Miscellania for 3rd May

Failing morale? Try

• Hope Tom Rosenthal and others
• Superhero Nimo Patel & Daniel Nahmod and others
• Government wants us to believe in Government
• Janie's Farm and Mill is shipping flour to the people.
• Carpentry for girls
• Bit more of Nat curse-cooking? Ozzie Risotto! 
• þetta reddast - how to be Icelandic
• American breakfast for the lads from Baluchistan

Better news from the production department. I have been oppressed by the failure-to-thriveness of my swiss chard Beta vulgaris (flavescens). The seeds were started on 20 March in rows of little [⌀ 5cm] plastic pots but they were looking straggly and recumbent all through April. I couldn't plant them out to a hostile environment of rabbit and frost so I was more-or-less waiting for them to die. Dau.II, fed up with my lugubrious Eeyoring, suggested transplanting them to window boxes. That would increase the rootable soil about 50-fold and I could shift the boxes, like patients in the consumption ward, out into the sun when the weather permitted. And it was so [top R] and they doing a'righ'. The green beans ditto pot bound; so reluctantly I repotted them into much bigger receptacles filled with sieved garrrrden compost. Moving them about is a lot more awkward but a Tesco-crate makes it more efficient. Hint: these robust plastic transport crates make great garden sieves.