2013's Spoils

I never did update to say how I got on in 2013 with the stuff I germinated and planted.

Not great to be honest.

The tatties came through pretty well, the broccoli was so so and the cabbage was good. Sadly I didn't have enough time to tend to any of it properly so a lot of it went to the slugs and other beasties. Neither me or the slugs got any of the carrots or the onions because they didn't come through.

Here's some piccies for your viewing pleasure:

Internet Camera in a Bird House (1 of ?)

After the Time Lapse Videos of the Garden project I got thinking about how to get round the issue of nothing being visible at night. If you haven't looked at that project the basic issue is that the infared light generated by the camera is reflecting off the glass of the window making it impossible to see outside.

Two solutions instantly came to mind:

1. Turn the IR on the camera off and flood the garden with infared light from a source already outside.
2. Move the whole camera outside.

From the two I've decided to go with the 2nd one. The first idea may actually be easier as you can already buy outdoor infared lights and all I'd have to do is connect the power to them and set up some sort of timer to turn them on and night and off during the day. However, I can't really justify the expense on what is just a 'for fun' project so I'm really stuck with option 2 regardless.

Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (3 of 3)

This is the last video in this time lapse series.

In this video I've removed all the images taken between 8pm and 5am. Don't worry, I didn't have to do this by hand! All the videos save with a similar file name which has the date and time in it so I wrote a little regular expression that deleted all the files with a 00 - 04 or a 20 - 23 in the hour slot. The commands looked like this:

rm 00A8F9005FCC\(IPCamera\)_0_2013????0{0..4}*
rm 00A8F9005FCC\(IPCamera\)_0_2013????{20..23}*

The rm command you should be familiar with, then it is the camera's MAC address (I think) followed by the name in brackets then _0_ (for some reason, maybe camera number) then the 4 digit year, 2 digit month (single digit wildcards), 2 digit date (single digit wildcards) then the 2 digit hour. Notice in the first command I put the first digit of the hour outside the curly bracket, I just wasn't sure 00..04 would work so opted for 0..4 instead. What came after the hour digits didn't matter so I just dropped in a multi digit wildcard.

Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (2 of 3)

The camera looking out to the garden has been running for a while now. Since about the 28th of March given the date of my last post on it. As you can imagine it has gathered quite a large collection of images, 18,000 at the last count! So I thought it would be a good a time as any to give another time lapse video a try.

I used the same script as last time but made a slight change so it would create a copy of each image with a 5 digit number rather than 4 (cause we have over 9999 images) and out the video with a greater frame rate (20fps instead of 4).

x=0; for i in *jpg; do counter=$(printf %05d $x); cp "$i" /tmp/img"$counter".jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done
ffmpeg -f image2 -r 20 -y -i /tmp/img%05d.jpg garden.avi
rm /tmp/img*

The results were less than satisfactory (don't watch the whole video, the first minute or so gets the point across):

Germinating the Veg

I was going around the shop the other day and it suddenly dawned on me just how late in the planting season it is getting. The terrible weather recently (terrible for gardening that is) has made it impossible to get into the garden which would have been a perfect time to get some germinating on the go but the bad weather also made it feel a lot earlier in the year than it actually is.

Thankfully it's not too late and most of what I'm looking to plant out can still be planted in April. I dare say with the low temperatures planting out a little later than usual may even be beneficial.

So here is what I bought:

Time Lapse Videos of the Garden (1 of 3)

I've gotten quite into hillwalking this year. In fact I even have another blog dedicated purely to that which I will shameless plug here: it is munrochallenge.wordpress.com and it details me and my friend Martyn's attempt to climb 52 munros this year. (We've managed 3 so far.) As part of this new hobby I signed up to a few on-line forums to meet other people with similar interests and one of the forums I go on frequently is the one at walkhighlands.co.uk.

It was on here that a user known as Alastair S (probably his real name!) posted up a thread talking about a little computer program he had made. What it does is connects to public internet cameras anywhere in the world you point it to and downloads an image from them once every minute. When it has a large collection of these images it creates a video out of them which is played back at 20 frames per second. This hence lets you watch an entire days, weeks, months or even years worth of footage in just a few minutes. It's a technique known as 'time lapse video' and it can make for some very interesting videos. Here are a couple he has produced so far:

Braemar Snow Gate

Fixing the Sankey Water Butt

So given its mostly good reviews I bought a Sankey 210L Water butt from B&Q and was pretty happy with the purchase given the size of it and the fairly sturdy design. It is a bit on the expensive side and having to buy the stand separately was a bit annoying but I weighed it up and decided to go for it anyway. Big mistake!

