And the number of chillis has started to grow almost exponentially. The count as of yesterday was up to 48. Yum, yum! The riots in particular are exploding. One of them has such a dense little patch of them that I’m hoping the plant can support them. I’m looking forward to seeing how the plant looks when they start to change colour…
Rainy day today, and the last day of the long weekend, so it was time to re-pot the chillis into their last, big pots. I should really have done it a couple of weeks ago, I think. Some of them were pretty root-bound and were a bit smaller than their matching plant that had been in a slightly bigger medium pot, but hopefully they’ll be fine. Hasn’t seemed to stop them flowering etc.
Gave me a good chance to count the chillis that have appeared. There are 16 actual chillis to date between the Ring of Fire, Prarie Fire and Riots. Still non chillis on the Zimbabwe Bird Pepper plants, but they look like they’re about to explode with a heap of flowers really soon (although there is one flower out now on one of them).
As it was a long weekend here and we thought the chances of us just wasting it sitting inside were pretty high we decided to make a bit of an effort to go out and see another of the free London museums. This time the Science Museum.
We had a pretty good wander around, but we’d have to say that it’s probably 3rd on our list so far after the Natural History museum, and the British museum. Not that there wasn’t some interesting stuff, but it’s just that I think you have to really be into some things before the exhibits really make too much sense to you. Even some of the descriptions of the items seem to assume quite a level of familiarity with the topic. But still enough cool stuff there to keep us both interested for a bit.
As it was a nice day we decided that we’d walk for a while once we left there. Hyde Park isn’t that far away, so we walked up to there and through the park down towards town. At the corner of Hyde park there is a new memorial to the Kiwi soldiers from the world wars. Although we’d been past it on busses now and then, this was the first time we’d had a close up look. Pretty impressive really.
We were going to catch the tube from there, but it was still so nice that we just kept walking…
And walking….
And walking!
And we walked all the way home! I’m guessing that most of you have no idea just how far that is, but believe me it’s quite a way. Mostly down the river, so it winds up and down as you go nominally east. We must have walked for about 3 1/2 hours, including the couple of pub stops we required in order to rest our weary feet! Good though.
Here’s the first Riot chilli of the year too.
The observant among you will notice that these ones seem to start off yellow instead of the green as in the below post.
The really observant among you will notice that unlike the Ring of Fire below, this plant rotates upwards when it’s pollenated so the chilli points up. The Ring of Fires start to droop quickly, I guess so they can easily support the weight of the bigger chillis. Weird to watch it happen. Happens over about 2 days. One day I must see if I can get a time lapse film of it all happening.
It’s snooker season on TV at the monemt, and it’s got me hooked again. I could just sit there watching it for hours and hours and hours. There’s just so much about it that seems so restful. The whispered commentary, the green of the table, the lack of much roaring from the “crowd”, the relatively slow pace of the game… Everything really!
And when there’s a long safety battle going on with the players trying for snookers I’m always reminded of a Japanese Zen rock garden where no matter where you look from you can only see so many rocks at once.
Maybe one day I’ll head to a session and sit there for a few hours soaking in the atmosphere. Maybe.
I was reading a random entry on Slashdot which was talking about a new submarine cable between SE Asia and the US and one of the posts there mentioned a Wired story/article on the topic of cabling by Neal Stephenson who’s written a whole heap of books that I really, really liked. So I just had to have a look.
The article is here (print version, which I find a lot easier to read), and it’s suberb! You’d think that this could/should be a really dry kind of topic, but the way he tells it all is great. So much history and politics that I haven’t really thought of before. It is quite a long piece, and a little old (not that it dates, I think), but I just had to keep reading. Must have been a fantastic fact finding trip!
If you do read it, let me know what you thought. Or maybe it’s just an interesting to a geek type of thing….
Woke up this morninga nd struggled down to get a coffee and noticed that the first flower had dropped off. Thought “bugger, the shaking didn’t work” as when they don’t pollenate the flowers just all drop off and get me in trouble for messy bits being all over the window sills. But then I looked more closely, and lo and behold, the first chilli of the year is starting to take shape!
It’s weird how they grow though. As soon as the flowers are pollenated the ring of petals sort of fall off to leave the long stamen-y thing of the flower attached to the little growing chilli. That normally falls off sometime a bit later. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the petal ring gets a bit stuck and sticks around the growing chilli like a tu-tu and I have to go around pulling them off. Gardener’s work is never done…
Finally the process that started in June last year is finally over, and the block of land at Cust is finally all ours!
Now the hard work of working out just what to put on it and where and when and why etc. starts.
I figure that might take a bit longer even than this first bit!
Thought it would happen this week, and it has!
I’ve given it a good old shake, so I guess we’ll see if it’s the first chilli soon too.
For all of you that keep asking me “have you still got that old phone”, no I haven’t. Finally. Got a new whizzy one that does far too much to take in at once.
But getting it has made me even more confused about the stupidity cell phone companies. The only way I could get a new phone before November was to change networks and get my number transferred across. If I’d wanted to stay with the same company and get a new phone I’d have had to have got a new number.
Dumb. Really dumb.
One less customer for them, not that they’d notice or care.