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Sitting and Waiting

These last couple of weeks have been a lot of sitting and waiting.  First of all the weather has been unseasonably cold, too cold to start much planting out into the garden.  I have a friend from Siberia, and we were comparing weather forecasts.  It’s clear Amsterdam is even colder now than Siberia.

The other way I’ve been sitting and waiting is the trash collectors and street cleaners have been on strike for much of the last few weeks.  The strike was settled over this past weekend.  I don’t know any details of the settlement, but apparently the main issues at stake were a raise and respect.  I’m not quite sure what they were expecting in terms of respect, but I guess they finally got that from the city.  I understand the wage difference was not all that serious.

The strike has really been annoying, and large piles of rotting trash have been collecting all over the city.  We were not supposed to put out trash out,  so most people’s houses were also filling up with trash.  Even now, they don’t seem in much of a hurry to collect it, and it’s only slowly getting cleaned up.

Here’s some local wildlife checking out this pile.  Anyone know what kind of bird that is?

Here’s a pile decorated by a graffiti artist.

One thing’s for sure.  I won’t be missing the smell of rotting garbage…

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Becks-Dwarf Broad (fava) Beans

Does anyone know this variety?

Someone in the UK just sent me an email asking about it.   He said his grandfather used to grow this on his allotment in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.

This variety can be found in old seed catalogs from the 1800’s and maybe earlier.  What a shame if this variety made it to the 1970’s only to be lost.

Does anyone know anything about this variety, as well as hopefully where to get seeds?  If so, please get in touch.  I’ll then put you in contact with the person who sent the email.

I’ve checked GRIN, the USDA genebank.  I’ve also looked in some old Seed Savers Exchange catalogs.  I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.

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Flattr


I’ve just signed up for a new micro-payment system called Flattr. I’m still working on the configuration, and the entire system is still in beta testing, so there may still be some quirks. Hopefully if you view the front page of this blog you will see a button like the one above on the right sidebar, and if you read via RSS you will see one as well. I haven’t actually seen the one with RSS (this post is a test), but I guess it will be somewhere on the page.

It’s not the intention this should appear in an annoying or excessively obvious way, so please let me know if it does in whatever newsreader you use so I can fix it.

In a nutshell, if you decide to sign-up for Flattr, you can donate money to me. If you’re not interested, it’s okay!

Since starting this blog I’ve been reluctant to carry advertising. I’ve felt it distracts from the material presented, in reality most of the profit goes elsewhere besides my pocket, and so wasn’t an efficient way to raise what I thought would likely be a small amount of money anyway.

Nearly all other options also had their problems, either soliciting donations of amounts of money I felt were too large, or using payment systems like Paypal that themselves had excessive fees, as well as general management and customer service problems.

Flattr users sign-up and agree to pay a certain amount per month, as little as €2 or about US$3. When they click on other people’s Flattr buttons, this money gets donated to them. The more clicks per month, the less each recipient gets. This means donations are as little as a few cents. The fees Flattr charges are not high, and they have promised to try to lower them over time.

As much as anything, I support the ideas behind Flattr, and I think this is potentially a good way for people like artists and musicians to raise some money over the Internet.   It’s potentially an enormous asset to everyone who works on materials that don’t have intellectual property rights associated with them. This includes people involved in seed saving and plant breeding!

My intention is to try to support the idea of micro-payments like these, as well as seeing if this is a way my readers would like to make small donations to my efforts.

At the moment not everyone can sign up for Flattr, it’s invitation only. I have exactly one invitation to give away! First priority is someone with another garden or similar blog, next is someone who has left at least one comment here before, otherwise it’s first come first served. If you would like an invitation code, please either leave a comment here with your email address filled in or send me an email.

If you have a Flattr button on your blog, please leave a comment here and let everyone know!

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Bloom 2010 Dublin, Ireland 3-7 June

I was recently contacted by someone representing Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board and the sponsors of Bloom, and they asked me to say something about their upcoming event.

While I’m told Bloom 2010 will include 25 large, medium and small show gardens, local fresh grown produce will also feature strongly.  The event will take place in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

Also new for 2010, is Bord Bia’s ‘Sustainable Garden’, which aims to highlight the positive impact consumers can have on the environment by thinking about their purchasing choices.

In 2009 a replica of the US President and First Lady’s garden was featured at the show, and visits included those of US embassy staff.

Tickets are available for purchase by following the link at the top of this post.  If you go, I hope you’ll report back and let us know how it was.

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Amsterdam Zoo — Artis

Steph had a few days off from work this week, so we decided to go to Artis, the Amsterdam zoo.  I’ve lived here 20 years and never been.  It has a reputation of being small, and of keeping wild animals in inhumanely small and unnatural enclosures, which is part of the reason I’ve avoided it until now.

I think part of the problem was over the years the land around the zoo became attractive for housing developments.  Greedy politicians and developers laid claim on so much, it didn’t really leave the zoo with enough for it’s own purposes.

To be a little fair to Artis, I think all zoos probably have this problem a little bit, but don’t visit Artis if you aren’t prepared to see a few distressed animals.

I was also a little surprised at how expensive it was.  It was more than €18 (about US$25) for an adult.  I haven’t been to a zoo since I was a kid, so I don’t really know how that compares with others, but it was more than I expected.

Now that I’m finished complaining, I have to admit we did have a nice time and there are many nice parts to the zoo.  We saw pretty much everything in about 3 hours.  The reptile house is certainly worth a visit.  They have a nice collection of snakes and lizards.

The butterflies were also nice, but difficult to take pictures of!  This was one of the few I caught standing still in a nice pose.