Albert Whiskers: End of Summer Report

Hello Friends,
Hope everyone is so far remaining lergy-free. As soon as school term starts in September, it seems to unleash the first wave of germs intent on lergifying the lot of us one way or another. French onion soup recipe at the ready here for first signs of the sniffles!

Albert Whiskers has now been with us since June. Several people have asked how he is getting on. The Verdict:

Albert Whiskers' End of Summer Report

Attitude to other cats  E : Tendency to confront outlanders regardless of size, seniority or odds on a positive personal outcome. Needs to learn that cats peacefully traversing the garden on their way home are not staging a hostile takeover bid & do not therefore require a major anti-terrorist response.

Attitude to humans B+ : Generally very good, but dropped marks for nipping at the Big Hairy One's feet, ankles & elbows if breakfast is late appearing. Loves strokes & fuss. Full charm offensive used on visitors, neighbours & the vet, who was unable to listen to his heartbeat properly because he was purring so loudly!

Communal living C+ : As an ex-street cat, Albert Whiskers is doing pretty well, but needs to learn that his gung-ho behaviour affects everyone in the house. Furry Alarm Clock Services at 5a.m are NOT required, neither is a 3-seater sofa provided for his sole personal use -  the clue is in the available amount of seats. Room for improvement around the whole area of respect for people's property. There is no need to begin every morning by killing the doormat & people's knitting should not be fished out of its basket & batted around the conservatory regardless how boring it is waiting for dinner time. A very promising start, considering his street-cat background, but Albert Whiskers needs to work on keeping unhelpful claws & teeth to himself.

Food Matters C- : In fact, nothing matters to Albert Whiskers more than food. After an excellent '100% plate clearance' start, he is now failing to engage fully with the 'Love Food, Hate Waste' campaign in operation at the 'People & Cats Republic'. A dominant trend has emerged which is to gobble all the jelly or gravy, then refuse to eat the meat because it is dry. Appealing to his better nature to 'Think of all the poor cats in Greece' has been met with contempt, & it is with regret that he has been placed in 'Special Measures' for food. Early signs are quite hopeful. Albert Whiskers needs to learn that the only food thrown away here is the very occasional orange which has morphed into blue fur overnight, NOT perfectly good cat food because someone has chosen to eat all the jelly on purpose to make it dry.

Ornithological studies B : Not all that interested to date, thankfully. Prefers ready meals.

Personal hygiene A : Excellent. Grooms regularly & thoroughly. No insalubrious habits. Likes his white fur to look pristine. Keep up the good work, Albert Whiskers!

Communication skills A+ : Communicates very clearly, both verbally & non-verbally, employing a swift head-butt to the back of the knee for emphasis. Would be a highly suitable candidate for Meowing A-Level & beyond.

Entertainment value A+++++++ : Both a highly entertaining addition to the household, as well as an impressively cheap date, as he genuinely prefers a piece of scrap wiggly string to bought cat toys.

Common sense E : Picking fights with bigger cats, trying to sit on people's feet when they are in the process of going downstairs & throwing himself down full length on the kitchen floor in the direct path of people carrying cauldrons of boiling jam are just 3 indications that Albert Whiskers was at the back of the litter when the common sense gene was being passed on. Being told to 'Oy, shift it, Matey' is very often for his own welfare, not part of a shady underground movement intent on denying sustenance to cats or confirmation of Daily Heil view on 'Health & Safety Gone Mad'.

Overall comment: Despite a disadvantaged background, Albert Whiskers has settled in extremely well. A couple of areas still require work - getting out of Special Measures' on cat food should be seen as a key personal goal for the coming weeks.

Exhilerated by the tensions of a recently watched Scandi-crime drama.

Engaging with a lively household debate on regional devolution for the UK.

Visibly gripped by a recent episode of Dr Who.

Getting thoroughly into the carnival atmosphere of 'Last Night of the Proms'.

So.......for everyone who has asked us, THAT is how Albert Whiskers has been getting on in his new home!
Till next time....which will be a round-up of successes (yay!!) & failures (boo!!) in the veggie garden this year and thoughts on whether Grow your Own is any more economical than buying it all in & saving ourselves the effort.
Wishing you all a great weekend,
C xx

Up to my armpits in worm compost. Nice!!

