Pig Sty Avenue

We went out for a drive on Sunday in search of gorse, and eventually found five or six bushes on a lane out past Torrance. Some of them were over 7ft tall. Most of the seed pods hadn't opened. I took them from the tupperware box I'd collected them in - maybe a hundred pods, and put them in a wee pie dish on the windowsill this morning, as a kind of unusually brutal pot-pourri. It just so happens that I've decided to work from home this morning, and I'm glad I did because I've got the pleasure of hearing the pods pop in the sunshine. I've always wanted a hedge with a lot of gorse in it. First of all, it's unusual and attractive in flower. Secondly, its a refuge for wee birds: wrens and dunnocks, but who knows I might be lucky and get some long tailed tits. Thirdly, it's entirely ned-proof. No human can get through gorse without serious injury. The lady at the allotments who keeps bees told me that someone had taken the top off her bee-hive during the co...

I can report that you can't hot compost with a load of tall nettle stalks. It's incredibly difficult to break them up with a hoe or a spade, as they take on the consistency of rope. The heap did warm up in the middle somewhat: about 25C when the Glasgow evening ambient temperature was around 15C. I turned it last night to find an ants' nest. I hope they move back in to their upturned home, because I suppose they'll likely help break it down. Anyway, I'm going to leave it be for now, maybe mix it with the horse shit when I get it - that should heat it up enough to kill the seeds. And I'm reluctant to burn good organic matter. But speaking of burning, I have no choice with the mountain of old, rotten timber that's growing as a I collect it from the area that's been used to keep wood, broken glass and rubbish. I've come across a big sturdy plastic fish-box, and I put the broken glass in there, en route to the skip, which I think I've largely been ...

1.    TITLE Can the New Standards in Education be used for English Language Learners in a non-immersive environment? The Common Core State Standards and young English Language Learners in China, a case study. 2.   QUESTIONS and IMPORTANCE Throughout the non-Anglophone world, Kachru’s (1992) “Expanding Circle”, uncountable millions of people want or need to learn English, usually for economic reasons. Only a small minority can afford to attend International Schools at home or abroad where they will benefit from immersion programmes. The rest must learn from online resources, their own state school and university programmes, and private schools giving tuition in the evenings or at weekends using commercial texts and locally prepared materials. Standards are of variable quality, ranging from curricula based on 20 th Century grammar-translation methodology, to others based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.   With the advent of the...

Almost the first job at Pig Sty Ave v2.0 was to weed the fruit bush bed, and cut back the severely overgrown bushes. There'd been attempts to pull back the feral bushes with strings and bits of wood stuck in the bed. So I hacked my way through it, piling all the cuttings and weeds and wood and string onto a pile which grew over six foot tall. Last week was mostly going through that pile, chopping up the fruit bush cutting to manageable size, and putting the bits of wood onto the woodpile-for-burning, (as opposed to the woodpile-for-wildlife), and separating out the weeds to compost. To this last I could add two other big heaps of mostly nettles from other parts of the garden. And of course the inevitable docks and grasses. So I got a big heap of twigs, some of which will go on the woodpile-for-wildlife, the rest for kindling. The weeds I need to hot compost - not because I'm in a particular hurry for the compost, but because they'll be full of nettle and grass seeds, a...