Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.