Hello Friends,
Made the mistake of watching a snippet of lunchtime news today. Oh my days.....another Windsor baby & all the sycophancy & non-news nonsense that entails. Just need the toadying Nicholas Witchell to turn up outside Kensington Palace........give it 10 seconds......& yes, there he is! Then it's off to Oxford where the Windsors weren't, due to morning sickness, but let's go to Oxford anyway & deliver some more nonsense from there! I nearly choked on a grape when someone else was asked how the new Windsor might tackle being younger sibling to an heir to the throne. One suggestion was that he or she would probably choose to be 'patron of different charities'. Well, big wow & yippee doo! Glad I coughed up the licence fee for that cutting edge piece of insight, I can tell you! Here at the 'People & Cats Republic of Hagstones' we ill-wish no-one for the circumstances of their birth (excepting certain members of the current government, of course) but can the BBC not just make a news announcement about the pregnancy then leave it until there is any actual further real news? So my thoughts today are with all the pregnant women who have had to get up & go into work today despite horrible morning sickness, with those women who were too poorly being sick to make it to work but still had to struggle to get a GP's appointment this week, because they stand virtually zero chance of a home visit, & most of all, why the British public allows itself to be infantilised by this intrusive, sycophantic minutiae. It makes us a laughing stock, this obsession with a feudal system way past its sell-by date. Aaaaagh!! Makes me want to take off in a converted mobile library with the Big Hairy One & Albert Whiskers.

Well, after that (& I honestly only watched about 2 mins), I needed to throw myself into something productive & soul-cleansing, so pitched into sorting out the wormery. Yes, it's full-on glamour 24/7 here! I admit to being a bit of a compost obsessive. We have 4 of the big dalek compost bins, but I also like to use a worm composter because it provides a pretty constant supply (except in the depths of winter) of free liquid plant food, as well as easy to access trays of worm compost which is high quality & great for top-dressing precious plants & shrubs. There are various money-saving methods of building a wormery, but I use the Can o' Worms unit, which I bought from Wiggly Wigglers over a decade ago. I paid around £80 for it then, but have found it's required very little in the way of expenditure since then because free alternatives can be found for quite a few of the recommended maintenance supplies. Our worm composter consists of 3 stacking trays which fit onto a drainage base with a tap for draining off free plant food (often called 'worm tea!). The idea is that you fill the bottom one with kitchen vegetable scraps & the worms start chomping those. When you've filled the first layer, you add the next tier, then the third & by the time you have filled that one, chances are that the worms will have scoffed their way upwards & the bottom tray will contain lovely rich compost for you to scoop out & use.

This is the compost I removed today, from the bottom layer, destined for a climbing hydrangea that looks in need of a bit of TLC.

This is the next layer up. The worms are making great inroads into this, but you can see that there are still scraps to be eaten before it's ready to use......

......and this is the top layer. There's already a big 'advance party' of  Wigglers getting busy in this layer. So, having removed the compost from the bottom layer, that tray fits on top & becomes the 
new top layer, to which I add more kitchen scraps every 2 or 3 days. The idea is to keep tempting the worms upwards so if I know I'm going to start off a new layer, I collect a decent amount of scraps for this purpose. 

You can see they've got all sorts of goodies here: egg-box, a slightly furry slice of marrow, carrot peelings, a teabag, flour bags (a particular favourite!), runner bean trimmings, potato peelings, etc. They also eat cardboard (avoid the laminated type as you end up with stringy plastic film in the compost), small amounts of coffee grounds & newspaper and joy of joys, BANK STATEMENTS! Yes, whoever thought there was an ethical use for those? Just put them through the shredder, layer them into the trays & watch them become food for worms. A certain sense of karma about that, I always think.

The liquid plant food is easily accessible from a tap in the base. It needs draining off every so often & can be kept in a container for a week or two until you need it. A little goes a long way as the recommended dilution rate is 1:10, so that's a lot of watering cans. If you forget to drain it off, particularly if there's been a lot of rain, you risk rather a lot of wiggly drownings, I'm afraid :-(

We don't buy anything to add to our wormery. We used to buy a product called 'worm treat' but didn't really notice any different in their performance. We occasionally bought a bag of lime mix for use if the wormery got too acidic (when it can start attracting little flies) but have found that adding crushed eggshell seems to have a similar effect. We don't buy anything as 'worm bedding'. We did use the coir brick that came with the original kit, but have subsequently used shredded paper or a bit of extra newspaper if we've needed to add more warmth. For moisture mats, which fit on top of the highest tray so prevent the contents drying out, we just use tough cardboard circles cut from old boxes or packaging. That's all they need. So, from everyday waste, we end up with an ongoing supply of free useful stuff for the garden. The original kit did include a starter batch of the red composting worms, but I've never bought any additional supplies. If the population drops a bit low (in an extremely cold winter, for example), I just replenish them with new ones from our ordinary compost bins. I like to think it boosts the wiggly gene pool a bit too! The only thing I would add is that you do need to be non-squeamish about handling them. If you are even slightly phobic about worms or still have nightmares about some vile lad at school who used to stuff them down the back of your jumper, then this would definitely not be your best choice of project. I'm fine with them.......it's the sight of an 'eight-leg' that sends me screaming in the other direction!

