Week Three of Furlough

It’s been a bad week.

Home Life

This week I’ve not slept well at all. The anxiety and insomnia have combined to be far more powerful than my nightly sedatives ever will be. I’ve slept funny and twinged my neck, and I’ve just not been sleeping well anyway. David has rigged up a blanket and a bed sheet to the curtain pole to act as a black-out blind and it is working thus far. Apparently he knows I've now had a good nights sleep because I was sleep talking either to or about someone called Maurice. Don’t ask.

David and I have been watching the Starlink satellites go over. The first few passes we saw were frankly, crap. I am hoping to see the string of pearls but it's not looking likely. I did however take this photo of the plough on my phone.

Allotment

It’s has been a non-allotment-dominant week this week. I’ve been quite grumpy, quite tired, and very anxious this week, and I’ve done a lot of big jobs on the plot recently. There is always loads more work to do but I haven’t had the motivation to do it. I want to get the pond done but I am still waiting for the liner to arrive. I have ordered some pond weed plants to put in which will help oxygenate the water but these won’t be dispatched until next month.

I have sorted out a couple of beds ready for mass courgette/pumpkin/butternut/spaghetti squash planting – these beds really just needed weeding and digging over but I am happy that I’ve done them.

Life

There is no sign of ending of the furlough, and I am not expecting to be back at work until mid-May at the earliest. I am getting paid about £200 more than I anticipated which is quite nice, as that relieves some of the stress of the past few weeks.

Crocheting is hit and miss. I have started a goldfinch amigurumi but need to finish it. The constant colour changes and swaps don’t make these patterns fun to work on so it is now taking me a week or more to finish each bird. I have made a couple more squares for the blanket but I think I need 36 in total and I currently have six. I have ordered more yarn to finish the battenberg granny square blanket, and I have also ordered some yarn to have a play with colours to start another new blanket.

I haven’t done any of the 30-day fitness challenges for a while now but I am intending to start doing that online PE with Joe Wicks thing on YouTube. David and I have been walking and I spend most of these walks taking photos of flowers.

Loofah Update

As of 24^th April, I now have five seedlings appear from nine seeds. They are ever so slow to germinate and even slower to actually grow!! I hope I get all nine come up but I’m happy with five. Apparently they take up quite a lot of room to grow so maybe I don’t want more than five!

April in the Garden

Our little garden at home is filling up and filling out nicely. We measured it at approximately 35m² which is quite tiny, but it is big enough for us two, some raised beds, a shed, a bird feeding station, a makeshift pond, a seating area, a potting bench, and some bedding either side. Honest. There was already some greenery here when we moved in – mostly evergreen shrubs – but the landlady has given us permission to plant more things and to grow veggies too.

David has built me three wooden raised beds and put together a raised trug planter thingy that Momma P gave me. He has also put up the bird feeding station, a solitary bee box, and attached a hanging basket hook to the shed. I have put sturdy garden mesh along the fence panels so that climbing things can climb, and tall things can be tied up to give them support.

In the garden I have sown veggie seeds in the raised beds whilst leaving room for sowing more next month. I sowed most things at the start of the month and they are only just coming up now! I have radish, carrot, turnip, spinach, beetroot, chard, peas, beans, salad leaves, lambs lettuce, spring onion, leek, nasturtium, and calendula. I also dug up some strawberry plants from the plot and replanted them in the garden, and I have ordered some giant strawberry plants today to go into a new hanging basket. 

I also chucked some seed potatoes from work into the longer raised bed as I needed somewhere to put them – being furloughed means I cannot plant them at work, and we already planted loads at Ley Hill Community Garden before the lockdown started, which was fortunate. These potatoes at home are now poking up between the carrot, radish & turnip seedlings so I hope they all get along fine, and that the seedlings can put on enough growth before they get swamped by the spuds!

I spent a happy three hours in the sunshine a couple of days ago, in a rocking chair, reading. I basically moved the living room outdoors, and with my wide-brimmed sun hat and a coating of factor 30, I was good to go. I have started reading 'Dancing with Bees' by Brigit Strawbridge-Howard. I bought this a while ago but was waiting to finish another book before I picked this one up.

