Waark!com allotment and green living blog

Ha. Another year.

February 11, 2017 at 3:59 pm · Filed under Growing, Uncategorized ·Tagged herbs, pots, windowsill

Keep getting busy and forget to post! So anyway, let’s try and get a bi weekly update!

So what has happened to me? Well I’ve moved jobs and been working long hours. I also managed to accumulate an extra 2.5 stone as I was working in a “good food” location. So I was over eating. The food I was eating was good, but not healthy.

Now I’m working away – I spend about 3 nights in a hotel and food is OK but fatty.

We’re going to have a go at eating a more vegetarian diet (but I’m not giving up meat). This is starting off with growing some nice fresh herbs!

Got a helping hand! Though he wasn’t keen to get muddy at first.

Lined them with black bin liner for water proofing

Some delicate sowing followed by tidying up

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Update time!

June 19, 2016 at 7:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged brewing, eBIAB, raised beds, sweet corn

Time to get the sweet corn in. This is the 3rd bed in.

Done!

First bed has garlic and broccoli

Salad bed!

Bean bed (4th and final)

And a nice Belgium Blonde on the brew!

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Garden clearup

March 6, 2016 at 8:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Doing the jobs that should have been done in September… A quick snip to the raspberry canes and at the back you can see that I’ve completely stripped the brambles back, mounted some green trellis and wound the brambles up. Yes, I’m trying to tame the brambles…

Meantime Helen cleared up the dead mint, planted some spring onions and fed the strawberries. They’re in their last year really so we need to plant some more up this year.

Last years bean bed was cleared up, garlic planted (see last post!) and netted them so the chickens or cats don’t get it.

The greenhouse needed a bit of a tidy and Helen was the woman for the job!

The chickens are happy enough when you ply them with meal worms.

And finally the grape needed trimming. It went bonkers last year claiming everything in sight. This is now set up a bit more traditionally with only fourish vines. Hopefully I’ll get better grapes.

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Elephant Garlic planting

March 6, 2016 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Chickens, Growing ·Tagged cloves, elephant garlic, garlic, growing garlic, planting garlic

Every time I went into the lean to I’d go “oh God I need to plant the garlic… Well finally I got round to it with a little help from Sam.

Elephant Garlic is much bigger. Each clove is the size of a small standard garlic.

The first garlic was given to us four years ago by our neighbour and generally it’s done well, but never actually splits into cloves. This year’s was given to us again by our neighbour and planted far too late again!

Plant about 1″ below the surface

Help optional.

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Energy Graphs

January 26, 2016 at 9:50 am · Filed under Conservation, Green Stuff ·Tagged electricity, emonpi, energy, graphs, grid use, solar, Solar panels

I do like gadgets and the emonpi system is an excellent gadget for keeping an eye on my panels.

The below graph is an interactive snippet that allows you to look at energy generation on the fly (Yellow is Solar) including how much I’m importing/exporting to the Grid (Green Line) and how much power I’m using in total (Blue).

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Solar generation

November 22, 2015 at 10:10 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Having bought and installed an emonPi, I can now remotely review my solar generation vs usage. Bit worried that my panels continue to generate 170w in complete darkness.

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Let them eat grass

November 1, 2015 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged chickens, earth oven, eggs, free range, pizza oven, waark

It’s got to the time of the year when the garden is low on productivity and the chickens can free range and clear up the parasites that have dug themselves into the top soil.