Igenlode Wordsmith

Everything has benefited from the rain after days on end of unseasonable and unbearable heat -- even the Christmas-present amaryllis that was busy having a 'holiday' out of doors ( Read more... )

The rudbeckias, marigolds and corn-marigolds all have flower buds on. Interestingly, one of the self-sown not-tomato seedlings has turned out not just to be a cornflower, but to be a pink cornflower -- presumably descended from the 'purple mix' of last year! I did save some of that seed, but haven't planted it myself as we seemed to have rather a lot of cornflowers already :-p

( Mesembryanthemums and orange poppy )

The beetroot and kale are also trying to flower, and I should probably be thinking about sowing replacements. Unfortunately I really don't have room!

( Rocket and lettuce )

The towel-tomatoes are producing plenty of little green fruits, and the one Roma tomato has put out its first flowers.

( Dwarf peas and sweet peas )

All the material available on the Internet emphasises the importance of addressing your 'book pitch' to a individual named literary agent; "no Dear Sir/Madams please, they go in the bin", one agent says adamantly.

But the actual agencies I'm looking at have a single submissions@agency address for all the agents working there -- the first one I emailed gave specific instructions to put the name of the person you were trying to contact in the title of the email, but the current one doesn't say anything of the sort (on the contrary, it says "If you would like *us* to consider your manuscript, please send *us* the following"). So while I do have an individual agent in mind, I'm not at all clear that I'm supposed to be the one picking and choosing in advance, as opposed to them deciding who, if anybody, might have any interest in my project... which means I either give offence by presuming to say whom I am and am not prepared to deal with, or by failing as a result to address a specific partner by name :-(
(And to be honest, all the people in the London office, apart from the one specialising in Japanese literature, sound like a possible potential fit anyway, even though I was only given the one name as "actively seeking to expand their client list"...)

In the (geeky) circles I move in, you don't normally put "Dear So and So" at the top of an email message in any case, any more than you put the date or your street address -- but I don't have any experience of business emails :-(

( Splitting up nasturtiums and marigolds )

( Towel-tomatoes )

The Gypsophila elegans has just opened its first spray of little white flowers( Read more... )

The chive pot is now very much dominated by self-sown flax, plus a self-sown Linaria (both in flower, so I am reluctant to pull them out). And, ironically, there is *also* something that looks to me rather like a seedling yellow Cambrian poppy that has established itself in the chive tub while I wasn't looking -- after all the years and years when I tried and failed to get a single one of the hundreds and hundreds of yellow poppy seeds to germinate, or even to successfully transplant the parent plant out of the miniature rose pot! Well, we shall have to see what it turns into...

I likewise have a strong suspicion that I have what is an extremely miniature sweetbriar seedling underneath one of the elderly pot marigold plants ( Read more... )

I also separated the two chillies, though it turned out that they hadn't really developed enough root yet to be entangled; it will make life easier later on in any case. For the record, they are currently two inches high and nice bushy (but very small!) little plants.

Discovered today that every single one of the four chillies, dozen or so basil seedlings, and unknown number of marigolds that I had donated for sale had been eaten by slugs :-(
One likes to imagine donated plants going to good homes elsewhere, but of course the probability is that a lot of them simply die in the hands of inexpert recipients: 100% mortality is a bit depressing, though. Especially as almost all of the basil that I kept for myself also died.

( Spring onions, basil and pak choi )

( Tomatoes, peas and strawberries )

We now have Gypsophila vaccaria, pink Linaria, cornflowers, Mesembryanthemums and flax in full bloom, along with the field and oriental poppies, and the white flowers from the 'purple mix' -- oddly enough none of the cornflowers in that mix seem to have come out the dark red colour this time round. None of the California poppies have produced white flowers this year, even though I didn't think any of the old plants had died, so I'm not sure what happened there...
( Sweet peas )
The two chillies that I kept from the pot of six are still tiny, but have put on considerable growth. I have sowed some more basil seed, from the 2025 bag this time :-)

It's midnight, and the temperature indoors is still 82F with all the windows (including the French windows) open and a through draught :-(
I'm literally walking around in vest and pants because it's too hot to wear anything else. The shirt I was wearing together is filthy and ripped under both arms; I have just been scrubbing my socks with soap where the colour from the shoe-leather has stained them apparently permanently after a day of sweating into them. They have settled down to a sort of grey with blue splotches.

