Website woes
This week: Website woes; This week’s project; Bananas in flower;
We had some more much needed rain overnight on Monday into Tuesday. There was just enough for me to cut back on havingto irrigate.
Also, as the autumnal season advances, plants recognise the shortening days and cooling temperatures and are starting the process of getting ready for winter dormancy.
Still things are in flower, like these small Honesty flowers, Lunaria annua.
This is a late seedling from last year. Usually they are biannual, however with a long growing season that we have here on Dol, they can grow and flower all in a single year.
I have seen my first Preying Mantis of the year. I mentioned last week that I had not seen a single one. Then this week I came across this single adult male.
Clearly there are not as many about as there have been in previous years. I need to look carefully for their egg cases this autumn.
Two thirds of 2025 have past, in what seems like the blink of an eye.
I picked the last of the figs this week and also some ripe pears and passion fruit. I deliberated on what to make and decided on a summer fruit Pavlova, which I shared with friends.
This being the first week of September I updated my weather charts.
Almost the whole of the year so far has been above the 10 year average for temperature, with June, July and August being well above the average. This is a visual representation of climate breakdown. These are the maximum and minimum temperatures.
More interesting is the 11 day running average temperature. Some time ago I discovered academic research that showed that a running 11 day average temperature was the most important factor in the growth of all plants.
The actual temperatures vary by species for seed germination, ideal growth, pollen production and reproduction, fruit set and harvest quality. However all are affected by their respective 11 day average.
I have already found that my unheated propagator is currently too hot for Broccoli seeds to germinate. Today it is 28°C inside, just from the heat of the sun and that is with the lid open.
My 11 day average is a mean of the temperature, taken every five minutes, of every day, so the average of 288 daily measurements, added to the previous 11 day’s averages and then divided by 11.
What it shows is that statistically, the 11 day average has been pretty much on the 10 year average, for the whole of this year.
So although we have had day time temperatures of in excess of 39°C this summer, these have been balanced out by cooler overnight temperatures. This isn’t a statistical “sleight of hand”, but the actual data from y weather station.
As Sir Winston Churchill one said, “There are lies, dammed lies and statistics”……
Website woes
When I first registered my domain, way back in September 2013, I was with a UK domain host, who at that time were rated as one of the best.
Over the years, they have been taken over by larger and larger companies and each time, the service has gone down as the costs have gone up.
The most recent acquisition was by the American company “Go-Daddy”. I really did not want to be hosted on US servers because of the security implications. Probably insecurity would be a better word!
With the renewal of my domain being due on the 6th September, I have been looking throughout August at alternative domain hosts.
A domain host is the organisation who has the servers where each weekly blog, and all the substantial files that make it run, are held.
After extensive research, I decided to move to Hostinger.com and quickly and easily renewed my domain registration, at a saving of £10 straigh away.
I got a four year hosting deal for less that the one year renewal fee that the Go-Daddy company wanted!
The first part of the transfer went very smoothly, however it was after 24 hours that things started to go wrong.
I found I had lost all the photographs, together with a lot of the page functions.
Hostinger have a very good AI driven chat-bot which quickly puts you through to technicians when things go wrong. So it was only a matter of time before everything was recovered.
There are differences between the way the old hosts and Hostinger give domain owner access to their backend systems. The H-Pannel on Hostinger is considerably simpler and you need much less knowledge of programming, which is good.
One thing which will not work though, are the old links which are embedded in the notifications about a new blog entry.
These link back to the old server and the only way to get them working is to re-link every one individually.
With almost 600 blogs since I began this journey in 2014, that is not going to happen any time soon!
This week’s project
Last Christmas I was sent a really nice gift from friends in Stuttgart: a Pflanzbarer Kalender – seed calendar, with a new packet of seeds to plant each month.
I have been planting them during the year, however when I looked at September and October, I realised the seeds were for Autum greens and vegetables.
It was only a short jump to realise that I needed to move ahead with a project inside the polytunnel, to add a raised bed down the centre.
I can grow tomatoes and peppers in the summer, however when the temperature inside is over 50°C, not much else will grow, even with copious amount of irrigation.
Winter, when the inside temperature seldom drops below 12°C and the inside has an 11 day average temperature of 11°C, is the ideal time to grow things, after outside crops have stopped growing.
Winter here is mild and usually frost free most years, but plants still go dormant. Just looking the 11 day average temperature outside is 9°C in November and December, 7°C in January and 8°C in February.
In the polytunnel the 11 day average is 13°C in November, 10°C in December and 9°C in January, enough to still have established winter collards growing.
After measuring out a 3 metre by 1 metre area, I cut corner pegs to hold the boards and then brought out the boards I have had in stock for some months.
They needed cutting and then I stapled plastic to the inside. This is to slow down rotting due to moisture in the soil.
This is why I never throw anything away. I used two offcuts from the polythene I use to winterise the outside of the polytunnel.
After moving the completed boards, I trimmed some of the wood I removed from the roof into 70 cm stakes to drive into the soil so I had something I could screw the boards to.
At one end there is a gap under the boards because the land slopes downwards, away from the camera.
I also decided to extend the underground irrigation system while I was building the raised bed.
There is a network of mixed leaky feeder and supply pipes under the strawberry bed. It was not difficult to change a 90° corner piece into a “T” piece. Then extend the pipe across the inside of the formwork.
There is an upward pipe which will provide soil surface level irrigation. I added a length of pipe which goes across the bed, just in case I ever need to extend the system further.
With the frame complete, I started to dig out a path along the sides. This is how I plan to fill the raised bed with soil.
It will need 1.5 cubic metres of soil to fill it to its finished size. I think I will fill enough now so I can plant some winter crops and then fill more in next spring.
The soil in this orchard is some of the best I have. Even so I am riddling out the stones which I will use in the path.
Bananas in flower
While I was working in the polytunnel this week, I moved some of the dead leaves from my Banana plants and was surprised to see I have a flower.
It has been there for some time because there are already three hands of bananas (pale green fingers) which have formed and which are 10cm long.
It will still take quite a while for them to ripen. Depending on the variety ripening can take three to six months
The flower stalk continues to grow downwards and as each bract opens, it reveals more flowers.
These open at night and are pollinated by birds, bats and insects in the wild. In my polytunnel, it will be insects: flies, moths and possibly bees.
Each flower can have up to nine tiers or “hands” of bananas. There can be up to 20 individual fruit per hand.
Botanically Banana fruits are berries. The trunk is made up of fibrous overlapping leaf sheaths and is extremely heavy and dense when you cut it. They are classed botanically as fruiting herbs.
Once flowering and fruiting have finished, the banana dies. New Banana “Pups” are already appearing at the base of this plant. I will separate these and grow them on.
Bananas grow from underground rhizomes and need a lot of water to grow and fruit. I will be pleased when these two die back because they are too tall for my polytunnel.
Having fruiting bananas certainly gives new meaning to “growing your own”! NCG