The birds are still happily visiting us; I am going to have to resupply with bird seed etc soon. The blue and coal tits are still taking cat fur – I have to keep scooping it up from the shrubs where they drop it to put it back in the holder for them to collect. They are getting quite good at clinging to the garden mesh on the fence to get the fur they want!

I installed a bird watering station too. There is a small water tray on the bird feeding station but it gets filled with peanuts and sunflowers, so I thought I’d make a ground level watering area – mainly for the dunnocks and blackbirds to get a drink. It is a cat litter tray from Poundland with a timber off-cut ramp, and some pebbles to weigh the wood down. I have seen coal tits drinking from it a few times now!

The garden is very green, except for the acer which is a rich red colour. I am really looking forward to having it full of colour; I have several sunflowers to plant (white, red, orange, and yellow), and I have also ordered some other plants. There was already a clematis which I think is going to have white flowers, so I bought a purple clematis whilst grocery shopping last week. I have ordered honeysuckle, red-hot pokers, and a load of seeds including campion, cowslip, deadnettle, clover and toadflax. Some of these seeds are going to be spread in the garden and some at the allotment. I have already chucked a load of flower seeds down and these are starting to come up too. I sowed calendula, tagetes, nigella, cosmos, foxglove, poppy, and whatever else I could find in my seed box.

We/I spend the days in the living room with the doors flung open so we can hear the birds. Our neighbours are quite quiet and the pub down the road is shut, so it is nice to just be able to sit.

Allotment Life: Woodwork in the Sun

I’m super happy with how these have turned out so I decided they needed a post all for themselves.

I bought a load of timber in March intending to make some raised beds but also half-planning to make current beds deeper. What’s actually happened is that David and I have built five new raised beds which has completely transformed the bottom of the plot. This is an area that floods quite badly every year – it is often under 4 inches of water – so it desperately needed building upwards to allow me to actually use this space to grow food.

I now have an area with five raised beds, two are the same size and the other three are different – custom made to fit the space whilst leaving enough room for a footpath to get a wheelbarrow up and down, and also enough space between the beds for the lawn mower.

The ground here is so uppy-downy so I’ve had to use most of the spoil heap (from digging out the pond) to level the ground off as best I could. The original plan was to use this spoil to fill the beds, but I thought raising the ground level might be a better idea. It sort of worked. One bed is definitely not level but it’s better than what I had before and I’m super happy with it now!

This area used to be three beds dug straight into the ground, and were some of the first beds we dug on the plot way back in 2010 and 2011! Adam dug one of them, and then spent the next day in hospital with a kidney stone baby. So now, instead of three beds dug into the ground, I now have seven raised beds. I just need to get them filled...

2014 - it looks completely different now

2011 - probably freshly dug!

So this is how it looks now!

Week Two of Furlough

Week Two has been a mixed bag. I am trying to NOT go to the allotment every day but I am finding hard with coping being in the house all day by myself. Two days is my limit!! I have been up the plot for a few days this week. The weather has been good and my brain has been bad, so I have needed to go.

I am really missing social contact with other people this week. I really miss my volunteers. They had basically become my social life. I have never been one to have a large group of friends and I rely on David a lot for support and company. I struggled with loneliness before the lockdown but now everything is amplified. My weekly work phone calls are likely going to stop soon as more members of the team are furloughed, so I won’t have that regular fixture to look forward to either. I am quite good with my own company and happy doing my own thing, but not having a soundboard has been hard, and not interacting with people who I enjoy being around has been really hard!

Allotment

So this week on the allotment has been another good one. I’ve been trying to get stuff sorted before the rain came – we were due a big thunderstorm this week that never amounted to anything – but I have also wanted to use this furlough time to get lots of big jobs started, and hopefully completed. 

This week I have:

·       Scraped vegetation off the patio area by the shed. I like to sit here and watch the birds, but couldn’t as it was thick with bramble, couch grass, and dock. Not any more.