The Sankey 210L Water butt 

After having it in the garden for a few weeks I found it kept falling over. Not sure if it was being pushed or blowing over because of the wind so I decided to fill it about a quarter of the way with tap water to weight it down a little. It was at this point I found that the water butt leaked through the tap!

Gardening Plans for 2013

So as you can see from this picture taken today (21st March) even though we are officially in Spring it still isn't quite gardening weather.

So instead I thought I'd share my plans for this year with you.

This year is going to be all about colour! What I want to do is create a rainbow effect round the border of the garden going from violet colours on the left round to reds on the right with all the colours in between in the middle.

Really this shouldn't be too hard since I plan on purchasing plants this year rather than growing them myself. I know, I know, it's cheating, but I just don't have the time to dedicate to growing from seed just now and especially not for the amount of plants I think I'm going to need.

The plant of choice is going to be Primulas; they are colourful, readily available, quite hardy and don't cost the earth.

Other than the border I'll probably give some vegetables a try again. Most of the hard work of digging up the lawn to make space for a vegetable patch was done last year so hopefully I can give more time to the tending of the veg and actually get something to show for it this year. We'll see...

Finally I'm going to plant some roses in the little strip of garden I have to the left of the house. Putting the water butt there (which needs the seal fixed btw) isn't enough as it keep getting blown or pushed over. Some thorny roses should do the job and I'll spend the little bit extra money to get fragrant ones which will hopefully add to the garden overall.

Or at least that's the plan if the snow ever leaves...

Overdue Update

Well it's been a busy summer, not that you guys would know due to my lack of updates! In my defence though I did get married in August!

Me and my beautiful girlfriend of 9 years tied the knot on the 18th of August 2012, it seems like a lifetime away now!

Me and Gemma on The Big Day

But you're not here to read about that! On with the gardening!!!

The garden has been really sorely neglected this year. Well maybe I'm being too hard on myself there, I have done a lot of 'layout' work, moving earth from one place to another, putting in a border, putting in a bird bath and adding a couple of other things I'll talk about shortly. But planting and maintenance have definitely taken a back seat.

The main reason for this is having propagators all over the house last year left a lot of mess so I didn't do it this year which meant planting straight from seed which yielded little results. Eventually I gave in and set up one propagator quite late into the summer and managed to plant out a couple of the 'Tall Mix' that I planted and grew successfully last year.

'Tall Mix' and a bit of moss

You can see in the picture some of the 'Tall Mix' growing around the corner of the slabs and some more up the top corner, they aren't as big as last year but they've came through again which is nice.

'Tall Mix' growing up the drain pipe

 Also growing is this beauty which I at first though was just a blade of tall grass but kept out of curiosity! Sadly though after nothing grew from my straight planting into the border I threw out all the packets for the seeds so I'm not sure what it is. One of the things I learnt this year is to always keep a note of what you've planted!

Mystery plant

 These are some plants my neighbour gave me which should flower next year. They looked quite strong so I've planted them under the bird house since that area tends to get a bit trampled by pigeons so whatever is there needs to be quite hardy.

Plants under the bird house

The veg patch hasn't evolved at all. I ended up dumping all the grass I had moved into the corner back on top of the same section after I found out that granite (the rock my house is made of) actually seeps water so having a pile of earth against it can cause problems with damp. Took ages to move it all back as well since I couldn't get the shovel under it properly due to the branches I'd put underneath! All that I covered was a patch of weeds so it actually looks better here than it did.

Veg patch still looking empty

 This is the first year I've planted bedding plants as well. I thought it was cheating really to plant things someone else has grown but with the lack of space for growing I'm actually thinking it might be my preferred method for now (until I get a bigger house). Here is an example of the bedding plants round my bird path:

Bedding plants round the bird bath. Grass has been cut!

 Looking ok considering they were looking like this at one stage:

NEGLECT!

In addition to the plants at the base of the bird house my neighbour also made this out of some bamboo polls and string. Looks good! Hopefully it'll grow nicely.

