There's Life In The Old Garden Yet!

I was out raking the leaves in the garden yesterday. As you would expect the Birch tree in the backyard is naked and it has simply been ages since I have been in the backyard to do anything, so yesterday it was a must to get out there and do something! I am not entirely sure why as yesterday it was blowing an absolute gale! Raking leaves in gale force winds is possibly not the greatest idea, but somehow I managed!

Was great to be out in the garden again after all of the snow and horrible freezing temperatures. As I was wandering about, well mostly during the speed raking, which is the only manner to rake in gale force winds, I noticed that there are signs of life in the garden! In fact there are even a few winter flowers poking through! The things you see when you have the time to look!

Also some of the bulbs, that we planted, a little too late admittedly, in Autumn are now poking through. Good to see some plantings making an effort! ;-). There are a lot more to come through yet, but we did plant several different types so hopefully they will all make an appearance in the not too distant future. Perhaps the ones below are simply early risers ;-)

Seeing the, albeit very limited, new growth is such a nice sign that we are well into Winter now and that Spring is not too far away! I guess the date, being mid January also gives a nice sign of this ;-) and the lengthening light at the end of the day which is simply a joy! We have had such a bitter winter this year so far, with weeks of below and very close to zero temperatures, and snow. Gradually the temperatures are rising (it has been in the 10 degree Celsius range this past week! Crazy and almost sub tropical!) and the days are lengthening. The Garden seems to be responding! Very nice.

I am not living in a dream world yet. I know we are not out of the Winter yet. Next week the temperatures are supposed to plummet again! Still fingers crossed they won't be as low as they were in December and early January. Well if they are hopefully it won't be so cold for so long! Fingers crossed! In fact everything crossed! I am so over winter!

Roll on Spring!

Cheers

m

Winter Gardening In Copenhagen?

Unlikely! There was more snow in Copenhagen in the 6 days we were there, a foot's worth (30 cm), than for the entire month of December in London. It also never made it above freezing during the Christmas period, so the snow that fell stayed there. Bizzarely, even through all that snow the airport, the trains and the roads never closed down. Sure a few trains were delayed, and people took longer to drive places than normal, but all in all nothing stopped. Well a few flights were cancelled, but these were flights to other airports that were closed such as Brussels, Paris and London. Perhaps the folks at Heathrow should go and have a look at how Copenhagen manages to keep running even through twice as much snow as that which closed Heathrow for days and caused chaos for several more.

We were incredibly lucky to make it out of Heathrow on the Tuesday before Christmas. At that stage, more than 3 days after the 10 - 15 cm of snow had fallen in London, only a third of flights were leaving Heathrow. Crazy. We were on an evening SAS flight which is typically a business travellers flight so I can only assume that SAS cannot afford to lose business Customers so made damned well sure that the flight got off the ground. Out of 5 flights they had that day, 3 of them were cancelled. Oddly there were still empty seats on the flight we took. How on earth does that work? Don't know. I am just thankful that we got off the ground.

What I saw at Heathrow though was terrible. A full 3 days after the snow had fallen the place still looked like a refugee camp. there were people sleeping on mats all over the departures area. Also the refuge of even hundreds more than had spent the previous nights there. There were mats and sliver foil blankets left all over the place. Were these waiting for more people to come back and sleep the night we left?

At the front of the airport large tents were set up for people, who did not have flights, to congregate (and sleep in?) and the Salvos (god bless the Salvation Army) were handing out food and warm drinks.

I felt guilty getting through the airport when so many people were left in a state of anger, confusion, desperation and sheer shock. It was horrible. O.K. I can understand that if we had feet of snow that there are going to be issues getting planes on and off the ground, but 15cm of the stuff 3 days beforehand? Seriously is it that difficult. I remember on the Saturday the news reporting that someone at Heathrow saying not to worry as they had plenty of de-icing chemicals to sort the problem out. Well guess what de-icing chemicals should be used on the ice and not used for drinking. Surely this is what must have been happening?

I certainly hope that the review of the chaos that is being held finds out the root cause of the problem and that something can be done about it. The answer here is yes, and it will probably cost money. I suggest that it it probably money well spent. Either that or Heathrow remains the laughing stock of major international airport hubs.

