Pig Sty Avenue

Before the old shed was demolished, yielding a lot of rotten timber and tarry-toosh , which cannot be recycled except by burning, there was anyway a heap of broken polystyrene fish-boxes, perennial weeds (mostly dock, nettle and ground elder), and of course scraps of wood. At the very bottom of that is the remains of the previous bonfire held there: what I learned from that was, if you want to get rid of all your old wood, you need to hang around until it's almost all burned, raking in the fragments from the periphery to the centre. Don't do that, and one ends up with circle of charred bits of wood, stranded when the bonfire retreats to its centre. On top of all of this I've piled up most of the remains of the old shed. Really, I should pull the whole structure apart and pile it all up again in a more bonfire-like way. This might also give any hibernating wildlife in there a chance to find another winter home, though in reality they'd probably encounter a fox or a...

No wonder it all fell down when I removed that window: the roof was several layers thick, and waterlogged, and therefore very heavy. Had it fallen down on me and the dogs when we were sheltering from a rain shower, injuries would have been likely. There was a layer of wood planks, all on the road to rottenness. They were covered by 2 sheets of overlapping tin, laid in a way that water was going to percolate through. Then a partial layer of sodden chipboard, so degraded that there were at least a couple of brandling worms living in it - how they got there, I cannot imagine. Another layer of tin, one single sheet this time, nailed down. Then two layers of roofing felt. "Tarry toosh", my Dad always calls it, I'm uncertain of the spelling: toosh rhymes with whoosh . Googled it just now with no helpful result. Finally, there was a layer of various sheets of chipboard and what-not, which had likely been put on the roof out of the way, and rotted down, adhering to the...

Speaking of France , I was listening to a podcast of Radio 3's record review about Cabaret , the musical. I loved the movie version, when I was still at school a cinema in Newcastle, now long gone, showed it every afternoon for a year or more. I played the wag from school, (that's Geordie for truant) and saw it ten or more times. And then a few months ago we saw it live in a graduation show at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and, wow, it blew the movie out of the water. Anyways, Radio 3 suggests the best version is actually the French one. But it's not on iTunes, and prices for the CD at ebay and amazon, are ridiculous. So if any of my multitude of French readers can tell me how I can get the CD for, say, €10 or thereabouts, do tell.

A screengrab of this blog's viewing stats by country for the last month. Why are the French so attracted here? If you're French, and reading this, do tell me what's so interesting about a Glasgow allotment, or what you were looking for when you accidentally googled your way here.

I just thought, I can't stand this old shed anymore. I don't like it. I don't like where it stands. I don't like the way the roof leaks. I don't like the way it's constructed piecemeal and yet manages to have none of the of the allotment charm such improvisation normally brings. And the last straw, an email from the secretary to say that a fellow allotmenteer's shed was burned down last Sunday. The fire brigade were there for 2 hours, putting the blaze out. Right, I thought, if we're going to have a spate of arson, I don't want all my tools burned. So I got down for a few hours and emptied it, putting all the tools and other odds and ends under a plastic sheet for now. Anything which can live outdoors, like the fruit netting and gutters for the water barrels I stacked up by the fence.  I took out a large window, being keen to use the double glazed pane in the new shed. As I removed it, the whole structure gave a sigh and collapsed in a single sin...

The figs, as you can see, are (to use a gardening term), flying away. The top photo was taken on Sept 12th ., the bottom one today. I haven't been feeding them at all, although I am going to start with a general purpose feed this week. There are 40 modules per tray, and 2 trays. All modules are now filled with growing plants, and I've got 5 more together in a pot. Figs got a mention on Gardeners' Question Time last week . Someone wanted their fig, (singular) to look more tree-like. Ha, I thought. I've got 80 figs, and don't care if they look tree-like or not! The thing I took away from that is, figs are vigorous. BBCGQT didn't mention it, but I have seen photos of coppiced plants, and they grow back like billy-o. Which is good if the hedgerow is to fulfill its wood-for-the-stove role.

Life, weather and short days keep me away from the allotment most days. When I do get there, I spend a couple of hours riddling the earth from the environs of the old greenhouse, which is, obvs, where most of the glass is. Not much to blog about. I'm learning to chill-out about the time scales involved. If the entire 2017 growing season is given over to weeding, riddling and shed-building, then so be it. Another job is to burn the heap of rubbish and perennial weeds which has been putting a hurt on my eyes for months now. I need to get petrol, and get to the plot at dusk whilst there's enough light to get it started. In winter, the committee asks us to wait until 4pm if we must have bonfires. People living near the plots complained some time ago about bonfires, which was fair enough because numpties were lighting fires on sunny Sunday afternoons, when most of Glasgow puts its washing on the lines. Dusk on a damp day means complaints are unlikely. And the shed....

I'm still a bit ahead on The Lincolnshire Poacher. And it's quite interesting, the lag between it and Dance of the Hours, because it means I can see the learning process in operation. I can read music, but not yet sight read, which means simply that I'm much slower at reading than I need to be for playing. And that in turn means I need to memorize the pieces. It takes a long time. I've been learning The Poacher for months now. I can see progress now that I'm giving it an hour almost every other day, but it's still not quite memorized, sometimes, less and less each session, I'll momentarily lose the flow. Likewise with Hours. But as those last memory wrinkles get ironed out, I listen more, get the tempo right. It's easier with The Poacher, because I can hear the song in my head, though, disconcertingly, it's in a Benjamin Britten arrangement , - Devin Barad in that link, but I can hear Peter Pears, assassin of trad tunes, singing it. I think Dudley...

After a brief break from practise, I'm back into it again with a new approach. No scales or broken chords or any other kind of warm up. I do a session of Dance of the Hours one day, and The Poacher the next, just playing them right through, over and over. It's the practise-until-you-can't-get-it-wrong approach. Still haven't settled on the 3rd piece yet. The Spring (Period A) of 2017 is my last opportunity to use the 2015-16 syllabus. Entry date is 20th January, and the exam is at some time between early March and early April. 4 months. Which should be fine if I keep practising.

And so it proved. On the left is a riddle full of earth that has already passed through the big riddle. To the right is the same, after riddling. So there's still a lot of stones, (pea sized, mostly) and a few bits of glass. It means I have to riddle it twice, but it's worth it because the big riddle also breaks up any clods and separates out most of the perennial roots still lurking in the soil. Below you can see the big riddle, v1.1; (v1.2 has a wheelbarrow to catch the bigger stones and shards of glass - it was tiresome to gather them all up for use in the rubble drain).  And below's a photo of 2 heaps of earth. The foreground one is after passing through the big riddle. I took that through the hand riddle, it took at least 2 hours, and added it to the hand riddled heap at the back, which has of course almost doubled in size now: it's about 1m high and 2m diameter at the base, which if my secondary school geometry is ok means 4 cubic metres of beautiful ...