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Nature update
Jul. 19th, 2024 07:27 pm- The dragonfruit plants are fruiting again! Two from one of mine, and so far, four from the one in the office garden.
- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.
- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.
- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.
- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.
I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.
I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.
Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.
The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.
- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.
- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.
- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.
- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.
I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.
I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.
Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.
The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.
