The turning of the year
5 October 2025 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAfter the brief biannual period of wearing my short-sleeved jumpers I am now considering doing the full changeover to winter clothing; I am wearing dressing-gowns (albeit summer ones) in the morning and snuggling down under an eiderdown and two blankets at night, which thinking about retrieving the third one from upstairs! And I really need more vests, even if not quite full thermals as yet.
I have been harvesting and winnowing the Swan River daisies, which have all gone into fluffy ripeness at once, and resorting to simply dead-heading them in order to stop them shedding unwanted seed everywhere!
Some of the self-sown marigolds are quite sturdy now, although clearly far from flowering. I still have a lot of seedheads from those as well. And the pink Linaria plants sown back in June are now flowering merrily -- we shall see how long this batch continues for! (I did harvest some ripened seed from the last of the old plants this summer, so there is no need to worry about whether they can set seed over the winter.)
The chives have largely died down like the grass that they are (the continuing blackfly problem both with chives and spring onions didn't help). We shall see if they come back next year. The mystery bulb has likewise gone underground without ever doing anything identifiable, and may or may not still be alive!
The yellow poppy has just about survived, but never showed any signs of flourishing. The ants, on the other hand, mercifully seem to have moved their operations, although my campaign against them with jar-lids of bicarbonated soda and sugar didn't seem to make any great impact...
I have been pulling up seedling California poppies from all over the place -- fortunately they are easy to identify. I seem to have one surviving orange long-headed poppy, though plenty of seed from last year.
I deliberately stopped watering the wildflower trough in hot weather, and much of what was in it has now duly wilted and died -- I hope to be able to clear it out this winter and start again with a fresh generation of less dominant (at least to start off with) plants. There are still tomatoes coming, although I reluctantly decided to pinch off all the fresh flowers on the grounds that any fruit which sets now will never amount to anything. The tomatoes from the fresh spurs are pretty much full-size, and just about starting belatedly to turn colour; the guess of a month to produce successful fruit was clearly over-optimistic! Possibly I lost a month or so's production from that mysterious leaf-curl syndrome... but more probably the plants would just have finished reproducing and died back by now.
Unexpectedly, I have yet another truss of decent-sized (albeit green) fruit on the Roma tomato that I hadn't previously noticed! I have been cooking with a lot of green tomatoes after one of the ladies down our road put out a big box of cut-off cherry tomato branches laden with unripe fruit -- presumably she had been clearing out her greenhouse and didn't want to waste the unharvested tomato crop. I didn't take the lot (or all the quinces) but I did take quite a few and have been cooking them into things, in addition to making a batch of green tomato sauce which ended up bearing a strong resemblance to chutney after I put rather a lot of sugar in to counteract the sourness ;-)
The chillies are flourishing this year as never before; the large plant has ripened almost all its fruit, and the smaller one most of it, and we shall have a bumper crop (though I have still failed to use up the chillies I dried out back in 2022... I have been giving my harvests away ever since, including the dark-leaf chillies (and have been observing the descendants of *those* busily growing this year!))
Both plants are now falling over due to the sheer weight of fruit on them....
The basil plant that escaped and which I allowed to flower has tall flower-spikes on it, but I don't know whether it will have managed to ripen any seed -- the tops of the spikes still have white flowers on them. Unusually, I have managed to keep on top of harvesting from the rest of the multiple basil plants and none of those have gone to seed :-)
I still have a few dwarfed plants/seedlings left in the cardboard tray, which astonishingly have survived through all the heat; the original plan was to pot those up once the larger plants had inevitably gone to seed, but in the event I haven't needed to do so.
I have been harvesting and winnowing the Swan River daisies, which have all gone into fluffy ripeness at once, and resorting to simply dead-heading them in order to stop them shedding unwanted seed everywhere!
Some of the self-sown marigolds are quite sturdy now, although clearly far from flowering. I still have a lot of seedheads from those as well. And the pink Linaria plants sown back in June are now flowering merrily -- we shall see how long this batch continues for! (I did harvest some ripened seed from the last of the old plants this summer, so there is no need to worry about whether they can set seed over the winter.)