·       Dug a pond! Great fun. I have dug it on part of the plot that I have never dug in the ten+ years I’ve been there. I hit clay and then hit the underlayer of clay (it changed colour). The pond is only maybe 30-40cm deep, but due to the slope of the ground, one side is maybe 60-70cm deep and the other is 30-40cm! I am going to have to install a fence around the back of the pond as it is a long way to fall. I cannot afford the liner or anything yet so currently it is just a whopping great big hole.

·       Planned and measured up for four new raised beds. Four!! This will totally transform the bottom of the allotment where it floods the worst. I will have five new beds in this area when it is done, but currently I do not have enough dirt to fill them all. The spoil from the pond will fill one, maybe two at a push, so I need to plan more digging to get more spoil.

·       Sowed a load of flower seeds in amongst the bulbs. I have sown nigella, calendula, hollyhock, chamomile, and other things. I just chucked the seed down and will hope for the best.

·       Dug over and weeded one small bed, ready for courgette plants (I have LOTS).

·       Started digging over and weeding the larger quince bed. I want to get this sorted out this year too as it floods really badly and the quince end up under 4-5 inches of water. I just haven’t got the materials so it’ll have to wait. I am trying to reduce the amount of dock on the plot (still, after ten years) so I have dug out a few, and will do more as the furlough period goes on.

The solitary bees are starting to emerge. I spent quite a long time just stood, watching. I think these are the male mason bees – they have hairy yellow moustaches and are waiting for the ladies to emerge ready to mate. I saw four males flitting around the three bee houses! I love watching them, and I absolutely love it when they sit in a hole looking out at the world.

This bee house was homemade - a chunk of silver birch tree with holes of different sizes drilled into it (between 3mm and 12mm). 

Home

At home, the salad seedlings are starting to come up. I have a handful of radish, a few turnip, and one chard seedling so far. I check the beds every morning hoping that absolutely everything has shot up overnight, but alas, no luck so far.

I have also made a start on growing LOOFAH! I have sown nine seeds, and as of 17^th April I have three seedlings appear. They are taking a while to germinate but I hope I get a few more. I might have to give them away to my neighbours!

Life

I have potentially another six weeks of furlough leave, so my allotment should be totally transformed by then. I am slowly putting on weight and I hope that regular trips to the plot to shift dirt should help keep the wobble off. I am finding it so hard to motivate myself to do anything, especially exercise. David and I started doing a bunch of 30-day fitness challenges and promptly stopped after day four. I keep doing odd bits here and there to try and exercise my hip, but I’m not doing anywhere near enough. I am not going out for walks when David isn’t here, so I told myself I would hula hoop every day, but I just can’t motivate myself to do it.

I have been crocheting squares to try and keep my fingers busy. I have made five so far; no idea how many I need for a blanket, but probably around thirty. I started making crochet birds but a couple of the patterns are written peculiarly so it stresses me out trying to translate them. There is also lots of fiddly colour work and carrying yarn needed, so it isn’t as easy as it looks.

The weather is due to change this week so I'm not sure how often I'm going to get up the plot. 

Week One of Furlough

It’s been an interesting few weeks. I had ten days off work, was in work for four, then was offered furlough, so I’ve now been on furlough leave for a week. It’s such a peculiar situation and it's all very surreal – the world is shutting down and lots of people are unfortunately dying, but I’m in a nice little bubble where everything is fine and we’re healthy, and it is quite hard to believe the statistics from the world. How can this be happening when everything is fine?! But of course, it is not fine, and it’s actually all very weird and strange and unsettling.

My anxiety is quite high at the moment and I’m having trouble getting off to sleep, even though my medication has sedatives in it. I had baggies under my eyesies the other day! I have been doing small bits of crochet trying to keep my brain and hands busy, but I cannot do complicated stuff as I do not have the brainpower and it frustrates me. I have been making larger mono-colour squares. Eventually these will be sewn together into a blanket (there’s a surprise), but focussing on one square at a time is doing good things to my brain, and it also means I’m not spending that time on social media – can’t use my hands to crochet and aimlessly scroll at the same time!

