I keep meaning to collect all the Greg the Florist posts and put them on a page so I don't have to look up the last post every time I try to do more...but that's not going to happen today.
We've just been to the allotment. Do snails hibernate in winter? I think they do. At least, you never see them, so I presume they're doing the snail equivalent of staying home with a hot cup of tea. It must not be cold enough yet, because Sherlock found two of them that were lively enough for a snail race.
You can't count of snails to follow a race track, of course, so he raced them consecutively and measured the distance each one went...in five minutes. Which is more patience for watching a snail crawl than I would've had. Or in fact than I did have. I think I wandered off to pull carrots halfway into the second heat. He wants you to know that the second one won, and that he thinks the viscosity of their mucous may be related to their speed.
We now have carrots (and chard), tomatoes (and chard), and some more small pumpkins (and...chard). The tomatoes are stubborn, hanging on in the greenhouse and ripening while their vines die off. The chard is just unnatural, and I expect to see a news report on it any day now.
We've just been to the allotment. Do snails hibernate in winter? I think they do. At least, you never see them, so I presume they're doing the snail equivalent of staying home with a hot cup of tea. It must not be cold enough yet, because Sherlock found two of them that were lively enough for a snail race.
You can't count of snails to follow a race track, of course, so he raced them consecutively and measured the distance each one went...in five minutes. Which is more patience for watching a snail crawl than I would've had. Or in fact than I did have. I think I wandered off to pull carrots halfway into the second heat. He wants you to know that the second one won, and that he thinks the viscosity of their mucous may be related to their speed.
We now have carrots (and chard), tomatoes (and chard), and some more small pumpkins (and...chard). The tomatoes are stubborn, hanging on in the greenhouse and ripening while their vines die off. The chard is just unnatural, and I expect to see a news report on it any day now.
41 comments:
Chard Threatens City - but not to worry! Superheros Doc Hottie Habanero and the Cake Crusader are on call!
We can have...chard and noodles later? Chard in a pie? Chard with chard, under chard? Charred chard? Chard.
Your chard sounds very impressive - maybe Sherlock could do a study on that too if he has the patience to watch snails. Maybe he'd like to give them some nitro like the snail in that new film - I could just imagine him doing large scale experiments with that. ;)
Did the chard arrive after some kind of meteor shower? If it did you may be in big trouble...
That's a lot of chard!
My sister has tried to grow veggies of various kinds in her backyard from time to time, but she lives in the suburbs and what the rabbits don't get the raccoons or squirrels finish off. She'd be very envious of too much of anything!
I was very disappointed with my tomato plant this year. It kept growing and growing until it was bigger than me, but it only have me two tiny tomatoes. Hopefully next year I'll have my own house and I can plant a real garden.
I suspect snail racing may be better to watch on a warmer day; it's a bit chilly to be standing around watching a snail for five minutes at a time.
John, apologies if this is a sensitive subject, and obviously I won't mind at all if you prefer not to answer, but how do feel about the idea of speaking to a class of children about your military service?
*does not mention the football*
Good. Don't.
Pip - you need to pinch them out to encourage fruiting, and stop them growing bigger, generally.
Nameless - I suppose it'd be all right? Bit weird, but I think I could come up with something age appropriate.
We had bangers and mash and roast potatoes and chard for dinner and then crumble for pudding because we got apples at the allotment and I think it's sad when apples fall off the tree where you can't get them like by a railway line.
That sounds like a super yummy meal, Sherlock! Did you help cook?
And it does seem like a waste, for apples to fall where you can't reach them safely. But I imagine there's wildlife that will make good use of them, no?
Ooh, bangers and mash, proper autumn food :-)
John - I can only imagine how weird it would be for you; but I'm sure that if you do it, you'll be able to talk to the children in a way that works for them.
...we didn't have bangers and mash. Because that would be very weird with roast potatoes.
We had toad in the hole. And chard. And roast potatoes. And chard.
