catching up
Apr. 17th, 2007 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesQuick catchup on various things:
On Sunday we planted out the tomatoes that were going in the bed at the front. All nice sturdy looking plants with healthy root systems, and in fact the Patio and Supersteak had started opening their first flower bud on Friday. They were sprayed with copper fungicide the week before as part of the programme of pest control after the suspected virus infection, but I'll spray them at least once more as we did have two plants attacked by blight last year. Varieties are
Patio
Caspian Pink
Granny Smith
Ace
Supersteak
Brandywine
One small problem -- Other Half has still not learnt from last year, and is blissfully expecting a flimsy 3' wire support cage that does the dwarf determinates to be perfectly adequate support for all of them. Including the indeterminates with fruit weights listed as 1 pound. He keeps thinking in terms of how tomatoes are cultivated in England, where home garden plants are normally stopped at four or five fruit trusses and the side shoots are pinched out. It doesn't matter what I say about jungle creepers and Mediterranean climates... I suspect that once he finally accepts that yes, they do need something more substantial, I'm going to end up with 6' bamboo cane wigwams to avoid damaging the root systems, which is not particularly cheap when you add up the cost of the canes. I'd really rather just put in a 6' length of 2x2 right now, as he wouldn't put any of them on the wire mesh fence where they could have had some real support.
Also repotted the Mamma Mia plum tomato into its intermediate pot rather than binning it, as it appears to be recovering from the virus infection -- in fact, it's started opening its first flower bud today. The Yellow Pear is staying in its intermediate pot for a few more days before being potted on into its final patio pot, as it was always smaller than the others and needs a little more time to bulk up. And I found the first self-sown tomato seedling in the spilled compost around the pots on the patio.
The corn and sunflowers also went out into the bed on Sunday, so we'll have a sunflower hedge in a few weeks.
Still making almost zero progress on the current book, for a number of reasons, and I think the main one is quite simply burnout. *Not* writer's block, though, so I'm not panicking. I think I may simply need to go and *read* some other books in the relevant sff subgenre to get back into the mood (aka, excuse to go down to Bookbuyers and see what they've got on the Andre Norton shelf).
Also spent some time looking through a friend's litcrit thesis proposal, an activity which rubbed my nose in the fact that I cannot grasp hardcore litcrit theory even if I did English to university entrance exam level. A useful experience, as it reminds me that I must not, must not, must not drop excessive geekery of my own subject into my fiction, because it will look like impenetrable technobabble to a lot of people even if it's perfectly legitimate vocabulary in the field.
Got involved in much writing-related gossip online over the weekend re ebooks and piracy and giving away free samples, which amongst other things resulted in me pulling out a reference to that old rasfc thread on m/m for someone, and deciding that the time had come to actually do that handy summary I've been muttering about.
And now onwards to a series review, ditto, and in fact not entirely unconnected to that last item...
Note to self: write up musings on the p word, and the different attitudes to same within slash fandom and pro romance readership.
On Sunday we planted out the tomatoes that were going in the bed at the front. All nice sturdy looking plants with healthy root systems, and in fact the Patio and Supersteak had started opening their first flower bud on Friday. They were sprayed with copper fungicide the week before as part of the programme of pest control after the suspected virus infection, but I'll spray them at least once more as we did have two plants attacked by blight last year. Varieties are
Patio
Caspian Pink
Granny Smith
Ace
Supersteak
Brandywine
One small problem -- Other Half has still not learnt from last year, and is blissfully expecting a flimsy 3' wire support cage that does the dwarf determinates to be perfectly adequate support for all of them. Including the indeterminates with fruit weights listed as 1 pound. He keeps thinking in terms of how tomatoes are cultivated in England, where home garden plants are normally stopped at four or five fruit trusses and the side shoots are pinched out. It doesn't matter what I say about jungle creepers and Mediterranean climates... I suspect that once he finally accepts that yes, they do need something more substantial, I'm going to end up with 6' bamboo cane wigwams to avoid damaging the root systems, which is not particularly cheap when you add up the cost of the canes. I'd really rather just put in a 6' length of 2x2 right now, as he wouldn't put any of them on the wire mesh fence where they could have had some real support.
Also repotted the Mamma Mia plum tomato into its intermediate pot rather than binning it, as it appears to be recovering from the virus infection -- in fact, it's started opening its first flower bud today. The Yellow Pear is staying in its intermediate pot for a few more days before being potted on into its final patio pot, as it was always smaller than the others and needs a little more time to bulk up. And I found the first self-sown tomato seedling in the spilled compost around the pots on the patio.
The corn and sunflowers also went out into the bed on Sunday, so we'll have a sunflower hedge in a few weeks.
Still making almost zero progress on the current book, for a number of reasons, and I think the main one is quite simply burnout. *Not* writer's block, though, so I'm not panicking. I think I may simply need to go and *read* some other books in the relevant sff subgenre to get back into the mood (aka, excuse to go down to Bookbuyers and see what they've got on the Andre Norton shelf).
Also spent some time looking through a friend's litcrit thesis proposal, an activity which rubbed my nose in the fact that I cannot grasp hardcore litcrit theory even if I did English to university entrance exam level. A useful experience, as it reminds me that I must not, must not, must not drop excessive geekery of my own subject into my fiction, because it will look like impenetrable technobabble to a lot of people even if it's perfectly legitimate vocabulary in the field.
Got involved in much writing-related gossip online over the weekend re ebooks and piracy and giving away free samples, which amongst other things resulted in me pulling out a reference to that old rasfc thread on m/m for someone, and deciding that the time had come to actually do that handy summary I've been muttering about.
And now onwards to a series review, ditto, and in fact not entirely unconnected to that last item...
Note to self: write up musings on the p word, and the different attitudes to same within slash fandom and pro romance readership.