Not a Masterpiece Sheathed

I have realized that I did not show this on Affinity, only on Instagram. With all that is going on, I haven’t done any actual work in my workshop for weeks now, but this one was finished months ago. In the end, I have decided to make a simple, unadorned sheath for my Not a Masterpiece knife. I decided to do that because I felt in the end that an overly decorated sheath would needlessly distract from the beautiful woodgrain in the handle. The striker and ferrocerium rod have simple stainless steel handles. The bronze caught patina, which was to be expected. It does require some maintenance to remain shiny.

The full set is for sale in the Knife Shoppe.

Greening the Balcony – Part 3

Avalus continues his balcony gardening adventures and he has shared some more thoughts and pictures. This is from somewhere mid-summer, I only got now to actually publishing it.

The Blooming Buzzing Balcony
Things are establishing, the tomato plants are continually exploding and I get a bowl of salad every day, although with late June, it gets so hot that the salads are racing to bloom. And they are not alone. So today we look at colorful hot plant sexy bits.
First, a quick overview of what changed in the meantime.

Yes, more green, tomatoes racing up, and the added board gets really bent by all the pots. Time for a support beam. A yes, parts of an old alu camping bed will be perfect!

On the other side, my usual chaos, more greens, a rescued kumquat bush hiding behind the table, on the table more plants waiting to be potted. The tomatoes on this side take their time. In previous years, these would grow much faster. Both pots got fresh earth so it is probably down to the variety.

Enjoy!

Nasturtium. The camera really struggles with their red shine. I really like putting these in salads or on just bread with cheese and butter. Yum-yum!

Sweet potato with an extra earth bee. Sadly the other won’t bloom and all the flowers fall off. I really would have been interested in growing them from my own seeds next year.

Ornamental Pea. I have them in a wide variety of colors but they grew down the outside of the balcony and I can’t get a good image (I am very afraid of dropping my camera).

A very prickly aubergine, I think I will need to cut most of them off, as the plant is still pretty tiny and I don’t think it could support the many flowers it produces.

Fiery red climbing bean, green leaves, blue sky. Contrast!

Tomatoes. I can’t wait for tomato season, my sister is already drowning in fruits.

Cucumber. They had a slow start and are not as sprawling as the years before. Maybe it is because of old seeds.

Mystery capsicums, probably sweet peppers. This one I bought but the tag had fallen off.

Tagetes, bumble bees really love them.

Strawberries, a monthly variety that steadily produces new fruit and is nearly as expansive with its shoots as the non-blooming sweet potato.

Stalked celery. Somehow, the wasps really love these flowers.

Sage, this is a very small steppe variety. I bought this to attract more pollinators to the balcony. I think it worked and the smell is fantastic.

Red cloves or small onions, leftover from last year.

And more Beans to close it off.
Soon there will be more. The Echinacea paradoxa is still growing, as are the sunflowers and the calendula. Then there is the thyme and one of the salads I left standing.
Overall, I notice a distinct lack of honey bees on the balcony (and in general) this year, the bumble and earth bees are also few and far between. On the other hand, I get several types of wasps that crawl all over my balcony (and occasionally me, which is a bit unnerving). The climbing beans have had dozens of flowers but so far only three have started to fruit, all the others just fell off, which is disappointing. The tomatoes fared better, but a number were stung by stinking bugs and developed a rot. But these are acceptable losses, one should never expect to have 100% success while gardening.

Next time, I think I will take a closer look at my “exotics” – tropical and half-tropical plants and my experiences. Because I really just can’t throw out avocado and mango pits, or pass by sprouting ginger in a shop … .

Runner Beans Riches

Our south wall used to be shaded by a rabbit shed, later converted to a chicken hoop. Ever since I demolished that, the sun was directly blazing at it. It does not heat the house much because it is well insulated, but I felt somehow that the space is wasted. After some thinking, I have decided that it would be an ideal space for growing runner beans, one row, close to the wall. Runner beans do not mind the low-quality soil, so they do not need to be fertilized and thus there is no risk of polluting our well which is down the slope exactly on the opposite side of the house.