I finally have a completed 'pitch' for Arctic Raoul, and continue to procrastinate about actually sending it off.
(I didn't want to send it in the small hours when it was completed, because that would look needy. Yesterday was a Sunday. Today turns out to be a Bank Holiday, so anything I email now will probably end up in a bigger heap of unsolicited messages than usual...)

This is for someone who was initially listed back in January as a 'new agent actively seeking clients', which was what prompted me into a renewed spasm of activity on this manuscript -- well, I think I've pretty thoroughly missed that window of opportunity! But he *does* sound too perfectly suited to give up on( Read more... )

The elderflower jam was a pretty much complete failure. You are supposed to boil it cautiously for five minutes until it 'thickens': http://www.jam-making.com/jam_elderflower.html
I boiled mine with increasing alarm for forty minutes until I had to go out, returning several hours later (which meant I had to sterilise the jars all over *again*) to boil it furiously for another twenty minutes of frustration, at which point it did finally start to wrinkle when pushed on a chilled saucer, so I thought I'd better pot it up in order to avoid a repeat of the crab-apple boiled sweet episode. However the half-full jar even when stone cold is still not set; it has thickened into a caramel-coloured gloopy liquid but is nowhere near being jelly. So what I basically have is four sealed jars of what amounts to runny and very expensive golden syrup; I can only conclude that my attempts at extracting the pectin from the lemon pips were entirely ineffectual, and that the amount of pectin in the jam sugar (over 1000g out of the 1,300g in total) was insufficient to set that volume of liquid, so that it only started to thicken at all after a significant quantity had been boiled off...

The same thing happened to my mother once with a batch of bramble jelly that simply failed to 'gel', but that was at least strongly blackberry-flavoured and we were able to use it as a topping for yoghurt etc. This is pretty much home-made golden syrup with a slight surviving floral tang -- but probably too liquid to even function as a golden syrup replacement in baking.

Wearing short socks to pick elderflowers is a tactical error, since the base of the tree is *always* surrounded by nettles... ( Read more... )
I am not quite sure how I managed to get my wrists and the back of one hand stung as well, but I definitely earned my booty :-p

This is the one recipe where I actually get to use the big 2lb weight, since sugar is very heavy for its volume. I need to dissolve two pounds of sugar in three pints of boiling water and then let it cool down overnight before starting the next stage of the cordial tomorrow...

It just just dawned on me that the Russian indeclinable (and hence of foreign origin) noun пальто is of course the French paletot, taken straight out of the nineteenth century -- just as the French redingote is, reputedly, the English 'riding-coat'...!

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Another of my tomato plants -- from the first batch this time -- has damped off while actually flowering; they are supposed to be way beyond it at this stage of maturity :-(( Read more... )

The first flower opened on the sweetbriar this morning, and there was a bumble-bee on it. (Sadly these wild roses aren't scented -- it's the leaves that carry the scent, but only when they are fresh and moist, and the leaves on mine are usually pretty leathery.)

At least one of the seedlings potted up as Gypsophila elegans has come into flower and turned out to be alyssum :-p

I watched the second half of the new 'Monte Cristo' (or, to be more precise, Parts 3 and 4 being run as a double-bill), and ended up with the same verdict: sort of mildly interested, but not enough to actually recommend it with any great enthusiasm...( Read more... )

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I really need to go and harvest some elderflowers; it is two weeks since I noticed that they were almost ripe enough, and I got the most terrific waft of scent (from some blossoms that were quite out of reach) while walking home tonight.