Shostakovich 5

conservatorium Symphony Orchestra
conductor Natalia Raspopova
Kelly Lee Dvorak Cello Concerto Op 104
Shostakovitch Symphony No 5

vegetables for winter 2016

At last I have tidied the compost and dug the garden for broad beans and sugar snap peas. How could we survive winter without these? The last corn crop was tenuous and fortunately we got a late one after early germination failures. Sweet potato continues to turn up in abundance when I clear the garden for planting, but otherwise our spring onions, leeks and capsicums/chillis are struggling through neglect and fruit flies in the latter. I did sow some seeds early in March so I have some small seedlings of radish, beetroot and ruby chard which I planted out yesterday after Graham suggested that I did not need to dig over the whole bed, just holes for each plant.
Today I added seeds of endive, spinach and kohl rabi. I wonder if any will germinate? They have been in the fridge a long time.
The sun is still very hot and things are very dry, but the tanks are full, due to neglect of the garden and lack of watering.

Worm farming to feed composting

The worm farm has been awaiting a cleanout for quite a while. As a result the worms have received little food and, with the sun moving back to the north, become quite dried out.
Now I have washed it all out with lots of dark liquid to the fruit trees, azaleas and vegetable garden. The solid remains and some liquid have gone to the compost heap which was recently consolidated after a period of neglect. I no longer get horse poo, and tried poultry manure pellets to boost the N for C:N ratio breakdown, but I think the worm liquid may provide the N required as well as other biological activity.
Now to feed the surviving worms which are quite small, unlike the enormous ones I find in the compost heap.

Esther Denison

We received an email from Norway this week, from a woman researching Sergeants. It led me to Adeline Sergeant a novelist and her 'autobiographical' novel Esther Denison, published in 1899. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister and it depicted a bleak impoverished childhood. I continued on through themes reminiscent of Jane Eyre but with ideas of socialism and the changing role of women. We know little of the Sergeant family other than they were chapel people from a small town in Lincolnshire who emigrated to South Australia in 1838. Adeline's father Richard Sergeant was a younger brother of our emigrant farmer. He married the daughter of a Methodist minister, whose brothers became shopkeepers in Geelong in the 1850s. Thomas Sergeant Hall of the next generation was Australia's first native-born palaeontologist, and first cousin of Adeline Sergeant.

India: the siege within

India: the siege within Challenges to a Nation's Unity by M J Akbar
published in 1985, I borrowed this book from Lee who studied Indian history at UQ
It took me a long while to get through this book but towards the end I settled in and found it interesting re Sikhs in Punjab, Amritsar and the assassination of Indira Ghandi, Kashmir and Muslims in secular India post 1947.
It was good to follow my reading of Ghandi from 2014 with this book and also another one I borrowed from Lee and finished quite a while ago, which I also enjoyed.
Naipaul, V. S. (1977). India: A Wounded Civilization