Last year was somewhat poor, the beans did not grow that much. There was enough rain, but not enough sun for them to really prosper. Even so, the harvest was big enough that we still did not eat it all.

This year the weather was extremely hot and dry again. However, we managed to collect enough rainwater in the spring to be able to water the beans the whole time sufficiently, so they prospered enormously and covered the whole wall.

They are still blooming and they will continue to grow until the first frost. I will probably wait for two more weeks, then I will harvest all green immature pods and clip the plants so they do not waste energy on growing and instead mature the remaining pods quicker. But maybe I won’t bother. The harvest looks extremely promising even so, I will have to convince my mother to cook beans more often. I like them better than chicken anyway.

I am thinking about buying seeds of other vine beans and planting them next year en masse on the vegetable patch where this year grew potatoes. But I like runner beans the best because they are big and thus they require the least work per weight when shelling. We used to have white runner beans too, but I haven’t seen them in shops for a long time. I could not put seeds consistently aside, because the white and red beans hybridized and after two-three years I had neither white nor purple beans but a mish-mash.

Greening the Balcony – Part 2

Avalus continues his balcony gardening adventures and he has shared some more thoughts and pictures.

Visitors from the Past and Visitors I want to go past!

(This is from about the middle to the end of May.)

Content warning: A spider at the very end!

Green stuff is growing and exploding everywhere!

Salads, tomatoes, nostrums, herbs, and potatoes.

More salads, cucumbers, strawberries, and radishes. One sweet potato in the middle for good measure. The climbers will be led along the different rails or suspended on strings dangling down from the piece of wood, that also serves as an extension to the rails for balcony boxes.

And on the other end of the balcony climbing beans, mangold, more potatoes, more salad and tomatoes On the bottom you can see capsicums. These really did not want to germinate this year, they took over four months to get this tiny.

In the boxes, the bush beans are coming up, the ones on the right were from very old seeds, most did not germinate. The ones on the left are from new seeds. I did not take a picture of the broccoli box, but you can see, that it is still blooming. At a later date, it will sadly fall victim to tragedy.

This year, I used up a lot of old seeds I collected over the years, just to see if they were any good. I did not expect much and was proven right, out of around sixty seeds I got three snowpeas and four to five weak bush beans. Then I got rid of the rest of the old seeds by digging them deep under the soil and, surprisingly, I was greeted by fresh pea sprouts three weeks later. Of course, this was after I bought and planted fresh seeds. Well, more peas!

I just really like peas! The trellis is made from hazelnut sticks I gathered in the surrounding area. It looks very flimsy but held up to a massive storm already.

Also, notice something odd about this sweet potato?

There is a pumpkin, either muskat or hokkaido, growing on the left. How did it get there? Last fall I peeled pumpkin seeds and threw the supposedly empty shells in the empty bin and then later planted a sweet-potato shoot on top of the chaff. I very carefully removed the pumpkin plant. It will travel to my parent’s garden and will get a nice spot in their old compost pile. You can see the extracted plant in one of the pictures above.

This spring I cut down my sage (it was getting constant mildew and was too sprawling) and decided to try and multiply it via cuttings. So, I used some paper pots I had left over from last spring, trying to grow some kind of tomatoes. Nothing came of these seeds, the pots have been completely dry for a year. And this year, of course, three tomatoes germinated! I wonder what kind they will be.

With greens, there are aphids.

Especially my capsicums were hit hard, with leaves getting all curly or falling off altogether. As of writing in mid June, they are still very weak.

But with aphids, there come fierce predators! Here is a ladybug hunting on basilicum.

I have no idea what caterpillar/larva this is, but the empty aphid husks tell a gruesome story of brutal murder.

The same goes for these bright orange larvae that are dining on the aphids. Probably some kind of wasp?

Sadly, with aphids also come ants.

In a garden, I like to have them around but on the balcony, they sadly have to go. That is the one time I use poison to get rid of creatures, but in past years I learned the hard way that ants become a huge problem in compact spaces, herding aphids and eventually invading the apartment.