I have had four days up at the allotment this week. Partly due to furlough but also because the weather has been so, so, so good! It’s been beautifully sunny which means that the bottom road and turning-around-corner have dried out, and my plot isn’t as squelchy as it usually is. I have ticked off lots of little jobs, a couple of big jobs, and have also decided some new jobs for the year!

So far this month (I was furloughed from April 6^th), I have;

·       Planted potatoes – two rows, in the ex-bean bed by the shed. This bed doesn’t flood as it’s at the top of a slope so the spuds should be fine. I have planted Maris Piper and Casablanca. I haven’t grown potatoes on the allotment for about eight years so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

·       Weeded the herb patch. I knew when I rebuilt it that I should’ve done it properly and put down cardboard or paper, and then fresh compost on top – but I didn’t and now I’m paying the price. I removed an awful lot of creeping buttercup (I love it, but not in my veg beds), docks, teasels (I left a select few for wildlife). I also dug out some strawberries and teasel plants to bring home to plant in the garden. I could do with going back and replanting it all, and putting down some mulch - but not right now.
·       Painted a new shipment of timber in preparation for raised bed building. I have enough new wood for four beds! They are all going to go at the bottom of the plot where the flooding is worst, and then I can actually use this space to grow things. These beds were initially dug by my friend Adam when I first had the allotment, but I am now completely remodelling this area to make better use of the space. 

·       Dead headed the daffodils that had gone over so that they put energy into the bulb ready for next year. The paperwhites are now fully on display in the flower bed by the plum tree and are looking fab. The first tulips are also starting to open and there are lots more buds to come, and I have decided to plant even more tulips next year – maybe along the edge of the plot as a boundary line.

·       David spent a happy few hours (!!) in the sun lifting paving slabs, digging out a massive trench, lining it with sand and then relaying the same four paving slabs. This was done in front of my shed which means I can actually open the shed door now without it dragging across the floor. Last year I quite literally ripped the door off the hinges so that was a job that needed doing. I want a double row of slabs in front of the shed to stop it getting so boggy so we/he needs to do more digging and laying…

·       Decided where I am going to dig a pond! I am hopefully going to start digging it within the next couple of weeks and then I can order liner when I get paid. If I get paid – furlough means I am receiving a smaller paycheck so I can't fritter it all away on the plot.

At home I have been sowing seeds in the raised beds (salad crops, beans, peas, potatoes, flowers) and I have planted up the trough planters. David has built me a high-level trough planter thing that Momma P gave to me, and he also put up the solitary bee house on the fence. I have seen dark edged bee-flies in the garden and these are parasitic on solitary bees, so I am hoping this means there are solitary bees around too. I have seen a male hairy footed flower bee too, but no females yet!

I have spent a happy morning potting up most of the plants that have been occupying our second bedroom. I had three trays of sunflowers for this years sunflower challenge – I am growing giant, pikes peak, harlequin, earth walker, and Italian white. I also had pots with seedlings that were started by one of my Green Gym groups at work, so I have potted up some tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins. Some are for home, some for my plot, some for Momma P, and maybe if I can squeeze them in, the rest will go to work when we’re allowed back.

I am also having a go at growing my own LOOFAH this year! This was supposed to be a work challenge – getting each group to try and grow the most/best/biggest loofah. Alas, it hasn’t happened at work but I am still growing some. I started nine seeds so there will probably be enough for work when I go back. The first one has started poking up! They apparently need a long, warm growing season.

David and I are so, so, so, so lucky and happy and grateful that we moved house when we did. Having our own space is helping a lot, and so is deciding to sign up to Netflix. I am not sure how long I am off work for – my current return to work date is June 1^st but it might be earlier than that, so I may have a long time to keep up with gardening! I am hoping that we can still access the allotment as I am only leaving the house for allotment and shopping at the moment, and have been combining the two into one day, so I go the plot and then hit up the shops before coming home again. I’m not sure I will survive if the council shut the allotments…