This year’s soap is made and maturing in the cupboard, hopefully safe from the mice who think it is literally good enough to eat. It will go whiter as it matures, and by Christmas it will be hard, white, fine grained soap with a nice clean smell and good bubbles. So nice to have so much of my Christmas shopping done already!
Search Results for: luffas
The cockatoos have begun stripping the bush lemon trees. They are very thorough and very wasteful. In a few days they’ll all be gone.
From late winter until now, I plant climbers – beans, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes – along the fences all the way round from the eastern to the western side, and sometimes (usually a bit more lightly) on the northern side too. The tallest beans even start to climb across the netting over top of my beds, the beans hanging down like fruit. But from late summer onwards, I start planting climbers only from the south east round to the south west.
The trouble with luffas is that I want them for Christmas, to go with my handmade soap. But I can’t plant them early enough here for them to mature and then allow time to clean and dry before Christmas.
I really am too far north for brussels sprouts, and climate change is only making it worse. Every few years, just often enough to keep my hopes up, I jag a combination of variety, timing, and weather that gets me a crop. But most times there is just not a long enough period of cool weather for them to form sprouts, and I get loose leafy sprouts. I should give up. Remind me of this when I complain again next year.
I quite like deadlines – they give me a target. Without them I find that, in my busy busy life, things that are important get put aside in favour of the things that are most noisily urgent. And seasons don’t scream urgent, but they don’t wait. They are a wonderful reminder that we humans can argue all we like but nature holds trump cards. We live on a little spinning planet, and there’s the reality of it.
Many food plants are very good at calculating whether the days are getting longer or shorter, It’s how they tell what season it is. The scientific term is “photoperiodism”, and there’s more about it on the gardening page. There’s no point in cheating with photoperiodism. Plants that fell for tricks like that became extinct a long time ago!