Mixed greens

Sumer is icumen in lhude sing cuccu . . . we did indeed welcome the 2023 cuckoo on 5th of May - the same day as the swallows returned from Africa. The other flag for Summer is fresh garden veggies. Last year was a bust as far as gardening went down. I started my saved beans ?too early? and they all died and I lacked the resilience to start all over later in the Spring. Dau.II has made all the running this year "not because I like gardening, but because I like a lot of salad". On Sunday 21st, she took a big bowl and the kitchen scissors and clipped what was readily available. The picture does not include a mountain of mixed lettuce and other salad leaves.

Lest you Ukrainian folks complain that you don't know what I'm talking about: Basil Ocimum basilicum; Chives Allium schoenoprasum; Coriander Coriandrum sativum; Dill Anethum graveolens; Marjoram Origanum majorana; Mint Mentha spp.; Oregano Origanum vulgare; Parsley Petroselinum crispum; Rosemary Rosmarinus officinalis; Tarragon Artemisia dracunculus; Thyme Thymus vulgaris. 

When I was growing up "salad" was sad lettuce and crisp 'transportable' tomatoes; with an optional vile off-white acidic faux-mayonnaise called salad cream. One of the transformative events of my very early 20s was setting out to make our own mayonnaise . . . with a whisk. It was bloody marvellous. And the same could be said for my first encounter with tarragon. Pretty much every day now we get fresh picked greens of many different species. A whole plate of, say, raw spearmint might be a challenge but a tuthree leaves give a lift >!surprise!< to any salad. And a good mix of anything does mighty things for the gut microbiome!

Her lovely horse

For a few months in 2016, we had "Young Bolivar" aka A Good Pair of Hands staying /WWOOFing with us learning English. His last project was building a mighty, and mighty handy, woodshed at the bottom of the yard. We measured up and decided that for the desired design we'd need N=130 lengths of western red cedar Thuja plicata to clad the walls. Jim Davis in Graigcullen didn't cut to length and threw in a few extra planks for luck, so we were left with a big stack of surplus planks not to mention many offcuts of different lengths from 150mm to 900mm in length. Heck'n'jiminy that's seven (7) years ago! The cedar planks have been stacked at the back of the woodshed all that time, quietly drying out some more.

This Spring Dau.II would have nothing but that we build a tree-house for her niblings down in our sustainable micro-forest. That's as well as the refurbed garden seat. And, because cedar is naturally pest-resistant and because it was already on site, we robbed the stack in the woodshed to fabricate the base of the tree house. 

The latest QALY adjustment here is planting salad and other veg for home consumption. But ppl can't live by bread alone and the democratic majority has voted for The Return of The Sweet-pea Lathyrus odoratus to grace the front of the house.In years past I have constructed functional outdoor beds for either side of the front door. But the pallet-wood aesthetic is sooo yesterday and when these planters stand directly on the ground they become a residential hotel for slugs, snails and ants; for which the democratic majority has little tolerance. Furthermore, pallet-wood definitely doesn't last forever when it is permanently butted up against wet soil. Accordingly, I pulled out all the longer [800-950mm] cedar off-cuts and paired them off to those of equal length and then started making jardinières / window-boxes / Blumenkastenpflanzer. I also sourced 4x ash logs from the wood-pile that were close enough to 30cm tall. 

Another option is to add legs to the boxes which make them a lot lighter and more convenient to move around. But the ash-logs are prolly better for the sweet-peas because that allows the planters to get up close to the wall all the better to string-up the peas. Yes, yes, I know it's possible to have two vertical legs at the back and stabilizing splayed legs in the front - speak to my carpenter. The problem with four legged furniture is that unless the floor is actually flat it is a royal PITA to get all four legs touching base and sharing the weight equally. You can see my third iteration in the foreground [L]. Notwithstanding George Orwell's “Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” In this case three legs is best of all. The top may not be spirit-level flat, but all three legs must be in contact with the ground and doing an equal amount of the work. That's why milking-stools have three legs.