The chives have largely died down like the grass that they are (the continuing blackfly problem both with chives and spring onions didn't help). We shall see if they come back next year. The mystery bulb has likewise gone underground without ever doing anything identifiable, and may or may not still be alive!
The yellow poppy has just about survived, but never showed any signs of flourishing. The ants, on the other hand, mercifully seem to have moved their operations, although my campaign against them with jar-lids of bicarbonated soda and sugar didn't seem to make any great impact...
I have been pulling up seedling California poppies from all over the place -- fortunately they are easy to identify. I seem to have one surviving orange long-headed poppy, though plenty of seed from last year.
I deliberately stopped watering the wildflower trough in hot weather, and much of what was in it has now duly wilted and died -- I hope to be able to clear it out this winter and start again with a fresh generation of less dominant (at least to start off with) plants. There are still tomatoes coming, although I reluctantly decided to pinch off all the fresh flowers on the grounds that any fruit which sets now will never amount to anything. The tomatoes from the fresh spurs are pretty much full-size, and just about starting belatedly to turn colour; the guess of a month to produce successful fruit was clearly over-optimistic! Possibly I lost a month or so's production from that mysterious leaf-curl syndrome... but more probably the plants would just have finished reproducing and died back by now.
Unexpectedly, I have yet another truss of decent-sized (albeit green) fruit on the Roma tomato that I hadn't previously noticed! I have been cooking with a lot of green tomatoes after one of the ladies down our road put out a big box of cut-off cherry tomato branches laden with unripe fruit -- presumably she had been clearing out her greenhouse and didn't want to waste the unharvested tomato crop. I didn't take the lot (or all the quinces) but I did take quite a few and have been cooking them into things, in addition to making a batch of green tomato sauce which ended up bearing a strong resemblance to chutney after I put rather a lot of sugar in to counteract the sourness ;-)
The chillies are flourishing this year as never before; the large plant has ripened almost all its fruit, and the smaller one most of it, and we shall have a bumper crop (though I have still failed to use up the chillies I dried out back in 2022... I have been giving my harvests away ever since, including the dark-leaf chillies (and have been observing the descendants of *those* busily growing this year!))
Both plants are now falling over due to the sheer weight of fruit on them....
The basil plant that escaped and which I allowed to flower has tall flower-spikes on it, but I don't know whether it will have managed to ripen any seed -- the tops of the spikes still have white flowers on them. Unusually, I have managed to keep on top of harvesting from the rest of the multiple basil plants and none of those have gone to seed :-)
I still have a few dwarfed plants/seedlings left in the cardboard tray, which astonishingly have survived through all the heat; the original plan was to pot those up once the larger plants had inevitably gone to seed, but in the event I haven't needed to do so.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 05:52 pm (UTC)And *all* the small number of Dreamwidth users who are subscribed to my blog -- many if not most of whom haven't posted in years -- are comparative strangers, in that I don't think I've ever met a single one of them face to face; the acquaintance is purely electronic, and initially random in nature!
I'm afraid my Russian, despite my current strenuous efforts, is still stuck in the pretty early stages; what I am doing is desperately trying to run before I can walk, jumping in at the deep end and hoping that some of it will eventually rub off. Which it is doing, I think, but probably not as effectively as if I were actually studying grammar and memorising vocabulary.
What I am mainly doing is acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of matters relating to that one specific film and its sequels, and the 'side-projects' of the people involved in it, a.k.a. their actual careers outside that particular bit of fluff :-p
I am good at translation; I have always been good at translation even of the English->English variety, which means that if I can, by enormous effort, puzzle out the meaning of something, then I can generally recast it into an equivalent fluent expression in my own tongue. It's highly misleading in terms of my actual ability to speak anything other than English, though -- I simply happen to be very good at *that*...
For a lot of those song lyrics, for example, I could barely pick up more than a tantalisingly catchy phrase or two from the chorus without assistance, and had to look up practically every word before I could hope to analyse the meaning enough to start writing my own equivalent verse. Sadly I really struggle with Russian poetry, even though I'd love to be able to appreciate Venjiamin Smekhov's readings of his beloved classics -- I simply can't understand a word of it without prolonged study, however beautifully it is spoken!