<< october 2006

Thursday October 19th

It's been the best of times, this past year since last I typed into this page.

Stan's been so busy creating and providing us with the most wonderful fresh vegetables from the allotment, and I've been single-minded and distant with my head in a book or out doing shifts at nearby hospitals.

I'll start with some pictures of our little eden as it was a few weeks ago:

this is the 'top part'; our allotment is double sized so we've been able to have some separation. This part has been cultivated organically, just because that's the way it worked out. (Click to see a bigger image). The green mass you can see on the further away beds is mustard cress which Stan is growing over winter as green manure.

We've been enjoying crops of onions, leeks, neeps, parsnips, beetroot, broccoli, cauliflower, broad beans, purple french beans, runner beans, peas, borlotti beans, radish, rhubard, salad leaves, carrots, fennel, spinach and several varieties of tatties. The brussel sprouts are burgeoning, mmm, I love them.

This is one of Stan's pictures from when we first got the plot: it's taken from almost the same viewpoint as the one above:

This picture is of the lower part of the plot. It has a few trees - apples, pear, cherry & plum. Stan's been digging it over this past month or so: it had been left so that he could make progress with the upper part. Originally it must have been where the former occupier grew his tatties: the ground was undulating in rows. When we got it, the ground was covered in a thick layer of brambles. Testament to his hard work, the area is now a flat expanse of dark earth ("It's like cutting chocolate gateaux", sighed a proud Stan); ready for his plans of turning it into a controlled meadow with wild flowers.

As it is today, the grassy area is almost entirely dug over. In the bottom corner grows rainbow chard, tatties, spinach, scorzinera and skirret.

Here's some pictures of our ever-green world in the middle of Springburn... (bigger pictures if you click).

a pound-stretcher casket of late-summer vegetables:

With the beetroot I made a beautiful cake, much nicer than the Nigella beetroot cake I tried a few years ago. Nigella's was heavy and a day-glo pink. This recipe, which I found on the times online, was dark, moist and tasted of mineraly chocolate goodness. It was extremely easy: I forsee Stan being instructed in it's dark arts.

Over the summer he got quite good, I grudgingly admit, at making rhubarb muffins. I'll post the recipe for it soon: we've a freezer full of bags of it, measured out into 4oz bags for muffin-ising.

The morn's morn we're to give a presentation on Coronary Heart Disease. CHD makes for depressing reading. One gets the sense that even if the impact of genes didn't exist, you couldn't escape your fated health were you to live in deprived circumstances. What is it about heart disease? It shouldn't been seen as inevitable. Is it not shocking that factors which mean a man in Springburn is more likely to be jobless are as likely to mean he'll die an awful death from heart failure in his early 60s?

I must get away to bed: yesterday was the last day of my participation in a British Heart Foundation study which is investigating the effect of moderate exercise on the risk factors for diabetes type 2. Since early June I've been stoically not exercising for 6 weeks; then exercising like mad on the instructions of Dr.Nick. This co-incided with a trip home and a fall down a rabbit hole and has resulted in my clothes fitting better and being as fit as the Green Goddess. How intruiging the life of a student nurse is.