Unfortunately the people that are affected by it (and I stress I actually wasn't) are not laughing along with the joke.

I truly hope that all the people who were affected by this utter shambles, and lets face it that's what it was, made it home safely and in time to celebrate Christmas with families.

Now wasn't this blog supposed to be about Gardening in winter in Copenhagen? Hmmm sorry a little side tracked by the Heathrow issue ;-). When it comes down to it though you have Buckley's and none chance of gardening in Copenhagen in winter!

Snow ...

... and more snow!

and more snow pictures (and Christmas pictures) on flickr

Have fun

M

Winter Garden.

Wow, it has been a while since I blogged here! It's sort of been because there has been a distinct lack of activity in the garden these past few months. This was kicked off by the fact that I never see the garden in daylight any more. I get home from work at 5pm ish most days but with the clocks going back in October it is pitch dark by this time. When the weekend comes around sometimes there is no time due to other activities to get in the garden! Not to worry really there's not a lot to do at this time of year!

Now the snow has hit, for the 2nd time this December, I thought I would share a few pictures of my local area. The picture above was the view from my front door last Saturday (18th December) after the snow. Below is a view of the back garden and the neighbourhood from the top window of our house.

This was from the first round of snow on the 2nd of December. The second drop we had was a lot heavier, causing severe disruption to all life in London. Heathrow airport has been stuffed since! Crazy.

A few more snaps of the carnage can be seen in my Flickr photostream

Anyways have a great Christmas and New year, and I hope to write more next year! Hoping to get some mobile apps up and running as well which I will be able to share here as well. Possibly not mobile apps about gardening ;-)

Have fun.

Cheers

m

SMS Is Not Dead!

Sometimes I get a little tired of hearing the question 'What value does the mobile network (carrier) add?' when discussing the relationship between the Customer, who owns a mobile phone, and their experience and relationship with it. In the past few years with the explosion of 'smart' phones, increasingly mobile networks are losing their relationship with the Customer as it gradually gets prised away by the likes of Apple and Google via the iPhone and Android.

Many years ago, location was the golden egg of mobile phone networks. Mobile network operators would be able to sell access to a Customer's location to application providers and make money in the application space. Well that didn't quite work out did it? Phones will now gladly present their location directly to the application developer and so bypass the network altogether.

The same can be said of payments. Customers will always want to pay on their mobile phone bill as it's so simple right? Along comes Apple with 10's of millions of dedicated iTunes Customers who again simply by-pass the network and bill direct to their credit cards. Thankfully other market place owners don't have such a captive market, who have registered their credit card details via a PC, so there may well be a chance for the carriers to wretch some payments, on Customer bill, back. In fact this relationship between application developers and network should be rewarding for both sides for a change.

When it comes down to it though the entire world does not own a smart phone. In fact the majority of the worlds' mobiles are not smart, and although it is clear that growth in the smart phone arena is massive, the rest of the world should not go unsupported when it comes to tools to communicate. Well guess what they don't. There is this thing that is common across almost every mobile phone and mobile carrier globally. Something that was invented to allow base station installers to send test messages that has exploded into possibly the standard way of communicating between friends with mobile phones. That's right. The simple 160 character SMS.

Given the volume of messages sent globally every year, and the volume of messages sent individually:

• The average US teen sends 3334 SMS a month
• There were 6.1 trillion SMS sent in 2010. That's 200,000 SMS sent every second.

it simply astounds me that there are precious few SMS applications of any real note out there. This is one of the only distribution mechanisms that can reach almost every single GSM phone in existence across every single carrier. Of course there are some noticeable handsets that don't support SMS, such as John's Phone, but you cannot please everyone ;-) A couple of applications that have appeared recently are:

• Fast Society is a free iPhone app that groups contacts into an instant, short-term team, combining group text messaging and one-touch conference calling. – iPhone only
• GroupMe makes life easy for you and your groups with free group texting. It’s your real life network, in your pocket. – also does conf calls from the number assigned to the group. Very nice.

