several moths, weevils and other nasties has taken up residence. Dispose of these, as the extra protein isn't really worth the unpleasantness of damaged chestnut flesh. It's worth giving your chestnuts a quick rinse in a bowl of water to drive out any other lurking pests, too.

Heat an oven to gas mark 6 (200 degrees). While that's going on, get out a small, sharp knife and cut X shapes into each chestnut. Most of them will have a relatively flat side - keep this down while you're cutting. Once your oven's up to temperature, chuck the chestnuts onto a lipped metal tray, and bake at the middle of the oven for 30 minutes.

Take them out and - if you have any sense - allow them to cool for a bit. Or, if you, like us, lack self-control, try not to burn you fingers and lips too badly while peeling and devouring scalding-hot, sweet, yielding chestnut flesh.

We couldn't resist cooking and devouring this lot in its entirety, but the next batch we collect is destined for planting, as our solitary chestnut tree could do with a friend at some point in the future, and on of our field boundaries is looking a little sparse

How to make pourable self-levelling concrete

Today we're going to take a break from the beauty of nature to delve into some construction notes, mostly for our own future reference. Getting a level floor is incredibly useful, but hard to achieve with a standard stiff concrete mixture. This is an experimental liquid mix devised by Andy, my Viking associate, which forms a level floor even on an uneven surface.

It's only designed to be strong under compression, so is good for floors but not much else. We've not fully tested it under load, so this article may be edited in the future to add success or improvement notes.

The proportions are as follows: 3 parts cement, 9 parts fine sand, ~5 parts water.

All measurements are by volume and use grey cement and very fine sand such as this from Bostik, The grain size of your sand is incredibly important to this particular mix - if you use standard coarse building sand, the mix will separate upon pouring and won't set properly.

Start with 3 parts water - you're after a very liquid mix, but depending on factors such as the consistency of your sand and how wet it is, you may need less than five parts: add the remaining water slowly. Use a power stirrer drill attachment to mix and pour immediately after stirring - within 30 seconds is ideal.

You want one of these attached to a power drill to stir your concrete.
You also want to remember to clean it after use

It's advisable to test the mix for your own ingredients in advance by setting up a box on a slant, pouring in a small amount of concrete and making sure that it both levels and sets hard.

We created a stiffer concrete surround to enclose the floor area we were pouring, but if you're pouring into an area that's already vaguely watertight, you can simply reinforce any small potential leakage spots with duct tape, for example.

Note that the setting time is on the order of days, not hours, for this stuff - it took around five for a full set.

Cat-proofing: not necessarily possible under real-world conditions

If you have pets or small children running about the place, you'll want to cover the area you've poured if possible - we used a combination of wood and cardboard. As evidenced by the photo above, this won't necessarily work on cats, who will apparently move the cardboard in the middle of the night, make paw prints, and then push the cardboard back into place.