Forgot to add August's additional garden wildlife in my last post. Only a few different species from July: Blue-tit, great-tit, red admiral butterfly, juvenile robin, large bluey-green dragon-fly. 

Hope this wasn't too 'wormy' for anyone, & that you're all out enjoying this beautiful late summer sunshine.

C x 

Grapes & wrath

Hello Friends,
Well, a nice thing to start off with, as I've started harvesting our grapes this week. People are always surprised when I say that I grow grapes here in the East Midlands, especially as our greenhouse is unheated. Actually, it isn't all that difficult. I think the proper way to do it is to plant the vine just outside, then cut a hole in a lower pane of greenhouse glass to train the vine inside so it is protected from frost, but the roots have free access to the soil & rain. I'd like to say I do it this Clever Trousers way, but my grape vine - a 'Black Hamburg', which I received as a 'new greenhouse' present in 2003 is in a pot. OK, it's a large pot....60cm diameter & 50cm tall. I planted it in ordinary multi-purpose compost mixed with out home-made garden compost & it hasn't been re-potted since then. Every year, it receives a top-dressing of garden compost in autumn & a layer of worm compost in spring. Apart from that, it just gets a dose of tomato feed or home-made comfrey liquid whenever I feed the greenhouse veg during summer. I'm sure there are whole tomes written about growing grapevines. I do take off any really silly little bunches to let the bigger ones thrive, & I occasionally snip off a few grapes if the bunch looks overcrowded, but only if I can be bothered. On the whole, the vine looks after itself, & withstood winter temperatures of minus 16 a couple of years ago. 

The grapes are not always as big as the supermarket ones which have been grown in hot countries, but they are sweet & juicy and it's really satisfying to be able to go out there & pick a bunch you've grown yourself.

So if you have access to an unheated greenhouse & haven't tried grapes, give them a go! It doesn't have to be expensive to buy a vine - I've even seen them on sale outside Aldi, with the bedding plants! One thing I haven't tried is making wine from them. None of them make it that far as I'm too fond of eating them!

That's the grapes.....now for the WRATH!! Yesterday, being a Very Useful Engine, I texted the Big Hairy half of the relationship to warn him that if he came straight down the garden when he got home from work to be sure to avoid the enormous heap of cat poo left on our lawn. To make absolutely sure he didn't have a horrible evening cleaning a disgusting mess off his shiny size 11s, I even mentioned it again when he phoned me about something, & made sure he knew it was right next to the stepping stone path where it would be very easy to walk in. That's how I am, you see. Thoughtful. To say this was 'stealth poo' would be a misnomer. Nothing 'stealth' about this. This was a feline with a grudge, completely blatant......a positive Silbury Hill of poo. How I wish now with hindsight that I'd cleared it up. I didn't feel too lively yesterday though, & cleaning up cat poo did not feature anywhere on my list of preferred tasks.......which is how I found myself a few hours later standing in the greenhouse thinking that the neighbours' dog kennel was smelling particularly ripe, when I thought .......'NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!'........but yes, I had. And if there's anything worse than treading in poo, it's not realising you have trodden in poo so that you spread it around & have more of the bloody stuff to clear up! So instead of my lovely afternoon of gardening today, that's what I've had to do! Even with a Jeyes fluid solution at 3 times its usual strength, I still had to wear gardening gloves, then wash them, & I still can't guarantee I won't throw them in the bin tomorrow. I don't have OCD. I have CCWSS. ("Can't cope with sh*tty shoes" disorder). My shoes have been disinfected 4 times despite only one shoe being affected. They have been quarantined down the shed until I decide they are allowed in. I can tell you that if it had been dog poo, I would have thown them in the bin, as happened some years ago with a pair of new trainers. Really, straight in the bin! I bought them when I mistakenly thought I might enjoy taking up badminton. As soon as the aforementioned dog-based cotamination occurred, I took them off, threw them in the nearest bin & drove home in my socks. That marked the end of badminton for me.....not just that I'd have to buy new trainers, but that none of my badminton opponents happened to share my view that 10 mins of jumping around followed by 50 mins sitting on the sidelines with a diet coke & a Bounty bar was a worthwhile use of an hour's court booking fee!
So what a waste of an afternoon! I was so utterly mad. Still don't know who the culprit was. I'd like to think it was more likely to be Ginger, Tabby White-Paws, BGF, the Tabster, 'Ungry Blackie or any of the other neighbourhood mogs, but I have to say that Albert Whiskers did have a particularly smug look about him yesterday morning, so he is definitely not yet in the clear......

.....and now I must go & do something for dinner which involves aubergines. Tomorrow will have to be another picking & cooking day, I think.
Hope everyone's having a good week,
C x