Home made trellis out of string and bamboo

Also new in the garden, which I hinted to earlier, are these:

New toys and some bedding plants

That is a 220 ltr rain butt and an equally sized compostor! Beautiful! Ok, I know, we are in Aberdeen so we don't really need rain butts but you never know when there might be a need to be able to collect a large amount of water (remember this blog is about zombies as well yeah!) so I've always wanted one cause there is something cool about collecting a large amount of water.

The compostor is just another trial. I have a brown bin for putting my garden waste to be collected by the council but I'll put the odd bit and piece into my own one as well.

Other than that there isn't much going on. Here is a couple of plants I have in the house that are doing quite well. Except the top one that is, it was left in the cold frame whilst I was away on honeymoon and looked a bit worse for wear when I returned but I'm hopefully that it'll bounce back now that it is in doors under my watchful eye.

In for recovery

Potted plant (again, must keep names!)

Wife's Orchid, still looking well

Well that's about it. I also had my first accident in the garden this period but I don't think it's noticeable, is it?

Perfectly good plant pot

Oh and I add this to my little spot in the back garden:

Little hide away in the back garden heated by a chimenea

A little chimenea! It's really a one man one and just tucks away nicely there. I got it in a sale at Homebase after buying one it BnQ that was way too big for the space (I've kept it as well though, still planning on that new house so I can fit in propagators remember!) but this one is perfect. I love the great deals you can get on gardening stuff as the summer rolls to an end!

Well that's it, sorry for the delay but I hope you've enjoyed the latest. Not sure when the next post will be as I don't have any more plans for the moment. I do have quite a few pots of plants out back that I'm hoping to keep all winter so I'll keep you posted on how they are getting on.

Till then.

The current state of the garden

A quick update to bring you fully up to speed on how the garden looks now and the current plans for it.

I was having a real problem with moss growing over on the left hand side of the garden through the lawn. So bad in fact that I even sought professional help to sort it. Sadly the verdicate was that the main cause of the problem was the hedge growing to the side which was casting a large shadow over the area and preventing any real sunlight getting to it. The options were simple, remove the hedge or live with the moss, I chose neither. Instead I decided to pull the lawn back and create a large bed for planting instead.

The vegetable patch with most beds planted.

I was reluctant to do so because I really didn't want to lose any of my lawn's acreage (lol) but a lawn covered in moss is no lawn at all so something had to be done.

I managed to get it all dug out in one session and put what little grass there was into the strange corner of the garden on top of a pile of sticks and branches that were there. It would be nice if the grass was to take there but I doubt it will because of the sticks and what not but I'm just happy to have it out of the way.

The strange corner. A small strip of garden down the side of the building.

As for planting I took care of that just a few days ago when we had a reasonably sunny day and I had some spare time after work. I don't have as much free time as I would like and wasn't sure when I would next have a chance to get in and get things done if I didn't finish them today so I took care of all the planting again in one sitting. I was exhausted by the end! It wasn't a huge amount but the digging of the soil and turning it over really takes it out of you without frequent breaks and because I had a limited amount of daylight hours left when I started I just plunged right into it.

I got it all done though and by the end I had planted Onions, Lettace, Cucumber, Peppers, Carrots and Watermelons. I'm pretty certain that not all of these will grow and a bit regretful that I didn't use the propagators this year but the mess I made around the house last year with propagators on every window sill was a bit much. Never the less I am hopefull that I'll at least get a few carrots, onions and lettece out of it if nothing else.

I also took the time to plant some Sunflowers at the side of the house in the same place as last year since they done so well before, hopefully this year will be the same.

I didn't record the names of the plants I put around my border this year although I know there were some Lillies, my fiancee's favourite flower. They don't seem to be coming though too well in the border and I may replace them with some sapplings my neighbour gave me but in the large planter I have they are coming through tremendiously. Maybe the soil is better quality there since I used it for mixing compost and soil for smaller pots or maybe it is just in a sunnier location, whatever the reason I'm really happy about the growth they are showing.

Lillies, perhaps?

And finally I also have a border round the garden now. Just a cheap plastic one which was about £1 per 6 meters but it adds some definition to the garden and helps keep the borders tidier. I plan to dig up the grass on the outside of it near the hedges and plant flowers in its place at some point. I'll also have to take the strimmer or grass shears to the lawn since the council don't seem to be interested in it.

The council isn't keen on strimming.

And that's where we are to date. Future plans are getting the border finished, planting potatoes in the left over veg bed and planting the neighbour's sapplings somewhere.