Sharing is caring! It seems invidious to construct such lovely functional outside furniture and become all hoarder about it. The Girl Who Invented Herself [who prev] is WFH really hard while juggling her caring commitments. The [only?] good thing about WFH is that the inevitable 'unproductive' office time is not spent waiting for a meeting in your cubical or chatting at the water-cooler. TGWIH, by contrast, can nip out into her own garden for a bit of dead-heading or weeding as the sea-mist rolls in. The lawn is out to contract mowers but the rest is a mix of raised beds and jardinières containing a striking array of plants shewing off their reproductive parts. In her younger days, she was mad about the nags and spent a few years shovelling shit for a pittance and meagre board before she came to her senses. It turned out that, like Jack Woltz, we have had a spare horse's head about the place since Dau.I and Dau.II dragooned their HomEd pals [and associated parents] into a perf of Cinderella at the village hall. Said head and a plywood cut-out wheel painted silver had been screwed to a baulk of timber to conjure the arrival of cinders at The Ball with his glass slippers. All it took was a hank of straw stapled to the other end et voilà - cheval! My ♩ove♩y horse, indeed.

beef bagel

Sambo, buy me sambo

• Fiore's of Hoboken: "roast beef and mutz" sub 
• Lox lag and bagel boom [prev] at Russ & Daughters NYC 
• Pulled pork at Brother Hubbard
• Ham n cheez toastie.
• Pastrami n swiss on rye
• Pastrami?
  
• Tuna salad sub
• Prego no pão [hot beef sandwich] Lisboa 
• ClubSandwichistan

Flora de Yola

It's been months since I schlepped 40km SE on a Tuesday evening to do Wexford Science Café. It's so easy to get slumped on a sofa after tea. The May meeting, however, billed Paul Green from Ballycullane who has recently published (2022) his compendious Flora of County Wexford. Is there a better way to display the book than next of a clump of cowslips Bainne bó bleachtáin Primula veris in our front yard? eeee but I do love an expert - they can be so obsessive: and so, reader, I went.

I came away with some insight into what it takes to record all the plants in a given area. And 'area' is fractal; you can like Louis Agassiz get up close and personal with all the beetles in your back yard or you can go global like Phoebe Snetsinger clocking off 8,300 different birds before she died in a car-wreck in Madagascar. Green has split the difference: his checklist is the 2,558 monads of Co Wexford. That's larger than the official 2,367 km² area of the county because of the fringe of monads shared across the county borrrder.  A monad is any 100 hectare 1km x 1km square on the official Ordnance Survey grid which maps the county.  Naturalists also respect tetrads [a block of 4 monads] and hectads [a 10km x 10km region]. The whole island is overlain with a grid of 25 lettered 100km x 100km squares; most of Wexford being in squares S and T. 

Except on the open heath and moorland of the Blackstairs, pretty much every monad in Wexford is traversed by a public road. This is of great benefit to folks whose task involves checking off data on a clip-board containing a species list. Farmers, in general, are hostile suspicious about The Man checking up on their business especially if their own paperwork is perhaps sketchy. This introduces a bias: plants which like gateways and roadside verges are just more likely to be recorded than those which hug river-banks or thrive in the middle of pastures - it's the access innit?

So there I waszzzzz paying attention to the war stories of botanists in search of red-list rarities, when up pops a picture of a small Church of Ireland and its yard - they all look alike but this one was tinkling bells of family familiarity. It turns out that my grandfather's final resting place in Saltmills is the Go To place for orchids especially the green-winged one Anacamptis morio. The botanists have begged the parish not to mow the churchyard in May - when this orchid flowers and sets seed - but the parish is on autopilot for keeping the grass trim - protestants gonna protestant. Heisenberg's observer effect whereby the act of recording something affects its existence should encourage botanists to observe but not intercede but it's right difficult to let nature take its selective course. I gather that some patches of rare plants are reseeded occasionally from seed-banks in the National Botanic Gardens Garraithe Náisiúnta na Lus in Glasnevin. But I don't have a dog in that fight.

There are 850 different species of flowering plant in Ireland. Wexford, like most Irish counties, I guess, sports about 150 species per monad. Obviously, some species will be omnipresent while others will be clinging by their sepals in only one place. Linnaeus decided that the easiest way to definitively ID plant species was by considering the details of their reproductive parts. But flowering may happen at pretty much any [species-specific] time of the year except dead winter. Accordingly, a full survey requires visits in at least Spring, Summer and Fall if not every month. But each monad will occupy the recording angel for 1 to 3 hours, and they must go cross-eyed with the effort after a while. At two monads a day, six days a week, 40 weeks a year, it will take 5½ years to cover each location once. And who pays for petrol, let alone botanist-time? All told such a project, done properly, might cost €500,000 in billable hours and expenses. There is a reason why such Flora projects - which generate data essential to documenting the ecological status quo and thus getting a handle on The Future in a climate changing world - have been traditionally carried out pro bono mundo by vicars who have little to do between Sundays and elders who keep active in body by being engaged in mind.

