One thing I don't like about summer time is having to leave the windows slightly open to let a bit of fresh air in.
Someone left our bedroom window open last night. It was like one of my annual roughing it camping trips to a Prog Rock festival in Blighty.
We had 20 minutes of pure rooks prog dawn chorus. What a racket!
Mean while back on the ranch. Or even in the front room. Blue bottles have been playing at Battle of Britain dog fights landing on our heads and limbs.
J came back with fly 🪰 papers. They even came with individual drawing pins or thumb tacks like they say across The Pond.
I attempted to press it in a door frame and had to resort to using a Manchester screw driver (claw hammer) and knocked the head off the drawing pin and had to find a nail instead to hang the fly paper on.
A few swear words later:
Waiting for a fly to land.
Fly paper with it's individual drawing pin.
After all we are trying to be ecological and protect the Ozone Layer like Eco Warrior Dave Angel:
What a character and another Dave.
Here's me holding a antique glass Spanish fly catcher. You put some glass in it and hopefully it entices the fly 🪰 (flies) to climb up the hole and it has its last 🍸 drink and drowns like my slug pubs on the veg plot.
I have NEVER known a single fly to use our free insect bar.
How do you keep the flickers away from you?
I have heard of filling clear polythene bags filled water and hanging them from the ceiling. Apparently old Mc fly looks at the water and sees a massive fly in its reflection and scarpers off.
We could with one of those big fluorescent blue lights you use to see in chippies and butchers in dear old Blighty.
The veg plot is getting a bit overgrown and neglected at the moment.
I decided to weed several of the repurposed oil tanks/ raised beds and J will sow more vegetables when I clear them.
Beetroots.
Cabbages.
Leeks planted in half a IBC tank.
Red cabbage with Alchemilla Mollis (Ladies Mantle) planted next to them. Yes I know A M is poisonous but we won't be eating them hopefully🤔.
The raised repurposed beds have been a great success and it's good to grow veg at knee instead of beneath your feet.
I also use old plastic baths with drainage holes drilled in them and I have old fish boxes for planters and some raised beds made out of old recycled decking planks.
I have a big pile of rotting fym and I will top up the beds with it this Autumn/Winter.
A big pile of fym sheeted up to keep the weeds out and heat it up to kill any weed seeds and aid decomposition of the mixed fym.
The best thing about raised beds, container gardening means you can grow vegetables anywhere. Even on concrete.
One of the things I love when I visit Blighty for my prog rock festivals and hiking/ roughing it, literary tours. Is the home baked regional food and drink.
There are not a lot of bakeries, pie,cake shops left here.
Well there is an excellent one in Sneem on the Ring Of Kerry that we have visited several times. I think the lady who owns the shop is English.
Any way or any road. The veg plot is producing a lot of new potatoes and onions at the moment.
Yesterday J decided to make some Cornish mince and onion and potatoes pasties:
Cornish pasties home baked in West Cork:
Minced meat, onion and potato pies. Just like my dear old mum would make and what you can buy in any grocers or chippy in the north of England.
Odlums soda bread mix. We buy the mixes in Supervalu. It's very much like the soda bread 🍞 my Irish grandfather use to make us.
Our motto is if you can't get it in the shops make it yourself!
Anyone else baking at the moment?
I must get J to bake me some scones. They are amazing.
We should champion our regional foods and drink.
Anyone got a Newcastle Brown homebrew or Vimto recipe?
Sliced 🌰 🌰, sliced 🥔 🥔 and a tin of corned beef. Covered with a dash of HP sauce.
That was my tea today. I dug far too many potatoes again and we made too much food for the two of us again.
I think we would be good catering for an army.
The potatoes were washed and sliced along with one of my whopper Japanese onions and placed in the air fryer.
The onions turned nice and crispy.
We sliced up a tin of Lidl corned beef 😋 to go with the potatoes and onion.
It was very plain but tasty and filling. The kind of grub my mum would give us when we were kids.
The tin of corned beef was 3 Euros 49 and we get two meals out of it. Was a very cheap tea. Food is cheap when you supplement the meat with your own homegrown vegetables.
It's potato blight weather this week in the Emerald Isle.