Danger - I'm sure you don't have to do it. Or maybe, you could just do something very general. It's hard to know what would be age appropriate - given Sherlock is hardly a typical specimen.
Heh - I thought that, but I didn't like say anything, because given the closest I've got to cooking a meal in the last week or so is tarting up some oven chips to serve with fried eggs, I didn't think I was in any position to comment. And anyway, roast potatoes go with anything - even mash :-p
Toad in the hole is also perfect autumn food :-)
(Watching Match of the Day right now...)
And crumble and chard? ;)
Maybe discuss it with Mrs N, John, if you'd like to do it? She'd have a good feel for what the class as a whole would be able to handle and would be interested to hear.
Nameless - I can't watch.
And I don't know why I expect Sherlock to remember what he's just eaten. As long as he's been fed he's happy.
Lestrade - It wasn't too bad, you're still top of the league. I'm glad we seem to have stopped losing...
Yeah, I know.
Funnily enough, football's my...barometer, if you like. The other week, the thing that made me realise how down I was was just...not caring about the result. When usually even if I don't actually really mind winning or losing, I want to know, I'm interested. When I'm feeling shit, it's one of the things that I very rapidly just don't care about, at all. I've no idea what that says about my values.
I don't know about values, but to me it suggests that maybe you are prioritizing your emotional energies during times of stress. I have to do the same thing when my mood is at low ebb or I'm going through a rough patch. It's taken me a long time to decided I'm okay with occasionally being a bit stingy with my passion.
I just found out something interesting. During/after the US Civil War, one of the terms for what is now PTSD was "Soldier's Heart." Partly because common wisdom at the time placed emotions and moods in the heart rather than the brain, and probably partly because the physical symptoms of PTSD/panic attacks include increased heart rate and breathlessness. They believed that war could literally change the structure and functionality of your heart.
I just think it's such an haunting term. If you'd asked me about the term, with no context whatsoever, I would probably have assumed it described the qualities that make people good soldiers or inspire them to join the army, courage and patriotism and wanting to help people and all those ideals (and, in my family, a fair bit of economic desperation). That it could mean something totally the opposite (or perhaps mean both) keeps snagging in my brain.
I don't know how that connects with Sherlock asking you to go to his class, John, or if it even connects at all. I think it's your story to tell, as much or as little of it as you ever want to, to whatever audience.
"In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
-Ella
Hope you're all having a good day. And it's not as grey and wet as it is here.
Hope you had a good and thoughtful silence, Sherlock. We managed to here, apart from the odd phone call coming through. Sadly policing doesn't stop for anything.
We've got sunshine, at least for now.
I'm kind of in "rationing my passion" mode, but I saw this and thought Sherlock would think it was neat.
http://jalopnik.com/swedes-develop-invisible-bike-helmet-1460189477
Everyone was quiet and mrs N said we were really good and we made poppies and I gave mine to John and one to Mrs Hudson because she's old and probably remembers lots.
That was very good and thoughtful of you, Sherlock. Did you start learning about wars in school today, too?
We learnt about how children sometimes got sent out of London and other cities because of the bombs and you got a label like a suitcase and you went away and lived with strangers and sometimes it was fun and sometimes it wasn't and some parents didn't want their children to go anyway I wouldn't have wanted to go.
Ah, so you're learning about World War II, then? That was a very hard choice for families to have to make, for sure.
I live in Lancashire because my mum was evacuated from Battersea during the second world war. She ended up well over 200 miles from home, but she was only six and thought that home was just over the hill near the house where she was living. In the end the rest of the family moved up here as well and they never went home. Most of the time she sounded like she belonged here, but if she ever went to London on a day trip she came home sounding like something off Eastenders. She would hardly ever talk about being evacuated, it still made her sad when I was little and it had been way more than thirty years. I sometimes wonder if she'd have been happier if she'd stayed there.