It is notable that Wexford is, botanically, the best covered County on the island. The vast majority of the work has been carried out by Paul Green and his comrade Paula O'Meara neither of whom are inclined to let mere weather rain upon their parade of data. Hats on! - another lashing shower coming in from the West. Paul Green used to blog about his Wexford project. If there is a second edition of this Flora of County Wexford could someone take a leaf out of Geoffrey Grigson's An Englishman's Flora [bloboprev] and include the Irish names? There are only 800 species on the list! You may start here.

performative biodiversity

Extinction is forever. Several iconic flowers of the Irish landscape are on the red list: clinging on by their sepals as more land is developed for intensive agriculture, hotels, offices and shopping malls. Because capitalism reasons, it seems impossible to get, like, affordable homes built in the country - but that's a rant for another day.

Monday 22nd May 2023 was designated International Day for Biological Diversity by the UN and RTE put out a piece congratulating Trinity College for the wild-flower micro-meadow at their Front Gate. The statues of protestant icons Burke and Goldsmith used to gaze out at the riff-raff over close cropped lawn mowed to within an inch of its life. In July 2020, the grass was dug up and sown with "meadow lawn turf that included 25 types of native Irish wildflower". I can tell you that it looks well scruffy because wild flowers are but small pin-pricks of colour and scent - just enough to attract the insects which will pollinate them. Cultivated flowers, by contrast, are blowsy in yer face harlots. TCD is making the argument that this biodiversity transition is not for people but for the invertebrates - both the visible busy pollinators and the lads scratching a living under the surface. 

It's not TCD's first such venture. When I worked there in the 00s, a tree-scattered raised bank in the car-park in College Park adjacent to the rugger-pitch was let run wild and shaggy. That area was even smaller than the Goldsmith/Burke lawn but afaik it was just left unkempt and the wildflowers elbowed their way in. It was super convenient for Botany 101 students to use quadrats and transects to calibrate the extent of species diversity. Like I did in Blean Wood as a teenager 50 years ago. 

And South Dublin Co Co SDCC have a Pollinator Action Plan 2021-2025 which seems to bee (see what I did there?) on the right track. They have embraced Long Flowering Meadows which are only cut once a year. Have to hope that there isn't an uptick in cases of Lyme disease [tick-borne Borreliosis] among the walking public. We, for sure, had to scan our kids every evening after they'd been out in the hayfields. And that was before Lyme disease was a thing in Ireland. SDCC would rather folks cavort in the much smaller acreage maintained as Short Flowering [5 cuts a year] Meadows.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up some back-issues of Irish Botanical News the organ of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland BSBI. An article therein was on message: The case against 'wildflower' seed mixtures - position paper No. 1. Doogue et al. pp Dublin Naturalists' Field Club DNFC.  Ir.Bot.News 32 (March 2022) pp. 32-44. They are correctly scathing about the effects of the wildflower-meadow-seed-packaging-industry. They include a picture of a, frankly gorgeous, non-native wild-flower road-verge at Portrane Co Dublin. Noting that the assemblage is an impossible pastiche of plants from very different ecological niches whose common feature is that they have profuse colorful inflorescences:

You may be assured that all these plants will be dead over-winter and any seed which is set will struggle through the thatch next spring. In a few years, almost all these introduced species will have failed the natural selection test. Whoever bought and distributed the bonanza will have to return to Sandro Cafolla [who prev] for more 'product'. Better, cheaper, to buy a scythe and mow later . . . and in patches. Better still to leave the verge alone and give the airspace to prickly poppy Roemeria argemone which used to be locally abundant but is now fighting for its life.