My cheap Homeguard seed potatoes from the discount supermarket do not appear to be blight resistant. Next year I will grow the Hungarian Sarpo Mira blight resistant seed potatoes again.
Being organic gardeners we don't use chemicals. This is what we did on inspection of the blighted haulms before and after:
Yellowy turning black foliage. I wore a pair of gloves and cut off the foliage with a pair of garden secateurs and piled it in a heap and covered it with grass and weeds.
Foliage removed.
I will leave the seed potatoes in the ground for a fortnight before lifting them. Hopefully when Scorchio returns next week any blight spores will be killed off with the heat.
On hindsight I deeply miss my polytunnel and starting the seed potatoes off in the polytunnel in February early March.
We're digging and eating early potatoes for our tea every night. Even Diesel and the other four legged pals love our new potatoes 🥔 😋.
Have your potatoes got blight? How do you deal with in a organic none chemical way?
Regular readers will know I plant Japanese or winter 🌰 🌰 sets every September and they are ready to harvest in June.
I planted some of them in baths complete with drainage holes. The repurposed baths were filled with fym, topsoil and home-made compost.
I think a combination of the wonderful sunny weather in May and now the frequent showers and a good sprinkle of pelleted chicken manure. Have all helped to give us such a bountiful harvest.
You will see in the above picture that the weeds are getting plentiful. I must get my gardener back. He's very inexpensive and a couple of cans of lager or Newky Brown always suffice for wages.
So take heart would be allotment gardeners on allotment waiting lists.
Start collecting old plastic baths and heating oil tanks and grow veg in your back garden or garden. You could even grow them on concrete.
The repurposed raised beds/baths may not be aesthetically pleasing on the eye. But you will be growing your very homegrown organic vegetables.
A Boar and A Sow going for a saunter along a boreen down to graze in a field.
I took out my mobile phone to take a new photo of my newly extended veg plot.
It was formerly a lawn with shrubs and perennials planted around it's perimeter.
We had a digger in doing some work and number one son duly cut up the lawn.
Instead of putting it back to grass. I decided to extend my vegetable plot and planted ordinary every day vegetables like new potatoes, onions, red cabbage and leeks.
No longer do I need to listen to the not very pleasant dulcet tones of my petrol lawnmower.
I have course lots of weeds to take care of but at least we will eat well.
Anyone else done their own Dig For Victory job on the lawn?
I might put it back to grass one day but then again it's great to have more veg growing space.
Regular blog readers will know that I am a big fan of American Prog Rock band Kansas.
I have often mentioned that I finally got to see them in Warsaw in 2014.
Some of the band are new members and Ronnie Platt replaced Steve Walsh on vocals.
In 2019 they released the following track. I think it's very apt for our times. I especially think of the plight of refugees in and escaping countries like Ukraine and Palestine:
We went to County Limerick the other day and myself and Bronte walked a very short section of the Limerick Greenway.
I have only 2 sections to walk and I will have walked all 40. kilometres . Stretching from Listowel in north Kerry to Rathkeale in County Limerick.
We walked just 4 KM from Ardagh to Newcastle West in total. Which is two and a bit miles in old slot electric meters.
Here are some photos 📸 for your perusal:
Ardagh train station now boarded up.
Ardagh oak carving with carved wood chalice.
Ardagh is famous for the Ardagh Holy Communion wine chalice.
It was found by two brothers under a stone. When digging up potatoes 🥔. Their mother sold it to a Bishop and it now lives in a museum. I managed to mention potatoes in a blog post again.😊
The GAA Sam Maguire Trophy was modelled on the chalice.
You can replenish your water bottle for free.
Bronte ready for her walks.
Old railway bridge.
Somebody's been busy strimming the weeds and grass.
Picnic tables.
Cattle chewing the cud.
Perhaps it could be the name of an Irish prog rock band?
Newcastle West.
J was waiting for us in the carpark. She'd been in Tesco's buying tins of Ravioli and a bread mix and some beer and wine.
Hope you enjoyed our saunter on the Limerick Greenway?
Good old Saxon and Yorkshire's finest. I was lucky to see them once at a Rock festival in England 🏴.
