Earthworm Massacre

Yesterday was one of those "rain, rain, go away" days. I took Olga for an early-morning walk, but otherwise we stayed inside almost all day. I'd hoped to go to Homebase to buy some gardening stuff but Dave wasn't feeling great, so we put that off until later.

I got outside long enough to shoot some photos of the rain on the patio (above). See how our forget-me-nots are already in bloom?

This was my major achievement for the day. We've been talking about turning the back corner of the garden into a wildflower patch. So yesterday morning, before the drizzle began, I got out there with a shovel and removed the sod, undoubtedly one of the dirtiest jobs I've undertaken in the garden ever. I killed or traumatized about a hundred thousand earthworms in the process, which I felt bad about, and I kept trying to move them out of the way, but our lawn is so thick with them that they couldn't be avoided.

(If earthworms are the sign of healthy soil, as is often said, then our soil must be supercharged.)

As you can see, I left the borage around the edges of the patch -- we like it, especially when the blue flowers emerge and the bees buzz around it in droves.

The challenge is going to be keeping Olga out of this zone. I think we may buy some garden fencing, as much as I hate it, to discourage her. We still need to get some wildflower seeds -- I'm hoping that slugs won't be drawn to them, since they survive in the wild, after all.

I also salvaged a couple of clay flowerpots from a pile of discarded construction debris in front of a neighbor's house. (There's always at least one house under renovation on our street. It's crazy.) One of the pots had some bulbs growing in it -- I think they're bluebells. More bulbs for the garden!

Engolfed!

Well, as you can see, I slept late this morning. Spring Break officially begins today, and as I write, Dave, Olga and I are all still in bed at 7:30 a.m. In fact, the dog is snoring.

It feels so good to sleep in, even though my version of "sleeping in" is probably most people's version of a normal time to get up.

I got everything done yesterday that I needed to at work, so I left with a clean desk, which is a good feeling. The conference room books are all cataloged, the summer reading lists made, the fiction shelves weeded, the computer chargers returned and rolled neatly in their drawers. (Well, kind of neatly. Neatly enough.)

Olga and I found this car yesterday on our morning walk. I went back with my camera on my way to work to get some photos.

This is why I love living in cities -- I stumble across the creativity and wackiness of other people on a daily basis. Suburban life, while it carries its own attractions, just doesn't provide that kind of stimuli!

Drug Bags

Several months ago I read an article about a photographer who has made a project out of collecting empty drug bags in London. The bags -- little plastic zip-locks featuring simple designs -- are used by dealers and consumers of marijuana and other drugs. They can easily be found lying around on London's streets and in its parks and public spaces.

The photographer, Dan Giannopoulos, not only collects the bags -- he maps his finds and relates them to certain neighborhoods.

I found it all pretty interesting, especially since I've been known to pick up an odd drug bag here and there. Above are some examples I've found during my walks around London. It's not the drugs that interest me -- it's been more than two decades since I've had any pot and I've never tried anything stronger -- but rather the artwork.

For a long time I resisted collecting them, choosing to simply photograph them instead. But after I saw a collage of Giannopoulos' found bags, I couldn't resist making a much smaller version of my own. I'm not sure I'll do anything with them. Dave might not be amused if I were to frame them and hang them up in the house!

On a completely different note, I planted our sweet pea seeds yesterday, so that's one more spring task completed. I still need to repot some plants and clear a flower bed in the back corner of the garden -- we're going to plant some wildflowers back there for the bees. There's more trimming and pruning to be done, and -- well -- it never ends, does it? Fortunately Spring Break begins tomorrow, so I'll have more time to take care of some of these tasks!

Our amaryllis bulbs have all sprouted, but for some reason there are no flower buds this year. It's the strangest thing -- the first time that's happened. Maybe they're still to come.

Hyacinth Bouquets

Olga and I found these bulbs sprouting on Hampstead Heath on Saturday. It's like someone planted a little spring bouquet -- a Hyacinth Bouquet! (Or Bucket?)

And how is it that hyacinths planted in the open in a park grow and bloom, while ours get devoured by pigeons?

Here's another nice hyacinth-and-daffodil assortment, growing in a small patch of earth surrounded by a parking lot. Someone definitely made creative use of bulbs in this tiny space.

