How to write good
This week: My next Monograph; Planting out; Gardening matters;
This week has been busy, although I do not have a huge amount to show for my efforts.
We have had good weather too. There was much needed rain on Tuesday and Wednesday which a welcome brought 13mm.
Because the temperatures are now lower, the moisture has not evaporated as quickly from my soils, so I have not needed to irrigate this week.
I have done some “spot irrigation” with the watering can on things like my newly planted vegetables. These have grown considerably since planting two weeks ago and are now looking very good.
Unfortunately, there are now weeds germinating all over the vegetable plot. I am going to have to get my Dutch Hoe out to eliminate them while they are small.
The daytime temperatures are still around 28° to 30°C, so a nice temperatures to be outside. The best part is that overnight lows, just after dawn are 17°C, so I have been out early, working before the sun has climbed very high in the sky.
I did come across some instructions for blog writing this week, which I thought were worth sharing:
How to write good – Ten rules
- Avoid Alliteration. Always.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid clichés like the plague. They are old hat.
- Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
- Be more or less specific.
- Sentence fragments? Eliminate.
Seven: Be consistent. - Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
I must try an incorporate more of these rules into my blog….
My next Monograph
In July a colleague asked me to research an aspect of the Plymouth City Police that has received scant attention. It seemed like a good project for our baking hot summer days.
Plymouth is another of those British places which you “go to” and not “go through”. It is in the far southwest corner of Devon and is a city I have never visited. However that did not deter me.
Such is the power of the internet now, that a considerable amount of research can be done, without ever having to leave your desk.
I was asked if I could help with the locations of the Plymouth police boxes and police telephone pillars which once were dotted around the city.
A very valuable on-line resource for the UK is the National Library of Scotland collection of Ordnance Survey Maps.
These are in every scale from the huge 1:360 scale through the more usual 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 series maps, all of which are out of copyright.
On these maps, street furniture like police pillars, shown as “PTP” are easily found. These can be correlated with photographs, like this of PC Tommy Watkins using the pillar outside the Pullman Bus Company office in Bootham, York.
The photograph give a good idea of the size of these police pillars because in those far off day policemen had to be 6′ (183 cm) to join the city force.
What I then do is to add a Google StreetView photo of the location today.
Working on the project for Plymouth has been interesting and it is now almost complete.
My research is complete and I have almost finished the book. It runs to some 120 pages and I have just a few more photographs and maps to add.
There is a time imperative here because I want to publish the PDF format book in two weeks time, when the next police history magazine is due to be published.
So this week, on the rainy days, and when it has been hot outside, I have been slaving over a hot computer, putting everything together.
Planting out
The mosquitoes have been really, really biting this week.
These are our invasive Asian Tiger mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus. They are ferocious, biting 24/7 and even biting through clothing.
I have barely used any Dipterol repellent this summer, that is until the middle of August.
Since I started having to use the repellant, I have gone through a full bottle.
This week I discarded shorts and went back to long pants when I’ve been working in the polytunnel, simply to reduce the amount of available skin that the little wretches can attack.
I’ve laid more of the old roof tiles around the edge of the raised bed, which has allowed me to dig out the path which runs around the outside.
The top soil I have removed has then been riddled, to get rid of the small stones. These stones are then put into the trench so I have a hard path around the outside, whilst the topsoil is used to fill the inside of the raised bed.
As the path advances around the raised bed, one end is now almost complete.
I have been letting some Sweet Potatoes produce “slips” for me. Slips are the seedlings which will produce sweet potatoes next year.
Normal practice is to wait until each sprout or slip is around ten to fifteen centimeters long and then break them off the parent potato, putting them in water to root before potting them up.
It is too late in the year for the Slips I have, to produce any potatoes this year, but what I want to try is letting them grow over the winter in the raised bed.
This is so that next spring, I will have some strongly rooted plants ready to produce more sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potatoes are vines and are from the same family as “Morning Glory” flowers.
Where it is warm enough, they are perennial vines. However I think our usual winter in Dol is just a little too cold for them to be perennial, but I am going to try in the polytunnel raised bed to see what happens.
With one end of the raised bed earthed up, I have planted the three small sweet potatoes I had had in the pantry which have produced the slips.
This is another of my horticultural experiments. I have no idea how it will turn out, but I will report once I know!
Gardening matters
In addition to the Broad Beans I planted in the vegetable plot, I also put some into the polytunnel border. This is for a mid winter crop and for the sprout tips which are lovely in stir frys.
Somehow they are still growing….
Also in the polytunnel, another segment of the Banana has opened with two hands of small fruit.
I reported in the summer that my citrus were under extreme stress and I had covered all the bushes with shade netting. I am delighted that it seems to have worked.
In the citrus orchard I have a good crop of early lemons and also Mandarin fruit. The Mandarin will be ripe in time for Christmas.
This week I have seen one of our Balkan Whip snakes and also several Balkan Wall Lizards, Podarcis tauricus. This one was sunning himself and looks extremely bright so may have just shed its skin.
They retreat into cracks in the walls during cold spells but come out on sunny days throughout the winter, so do not truly hibernate, like our snakes.
This year has really been a year for brambles. These are wild blackberry briars. If left they only produce small fruit which are eaten by birds.
The birds then drop the seeds everywhere. The plants have vicious thorns all along every stem and they attack you as you walk past, just like Triffids do.
Their roots are deep and difficult to dig out, often growing within the root system of other plants. This week I have been round with SBK, a brushwood killer and have cut the stems then treated each cut using a fine paintbrush to apply a drop SBK only to the cut.
The problem is that every time I go into one of the orchards, I see more brambles, which I hadn’t noticed before! NCG