Lurking Latin

I had a strange experience this morning after listening to another chapter of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (last night I was already too sleepy to even attempt it). YouTube subsequently showed me a video of a Polish priest conversing in the Vatican with an American via the medium of Latin, and I genuinely could not work out whether I was hearing Russian or not :-p( Read more... )

---

I found an envelope of spring onion seeds which I evidently harvested last year from the spring onion that flowered, so have tried sowing those, since the two surviving stubs of the old ones are looking pretty sick. It didn't help that something came along and ate the tops off them -- and also ate the flowers off the calendulas, quite deliberately, half a head at a time, coming back every night to finish the job and then moving on to the next plant -- I would be more annoyed about that if they hadn't been flowering all winter so that I was rather bored with them!

The tulips are all blooming heartily, with the exception of the bulb at the end, in between where the two garlics were put in, which is only just showing a bud. Presumably due to competition from the neighbouring bulbs, even though the garlic cloves were much smaller....

Chives

I took a packet of chive seed (hand-labelled '26 but presumably harvested last year, unless someone had overwintering chives!) from the local seed library -- a fair return for all the marigold and calendula seeds I had given them :-)
( Read more... )

But when I went to file the rest of the unused seed away, I discovered that I already *had* an unopened packet of commercial seed that had evidently been given to me at some point last year on the grounds that it was date-expired, so I could have tried simply sowing that first rather than helping myself to the fresh seed... However, it was dated 'sow by 2023', so this swap seed will undoubtedly be more likely to germinate reliably.