Lancs. Anon
ReReader sometimes in the first world war people sent their children and maybe wives away to stay with other people like relations if they lived somewhere less dangerous but that wasn't like the second world war where lots and lots and lots of children got sent away on trains and things for ages sometimes because everyone was away fighting or working very hard.
Lancs. Anon thank you for telling me that I might tell my class that she didn't know how far away from home she was because we didn't think of that when we talked today. We thought maybe lots of people felt very very far away from home, even further away than they really were because they couldn't decide to just go back they had to wait until they were told and they didn't know how long that would be.
I didn't realize that some people sent their families away during World War I, that's very interesting, thank you Sherlock. I suppose they were afraid that large cities might be bombed.
I had read about the evacuations in the UK of the second world war, although it did not impact my family--my father was the right age to be evacuated then, but he was born and was living in the US, and my mother was a baby at the time but she was born in Belgium and, being Jewish, she and her parents weren't able to be evacuated anywhere, they had to escape a detention camp (they bribed a guard, and then had to sneak out in the middle of the night)--first to France, and then eventually to the US.
I've just realised it's not me holding up the Greg the Florist! I thought it was my turn, but it's not. It usually is. First time for everything, huh?
Except this now means I don't know what to write about...
Yes! The Invisible Bike Helmet makes me so happy. The film about it is as good as the invention itself!
AftSO
L - no, it's definitely me. Feel free to write more though!
My dad and his family were Americans living in London, and they got out on the last boat with one suitcase each. My grandmother's was full of her paintings, taken out of their frames and rolled up. My dad finally unrolled and framed them after he'd retired.
RR, that's a pretty hair-raising story, glad they made it out!
I wanted to say something too about Kestrel's wise words, but I'm not sure quite what... mostly that as usual she is wise. :)
S
Thanks, S!
Sherlock, a few years ago the BBC asked people for memories about WW2, and collected a lot of them on a website over here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/
My mom wasn't in England, but she talks about the war, and about rationing, which ended here when the war was over, but went on in England for a long time afterwards. It didn't matter if you were rich or poor, you were supposed to get the same amount of food, or gasoline, or whatever else was rationed. Some people cheated, and there was a black market, but for some poor families rationing actually meant they had more food than they had before it started!
Here's a film about rationing that was made during the war. Do you think you would like figuring out what dinners to make with those groceries? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9wNJ78S2GY
That's fascinating, rsf!
Thats what we're doing about and there's a lady who come in and has the amount of everything you got to show us and it's not very much but she said I'd be really lucky because we have the allotment but maybe people would have tried to steal stuff too. And she has recipes and some of them don't sound very nice but Mrs Hudson said she remembers some nice things.
I'm...enjoying isn't the right word. Appreciating is closer, but not enough. Anyway. Thanks for the stories, folks. Being born and bred in the time and place I was, I'm a bit more distanced from the realities and hardships of that period of history. Which makes it especially important, I think, for me to read such things.
And S, thank you for your kind words. I do like RSF's phrasing better than mine. 'Rationing' is a kinder word than 'Stingy'.
Well, I had rationing on the brain, given Sherlock's current studies. But you had it right, Kestrel. Some times we just have to get through.
Sherlock, my mom says when butter was hard to get, people would eat their bread with the butter spread very very thin, and then turn it upside down so the butter side was on their tongue. That wasn't so much because of the war, for her. She grew up during the Depression, and there were six kids in her family. In the springtime, before the garden began to produce more food, the cupboards could get a bit bare. They foraged for food too, like chokecherries, that they made into jam. No one left apples on the ground for the squirrels either! They'd just cut out the bad parts (and the worms) and make applesauce with the rest.
My grandma was born in 1930, and had 16 brothers and sisters. When the Great Depression hit, the family lost their farm and ended up living in their neighbor's goat barn. My grandma used to tell us how each night they got one potato apiece, and that sometimes that was the only thing they ate.
All her brothers went to war, but every single one of them came back, which was pretty much a miracle. It always amazes me what people can do and deal with when they have to.
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