In their position paper the DNFC makes a few cogent points:

• Native to Ireland is nowhere near good enough! Ecotypes of the same species will have different flowering times; be adapted to different habitats; be resistant to local pests. Seed from Donegal may be at nothing in Waterford.
• Native seeds work on the Field of Dreams principle: if god builds it [the correct habitat] the flowers will come.
• Pollinators are fussy. Not all 'wild flowers' will be to the taste of locally abundant insects.
• Let's hear it for dull native plants with inconspicuous flowers: gardens are the place for in yer face.
• wildflowers build up a close mutually beneficial relationship with the darkness below ground - especially fungi and microbes. Wildflower seed packets leave all that behind on the packing-room floor.

DNFC: In conclusion, we are of the view that the distribution of 'wildflower' seed mixtures will nt enhance Ireland's natural biodiversity, it is damaging to what remains and will divert attention and funding from addressing the underlying causes of the ongoing destruction of our flora and fauna. Quite!

Wayfarers return

Every year this century, The Wayfarers hiking club has organized a day-long up-and-down hike in the Blackstairs. We first heard about this annual event in May when there seemed to be A Lot of folks yomping and chattering down the lane past our yard. The following year, we tapped a 25 lt drum of spring water and left in on a crate out in the lane, in case someone was parching up. A tuthree years after that the weather was forecast to be super hot and dry. The Wayfarers contacted us and asked if they could be sure that water was available at our nearly half-way house because otherwise they'd make other arrangements for [emergency] re-hydration. My answer was "water is free, water will be available, even if we are not" and it was so.

Over the subsequent years we developed a long-distance relationship: me sending a message to say water would be; they being effusive with thanks. In 2007, we finally installed a stand-pipe in the yard near the front gate. Not just for random walkers you understand: sheep need water too. Recently, for a jape, I've been making a slab of flapjacks and setting out some chairs to make the water-stop more engaging. Sitting in a chair makes it easier to deal with blisters and who doesn't like a flapjack? 2019 was notable because someone left us a thank-you note and €2.50 appeared in the empty biscuit tin. It looked like a turning point in the profitability for Bob's Bix and Bevvies plc. But Coronarama put the kibosh on those dreams, because The Wayfarers cancelled their walk in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Y'have to respeck such tenacious concern for their members and the stewards of the event because, by a year ago, most other public expression of Covid measures had been thrown out the national window.

Whatevs, The Blackstairs Challenge was back on Sat 20th May 2023 and I contacted Wayfarers a month out to promise water. I was perversely looking forward to the event because my engagement was truly peripheral - the walkers were committing [or aspiring] to trek 30+km up hill and down vale while I could be sofa-bound. The day before I 

• made two (2!) slabs of flapjacks - one with a hint of ginger to spice it up a bit
• put out a table and a miscellaneous collection of seats
• cleared up the corner near the tap

Up betimes on Der Tag, I flung open the gate; hammered in my "<W-A-T-E-R<" fingerpost; and waited for the horde. The Off in Killanure is between 0730 and 0830. As expected from previous years the first, excessively fit lycra-clad bodies trotted past the gate at ~0930. They were not the type to pause for water. Over the next 3 hours several dozen happy hikers turned in at the gate, and set off south a few minutes later "refreshed".  Everyone had to be through the next checkpoint before 1300 hrs, so it puts a finite window on the event as far as we are concerned.

Because you can never have enough signage, I tried to make clear what was in the biscuit tin. Somewhat to my chagrin, when we tidied up before lunch the tin was not empty. It had lost its biscuits but acquired €11.20! BB&B plc. may be a runner after all. To my utter chagrin, in the early afternoon there was a knock at the door and two Wayfarer stewards presented me with a bottle of Jameson. That was thoughtful and I accepted gracefully. These things shouldn't be thought of as transactional. Small kindnesses are the lubricant which keeps society trundling along. The next day I sent a note: "Thanks for the bottle of Jameson! It's a bit like the Marriage at Cana: turning uisce into uisce beatha. I know that you know that you don't have to do that. I won't drink it all at once. " Till next year, walking people!

washoe the talking chimp

wash wash Washoe [prev]

• Abandon car all ye who enter here (Mt St Helen's washout) 
• Washington's and other state flags. 
• Washoe County mounts up
• I'm forever washing dishes
• dish-dog clatters
• Le métier de plongeur 
• Messy business
• washout  
• Washboard Buskers 'Travelin' Broke'