Harvest time

This blog post is sadly way over due. Other things, like finishing my thesis, got in the way. And now this blog serves as a procrastination tactic so that I can avoid fixing the reviewers comments on a paper that was rejected.

With great intentions of feeding the house-hold, and possibly neighbours, with products from the garden, I bravely planted a collection of vegetable seeds early last spring. The sprouting went very well and even the self-sown cherry tomatoes promised a delivery of hundreds of juicy blobs.

The variability of rainfall meant that these poor germinants were subjected to either too little rain - I did my best to water them regularly - or too much - followed by some mildew-y type infection of all the squashes. A handful of really baby marrows and six marrow flowers were all that I could scavenge before the mildew took over. The rocket grew too fast to harvest at it's peppery, non-bitter best. The spinach went to seed in the blink of an eye. The carrots on the other hand took months to deliver tiny little snacks. I suspected, that tallied up my harvest would look something like this:



(By Andre Jordan via www.awaytogarden.com)

In many ways the harvest was barely enough for a dinner for two. And just when I thought the harvest was over, the pumpkins delivered! Hidden in among the mass of vines and decorative garden plants was the growing pumpkin harvest. At first it looked like three good sized squashes, but when the mass of vines started to dry out and look the worst for wear and the pumpkins weren't getting any bigger themselves, it was time to haul them out of the garden. What a bounty it was!



Now nearly everything has pumpkin in it. It started with cookies, gnocchi and a veggie side with dinner. Next is soup, fritters and maybe muffins. Growing pumpkins may just be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I'll grow them again come spring time.

Travel tales, Part 1 - Edinburgh

That's Edin-bur-ah, not Edin-berg. Well it took me 2 days to find someone who spoke with any kind of Scottish accent! So the "bur-ah" vs "berg" story was relayed to me via an American delegate at the Nitrogen deposition workshop I attended. What a culturally diverse city with many many foreign nationals doing the business end of dealing with the public. To start with the young lady in customs at Edinburgh airport (story to be told in person to protect the not so innocent) had family in South Africa, but she hadn't been to visit them yet. And then the hotel I stayed at, on the dodgier side of town, had staff mainly from Eastern Europe. And the lady at Subway(TM) who was from some part of Asia and I struggled to understand her - although she probably wondered where I was from too. I later found out that there are a lot of young Polish people moving to the UK looking for work. The point-at-item-when-there's-no-other-option-system is well in place in Edinburgh.

The weather was typically fine, and much warmer than I expected, for the 3 days we were cooped up inside for meetings. Then the wet weather arrived with a serious gust of wind that blew for the next 1.5 days until I left. I felt really sad for the people in South West Scotland who had their neighbourhoods washed away. At least I could get a train down the east coast and not be too affected by the flooding.

I did find a way to spend some time in the wet weather before I left on the train; possibly one of the most amazing museums I've ever visited, Our Dynamic Earth. Loved the interactive style, touching an 'ice-berg' and being shaken by an earthquake, being sprinkled by a rain-shower in the rain-forest and being an astronomer for 20 mins.

Some photos are in a collection on Flickr.

Oh the workshop went well too: met lots of new contacts, got good feedback on the research our group is doing, and good feedback on my talk too.

I recognise this situation.

I wonder if my family, friends and students hold back when I start spouting off about biology.