If only I can find the time get it all done!

Oh and for those that are interested, this is what the slabbed section looks like:

Entrance and staging area.

My history of gardening

In order to set the scene for future posts I think I'll take a little bit of time to go through my journey so far with each of my key topics. First up let's look at gardening.

My gardening history is quite a short one, only a couple of years long, and even then we are only talking the spring and summer months since there isn't a great deal to do in the autumn and winter (or if there is I don't know about it yet). There is a good reason for this, I've only stayed in a flat with a garden for a couple of years! Growing up I always stayed on at least the first floor or above so never had a garden of my own and even if I did I doubt I'd have a huge interest in gardening as a kid since my mum (who raised me) didn't show a particular interest in it.

It's kinda strange that actually. Despite not growing up around any gardeners or ever having a garden one of the things I really wanted when looking for my own flat was a place with a garden. Maybe it's just a case of me wanting what I've never had. Whatever the reason, 3 years ago I got one when I moved into my first flat with my then girlfriend (now fiancée and soon to be wife!) and it's a beauty:

The garden circa May 2010

Ok so she's not exactly 100 acres but she is good enough for me. I'd already made a few changes to the garden when the above pic was taken, putting down a few slabs at the entrance, tidying up the ones that were already there and adding some small stones for decoration and to make it easier to take the brown bin in and out. I was planning on parking my motorbike where the brown bin is in the picture but it was too much hassle getting it in and out of the small entrance and down the narrow path. A shame as well, if I'd managed to keep her there maybe she wouldn't have gotten stolen and set alight. Such is life though.

Here it is from another angle, I'd also planted several flowers all along the border at the side of the house:

May 2010

Nothing came through though and I vowed next year to learn more and to try harder.

So next year my garden was looking like this:

March 2011

You can see the lawn is in a bit of a bad way, covered in weeds and brown patches, the hedge is cut way back but it is still alive and well, the council cut it once a year for us and I think they got a little carried away last year. They also mow the lawn several times a year for us which is pretty handy.

So when I said I vowed to try harder I meant it, I even went so far as to measure the garden out and draw scaled plans of them! And a colour coded planting plan as well:

I didn't get everything planted that I wanted to but I did get quite a bit done. I didn't create the circle in the middle as I decided it would be too much of a nuisance for cutting the grass between it and the diamond but I did expand the square and remove the pampas grass from it. This time I also researched my plants before planting and bought some propagators to germinate them in first and pots to grow them in doors until I felt they were strong enough to survive the Scottish climate. Here is some photos of the process and the results:

And finally throughout all this I also made a wee cold box to try and grow tomatoes in, the box is good, not hole free but good enough, the tomatoes were rubbish:

2012 hasn't saw much action so far. I've been pretty busy with work and wedding related things but I have added in a bird house with several feeders to the middle of the garden and also got some professional help on restoring the lawn from GreenThumb (expect more on them and their great value for money service in another post). Here's a pic of the garden earlier this year:

February 2012

There has been some changes since then but they'll need to wait for another post, this one is already way too long. Hope you've enjoyed it though!

The beginning...

So what exactly is this blog going to be about?

Well, I'm a fan of all things computer related, zombie related and gardening related. Ok, maybe not all things but certainly most things. In fact with respect to gardening I just like pottering about and I'm not too interested in all the ins and outs of it but I do enjoy it, even if I am a complete amateur. When it comes to computers I like to think I'm a bit more experienced, having spent most of my life around them and having spent 4 years studying for a degree in Artificial Intelligence at The University of Aberdeen and now working as a software engineer. I guess my zombie experience, my real life zombie experience that is, that being the actual experience with real life zombies, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, non-existent but I certainly enjoy the genre! In a world stagnated with zombie related things I still can't get enough! It may be controversial but both the traditional shambling zombies and the more recent runners are good in my book and I think any sensible zombie apocalypse survival plan will take account for both situations (and of course a mixture of the two!).

So I've decided to fire up a blog that discusses all three topics and tries to relate them to one another in some shape or form, as you do.

The general premiss is going to be relating how my work with computers and my time spent in the garden can be used to help in the upcoming and inevitable zombie outbreak. I'll also from time to time fire up some garden, computer or zombie related content might not make any great contribution to your survival plan but should hopefully be interesting none the less.

First real post coming soon...