Aside from the bit where I am a neurotic, the main reason that I am so obsessed about nutrition / diet (and exercise), is because I have thirty-five years of experience showing me the direct relationship between what I eat and my health. This started with a Naturopath ‘curing’ my severe eczema when I was about thirteen, after a succession of medical doctors prescribed stronger and stronger steroids over a great many months, for an outcome of precisely fuck all. I am now convinced the eczema came as a result of me turning vegetarian, but I don’t have my medical records to be able to say for sure. Although the eczema cleared up in two weeks after starting the naturopathic exclusion diet, I was on it for 1.5 years. Once excluded foods were reintroduced, I discovered that cow dairy triggered the eczema and so I have avoided it ever since. Aside
Continuing my adventures with microbes, I have now made lactic acid bacteria juice (aka LAB aka curds and whey) which is an important part of Korean natural farming, according to the YouTube hole I fell down a while back. LAB is used as a foliar spray and also as a soil drench. (Apparently you can also use it in hair and skin care too!) I literally have no idea if this is a bunch of mental people on YouTube talking rubbish or if it is real, but I don’t care. Cultivating various microbes is genuinely the most enjoyable productive pastime (lest it enter into an unnatural competition with spa) that I have engaged in for a long time. Learning how to sew my own clothes was never this much fun, nor this easy and cheap. Anyway, to make LAB, the first thing you do is get some cheap white rice and
This is what my garden looked like when I moved in a couple of years ago. It had recently been cleared of brambles, and had been the foxes home as no one had used it for years. One of the first things I did was buy a potting shed as I just really, really wanted a shed of my own. My original plan was to have a small patio in front of the shed and some kind of ‘cottage garden’ with native pollinator and bird friendly plants at the other end. I even went so far as to find a load of terracotta paving slabs for free and stacked them up in a corner ready for getting around to laying a patio. Yeah, that never happened. As I have said before, I just couldn’t quite muster the enthusiasm to do much of anything with the space for the first year and
I have decided that god is definitely a microbe as things are really looking up for me since dedicating my life in service of the microbial world. Not only did I catch sight of the goldfinches one day this week for the first time since the bastard council cut down the rowan trees, but a handsome young man asked me if I wanted help carrying my shopping and plants home today. I said no, obviously, because HELLO I’M NOT A PENSIONER, but still, it was nice to see my future mapped out for me like that. In other news, my King Stropharia spawn arrived today, so I made a bed for it. This is it after fox-proofing (before fox-proofing, it looked a bit like I had buried someone). I thought I had more chicken wire than I did, so I had to improvise with whatever I could find in the shed.
I used to think that there was nothing that I wanted to be when I grow up, hence the lack of meaningful work. However, I have realised that is not quite accurate. It is not that I did not know what I wanted to be when I grow up, it is more that since what I wanted to be seemed unfeasible, I resigned myself to a life of meaningless work. That resignation was so long ago now, that I forgot there was any desire there before it. Well, no more! I have remembered. 😎 My beautiful, shoebox of light came with a fairly large garden (given the size of the flat). It was pretty much derelict when I moved in 1.5 years ago; one of the first things I did was put up a potting shed, because adults with gardens have sheds. Fact. I transplanted a few of the plants I had grown