Here is a very different caterpillar, happily munching on a cabbage. The cabbage itself was a result of an experiment: What would happen, if I were to just plonk the centrepiece of a cabbage I ate in a glass of water? It grew and has given me some nice leaves so far. I have no real plans for the cabbage other than pick some leaves every now and then, so the caterpillar can stay. Enjoy your meal!

And for PZ, a newly hatched batch of tiny cute orb weaver spiders and their mom hiding in the rosemary. There are many of them around on the balcony, their nets are getting filled with winged aphids!

[Read more…]

Fig Season Starts

I picked over 800 g of fresh figs today. It is figs and yogurt for dinner tonight. Eating them all before they spoil will be challenging – this variety is supposed to be eaten fresh and these first ones are extremely sweet. It never ceases to amaze me that I can harvest figs in my garden.

Another Wooden Mystery

In one of the sacks were these two pieces.

I cut off the two ridges and I run all four sides along the table saw blade to clean them and I got two pieces 45x35x250 mm. One of them has a slight crack, but it is in a position where I would probably cut it anyway so not a big deal. This is enough for 4-6 knives, more if used as scales for smaller knives.

I am reasonably certain this is coconut palm wood. I worked with it before and Giliell has the resulting knife.

What is puzzling are the darker and lighter parts. Those are not sapwood and heartwood, palms do not have those, and anyway, I know of no tree where the outer sapwood is darker than the inner heartwood as would be suggested by the curvature here. I do not know what caused that color contrast, maybe it was cut close to the outer layer of the trunk, maybe it is decay, I have no clue. Palm trees do not grow around here so I have no knowledge about their variability and specific properties and no way to obtain said knowledge (google does not help).

It is not an extremely expensive wood but two pieces like this would cost me somewhere in the vicinity of at least 40,-€ plus shipping, so it is nothing to sneeze at either. These were, alas, the last surprise in my firewood treasure trove, the remaining sacks were all pure jatoba. Still, I can’t complain.

Solving a Wooden Mystery

I haven’t worked with anything but wood for a while now and I still won’t for another while. But I am progressing and today I started to seriously sort through the Unexpected Treasure woodpile. And it turns out that there is more to that treasure than I initially thought.

When sorting through one bag, there were a few pieces that puzzled me. The wood was sold to me as a mix of jatoba and black locust, but these were definitively neither. I am also fairly certain it is not a local species because I would recognize most of those at a glance, certainly those that can produce pieces of this size. I put the pieces aside for later use and went on sorting the wood into neat piles by size if useful or into bags as firewood. And then I opened one bag and it turns out it is full of this mystery wood.

Here are some pictures:

It is a very hard wood, not as hard as jatoba, but close to the black locust. It is also very dense – specific gravity of about 0,8. The growth rings are not very visible, the pores are very fine and the color is various shades of golden-brown and orange. It changes a bit depending on the viewing angle. On none of the pieces is a visible distinction between heartwood and sapwood.

That is not a lot to go on, so I have made one assumption – Jatoba is from South America, so maybe this wood is from there too. It would be sensible for a furniture and flooring manufacturer to order multiple species from one supplier and then for said species to get mixed up in the offcut bags.

So armed with this information I went on a search on the Wood Database website and I am convinced it is Garapa. All the properties check out. And it can be used in combination with both Jatoba and Black Locust because it has very similar properties (not only hardness and density but also shrinkage) to both. I am researching whether it could be used to make cutting boards and I think it is so. I have come to the conclusion that black locust can, despite the plant being toxic – but black locust cutting boards are, in fact, sold here. But even if unsuitable for cutting boards, there is nothing that would disqualify it from knife handles and knife blocks.

If you think my solution to this mystery is not correct, I would be grateful for any info. It is useful to know what wood one is working with.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 11 – Finale

Not a grand finale I am afraid. Just a few more pictures of trees.

First, the view that meets people upon entering the garden.