Finally, just to show you that we're not complete losers in the bulb department, these hyacinths are growing outside our front door. They're the ones given to us by our friends Adam and Tim a couple of years ago. Pests don't bother our front garden nearly as much as the back -- I guess commotion in the street and the fact that it's a much smaller space keep them away.

Dave and I worked in the garden a bit on Monday -- we trimmed away some dead stuff, pruned our gangly geraniums and planted some seeds that I'd been saving in envelopes all winter. Some were poppy seeds collected from the purple opium poppies that Mrs. Kravitz grows next door, and some were hogweed seeds from Hampstead Heath. I've always wanted to have some tall, dramatic hogweed plants in the garden.

(I'm not talking about giant hogweed, which is a whole different matter -- those plants are certainly dramatic but they're also apparently dangerous and invasive. This page explains the difference between the two.)

Anyway, I have no idea whether any of these seeds will grow but I'm giving it a whirl. And we have more seeds still to get in the ground, including some sweet peas I picked from our vines last year. I gotta get moving on those.

We got a nice surprise when our council tax statement arrived the other day. Apparently we've overpaid somewhere along the line, and we don't owe any payments until September! How this is possible I'm not sure, especially when our monthly bill (£215) is more than we've been paying each month (£199). (When we first moved in here, almost four years ago, I set our bank account to make regular payments and never adjusted it, so apparently the tax increased at some point.) A co-worker told me that council tax, which goes to fund municipal services like trash collection, is only paid ten or eleven months of the year -- so maybe that's where we went wrong. We've paid every month. Anyway, as I said, it's a nice surprise.

Last night Dave and I went to a book-launching party for an acquaintance who's written a new novel. I bought a copy for the library, since she's affiliated with the school, but apparently the book is quite salacious so it may not be appropriate for student reading! I read some of the sexier parts of it to Dave last night after we got home, just for laughs -- it is definitely graphic. I hope, for our friend's sake, that it sells a million copies!

Hooper Struve

Not long after I started my LOOP walk on Sunday, I saw the telltale signs of an interesting bottle sticking out of the mud.

Most of it was completely buried, but I could tell that it had embossed lettering -- which is often a sign of something old or unusual. I grabbed a stick and gradually dug it out of the muddy path. (Don't worry -- this wasn't in the asbestos area!)

Here's the result -- a vaguely bowling-pin shaped vessel, about 6 1/2 inches tall, that says "Hooper Struve" on one side and bears the royal warrant on the other. "To H. I. M. the King, by appointment," it says.

The fact that it specifies "king," and not "queen," suggests that it dates from between 1901 and 1952. It turns out that Hooper Struve was a mineral water and lemonade manufacturer based in Brighton. It operated there until 1963; I'm vague on what happened to the company after that.

There are lots of photos of old Hooper Struve bottles online, but the only one I can find resembling mine is in this photo, lower left. And there's no information about it.

So, anyway, after I dug it up, I put the bottle in a plastic bag (an unused dog poo bag, to be honest, because being a dog owner I have them on me at all times) and I stashed it in my camera bag. I could tell that the neck was broken but I saw no other glass pieces at the site, so it must have been broken long ago. If you look closely at the top photo, you'll see that the bottle was so full of dirt that tiny plants were growing inside it! Nature had turned it into a terrarium!

As much as I liked the terrarium effect, when I got home I cleaned it up -- easier than expected -- and this is the end result. Another interesting find for the kitchen windowsill!

Hatch End to Elstree

Finally, FINALLY, after weeks of bad weather and back pain and traveling, I was able to get back on the LOOP yesterday. I walked a 10-mile section from Hatch End to Elstree.

Can you believe it was almost two months ago when I last stepped off the trail and had lunch at The Moon and Sixpence pub (above) in Hatch End? Seriously, time flies. I didn't get a shot of it then but I photographed it yesterday as I headed back to the trailhead.

From Hatch End I walked through some marginal woodlands, across fields and along a busy road before coming to this peculiar bit of land. The trail was prominently labeled with warning signs advising us that asbestos was present. (Apparently asbestos doesn't bother the teasels!)

Turns out this plot is known as Valley View Farm, a former piggery -- closed in the late '90s -- where people dumped construction waste and other debris for years. There was a plan to build houses here (!) but that sensibly got scrapped. Apparently the waste is still hanging around. I know asbestos in the ground isn't going to hurt me, unless I get down on my hands and knees and dig in it and inhale it, but still -- it felt a little unsettling to walk through this area.

And clearly dumping is still a problem. Kitchen cabinets, anyone?

From there, I walked through a wooded area near the "Grim's Dyke," an iron-age ditch that was constructed for a purpose we apparently don't fully understand today. The woods here were beautiful, with ponds and rhododendron and towering redwood trees.

At the center of it all was the Grim's Dyke Hotel, once the elegant and stately home of William S. Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. In fact, Gilbert died on this property, while swimming in one of the ponds in 1911. The hotel looks amazing -- I'd love to stay there with Dave and Olga! (The web site says they take "small dogs." Is Olga small? I'm not sure.)

From there I walked to a scenic overlook known as the Harrow Viewpoint. It wasn't very scenic on this particular morning, which was foggy and gray, and the place was strewn with an incredible quantity of litter. (Dave theorized that it's probably a Saturday-night hangout for local teenagers, and he's probably right -- so Sundays may be particularly messy.)

I found a memorial to "Fabian," which I think must be related to this incident, in which a young man and his girlfriend were recently found dead at the overlook. (Typical of some news articles, that one raises more questions than it answers -- the two "were found asleep," it says, with the cause of death still under investigation. How they went from "asleep" to dead I'm not sure, unless "asleep" is meant in the euphemistic sense.)

From there I passed a peculiar pub called "The Case is Altered." Strangely, it's one of several pubs in the UK with that name. Why it's called that I'm not sure -- there's a Ben Jonson play by that title from the early 1600s, but the signs showed soldiers in some kind of military campaign. It didn't appear to be open.

From there the path wound along roads and across farmland. What is that contraption?

I passed some contented-looking horses munching, and reclining on, their hay.

I stopped at a park near the Aldenham Reservoir for a completely tasteless egg and mayo sandwich. Then I pressed on to Elstree and Borehamwood, the home of film and TV studios where "Star Wars," the early Indiana Jones movies and "2001: A Space Odyssey," among others, were filmed. There's a big mural outside the train station commemorating the show-business history of the area, featuring the faces of Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Roger Moore and Christopher Lee.

From there I took the Thameslink train back to West Hampstead -- a straight shot and just four stops away! Probably the easiest commute to or from a trailhead I will ever have during this LOOP adventure.

Our Molested Tulips

I spent part of yesterday morning getting reacquainted with the garden. There's still not much going on out there -- our lungwort is blooming (above), and the hellebore is going gangbusters, and we're starting to see the first few forget-me-nots around the patio. The forsythia looks like a cloud of tiny yellow moths circling each other. And of course there are the daffodils, which not only survived the snowstorm but managed to right themselves again -- I took away the support stakes I put in to hold up their blossoms after the snow beat them down.

Otherwise, almost everything is either still dormant or just a tiny sprout.

Some of our bulbs are having a terrible time. The squirrels have eaten the heart out of them, and the slugs are feasting on what's left. We think these are tulip bulbs, which are apparently known for being tasty to both. You can even see a small black slug on that large leaf. (How can it be that just a week after a snowfall we have slugs eating our plants?! Where do such soft, watery creatures go when everything freezes?)

I put a few slug pellets around the wreckage, but I don't know what to do about the squirrels. It seems unlikely we'll get any tulips this year. Dave also planted camassia lilies, and I hope they aren't being eaten too -- but they might be. (It's hard to tell one bulb from another at this point.)

One of our hyacinths also got mangled by the pigeons. Sigh.

I'm sure there's a quotation out there about gardening being heartbreak, or something like that, but I can't find it right now.

Oh, someone asked on a recent post whether we'd tried feeding the squirrels to keep them away from our plants. The answer is yes -- we had a squirrel feeder for a while. But we found that they mangled the plants anyway. If anything, the feeder just seemed to attract more squirrels! We took it down.