That huge Chamaecyparis pissifera on the left is absolutely gorgeous. It is over thirty years old. And the small birch in the center originally just happened to sprout there as a weed towards the end of my university studies, so it is somewhere around 24 years old. At that time I was really getting into growing bonsai trees and my aunt has seen some when she was visiting. And it gave her the idea to let the birch live and just prune it so it does not grow into a full-sized tree but remains small-ish, like bonsai. She seems to be fond of the tree.

And the last picture that I have is of a blooming Magnolia hugging the southern wall.

I took lots more pictures during this trip, but not in my aunt’s garden. That will be another series – stay tuned.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 9 – Suculents

There are several colors of sempervivum around the garden, and this red cluster near the old well is particularly beautiful in combination with its surroundings.

Then there is this bowl with what looks like sempervivum but is a different species whose name completely skipped my mind. That is the reason why it is in a bowl – unlike sempervivum, this one is not frost-hardy species.

There are also several clusters of various sedum species, but I did not make extra pictures of those since they are tiny. What is not tiny, however, is this little opuntia. The fruit (“prickly pear”) is edible, although not particularly tasty according to my aunt. There are only several cacti species that are frost resistant enough to survive the winter here, even in the much milder winters in the area where my aunt lives. And if frost does not kill them, then the overabundance of water will. This one has survived several decades under the careful care of my aunt and it looks healthier than mine in a flower pot.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 8 – Shrubbery or Bush or Both?

I am not finished with this magic place where I played as a child, but I am still working my way through the woodpile, and together with other things, there is not much time at the PC left when I have the strength to sit down and write. There will be more.

Between the garage and the house is a big mahonia bush and it was right in bloom, all green and gold.

Two huge ericas add different colors to the garden elsewhere.

Various rhododendrons and azaleas are not blossoming yet, so they are unfortunately still just indistinct green blobs in the background somewhere. I think there will be more than one color here in due time.

I do not know what this is, but it is taller than me.

Hugging the south wall is this miniature almond. I have tried to grow it as a bonsai, but it did not prosper very much in the much colder climate where I live and after several years of barely surviving and not growing very much it unfortunately died. Maybe it would fare better now, the last five years were markedly and measurably warmer than normal.

Nearby is also frost-hardy rosemary. I did not have any luck with that either. Last year I got three clippings, all died before Christmas and I have no idea why. It was not even planted outside yet, I was wintering it with my laurels and citruses.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 7 – Still Some More Small Flowers

There will also be posts with other things, but I am not done with the flowers yet. You probably understand by now why I love this garden, especially in the spring. Nobody knows how many species my aunt has amassed over the years. One could possibly write a dissertation on it. Even when one thinks one has seen all, there is something rare or tiny or seasonal or all of it lurking in some corner somewhere.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 6 – Even More Small Flowers

I am back from the holiday with my friends from the university but unfortunately, I did not bring back any pretty pictures. There were no pretty sceneries, cute animals, or interesting flowers. There was a lot of talking since we did have some catching up to do – we did not meet for over two years, even more with some.

But there are still some more pictures from my aunt’s garden so there will be several more posts of that. I am very busy in my own garden right now too so I do not have much time to write.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 5 – More Small Flowers

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Affinity

Art, Fun, & Nonsense.

Don't panic if I'm not posting tomorrow

Canada grapples with medically assisted dying

The Great Gardening of 2025 - Part 44 - Froot Frenzy

Failed Rapture prophecies (2025 edition)

It's All About the Sidebar

Confession

‘Ghost who cannot be named’ spotted in Bolingbrook (Fiction)

Guessing the Next Number

Not a Masterpiece Sheathed

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Greening the Balcony – Part 3

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Runner Beans Riches

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Greening the Balcony – Part 2

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Fig Season Starts

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Another Wooden Mystery

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Solving a Wooden Mystery

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 11 – Finale

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 9 – Suculents

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 8 – Shrubbery or Bush or Both?

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 7 – Still Some More Small Flowers

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 6 – Even More Small Flowers

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My Auntie’s Garden – Part 5 – More Small Flowers

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