but on the whole there are very few that engage with SMS other than using it as a sharing distribution channel. OK there is nothing wrong with this, but there is so much more that could be achieved. Sure the development of smart phones leads to exciting new access mechanisms to engage Customers but SMS is almost universal. So why are there precious few SMS based applications as opposed to several 100,000 web based apps? Because the distribution mechanism costs! Sending an SMS has a cost that someone has to pay. In the US the recipient pays. In most of the rest of the world the sender pays. In Italy, during the 2006 World Cup the 3 network paid its Customer to receive text messages. This of course provided an excellent hacking opportunity for canny Italian 3 subscribers to hack web based services to send them SMS messages such that they would be paid by their network! Cheeky! Very Cheeky indeed! That being said, there is a cost for SMS that is either paid for by the Application provider, or the users.

So service providers cannot afford to distribute via SMS. Herein lies a very clear statement that can be addressed by the mobile networks. Mobile Networks go out of our way to entice Customers with massive packages of SMS'es that they can use each month, or they are given away for free. Why then, as we control the distribution mechanism, and access to it, and knowing that our Customers use the distribution mechanism so heavily, do we not go about making tools and products to allow our Customers to engage with their favourite distribution mechanism. If access was free you can rest assured that this would have been done years ago by application developers. Hey guess what. At the moment it is not free and the only folks who can have success in large scale SMS messaging application development are the mobile networks.

There are tens of use cases that I can think of at the drop of a hat, outside the garden shed SMS alert applications, that simply could not be delivered in a cost effective method by the application developer. I am convinced that if they could that they would have done so long ago. Why then, when the mobile networks are continually being asked what value do they add, don't the networks act to try and provide value in a communication and distribution service that they have complete control over? I am really not sure. Is it simply that we are blinded by the app ecosystems that have exploded in the past few years. Is it that we are simply missing a trick? I have my thoughts, and need to try to do more to do something about it. The point being if you own the distribution mechanism I think its a crime not to exercise it, other than giving your Customers bundles of messages to use each month. If you don't the next thing you know Google will have their own SMSC and take another chunk of your Customer. Will google Voice move into further SMS functionality on top of SMS to Email? If they do you can rest assure that there will be some interesting applications that come with it.

Time to act on and play with the resources that the Mobile Networks still have!

Cheers

m

Gardeners' World On Flickr

I have been trawling through the BBC2 Gardeners' World Flickr Group photos. There are some seriously great photos up there. A great time filler although right now I need to be doing something else at the moment!

Still weekday gardening seems to be at an end for now. With the end of Summer Time this past weekend it is close to pitch dark when I get home now. This leaves weekends only for the larger garden chores. Still I guess I could get my miners hat on to light the way in the garden? Unlikely. Think it will be a weekend endeavour now. Ho hum.

With the impending darkness in mind yesterday saw a frenetic bulb planting session undertaken. I think we were a little late with the whole bulb thing so lets see how they turn out, if they turn out. Looking forward to hopefully being surprised!

'spose with the ack of gardening malarky going on there might be some time for mobile blogs. Lets see .....

Ciao for now

Murray

Autumn Colour

The last folks who looked after my garden knew what they were doing methinks! Its Mid autumn and my garden is still full of colour! This through no fault of my own! I have been happily photographing the results of the previous owners handy work! I only hope that this time next autumn that the garden is still as colourful! Thought I would post a couple of photos of the Autumn Garden. There are more available on my Flickr Photostream in the Autumn Garden Set

The following is a bunch of Aster Amellus 'Sonia' - Michaelmas Daisies. These things are seriously going crazy. Still bursting with colour even despite the frost we are now getting.

Another View in the sunlight this time. I waited for an hour coming back every 5 minutes in the late afternoon to finally get this view of the flowers in sunlight!

Of course for a more traditional Autumn scene in any Garden, the view through the window on a seriously frosty morning.

It has been a very warm September and until recently a pretty good October. So nice in fact even the Rambling Rose has put in another appearance!

One of my favourites, the Cosmos Atrosanguineus or Chocolate flower is still putting up a brave appearance as well. These flowers have been in bloom now for a couple of months over the end of the Summer and now through Autumn. They genuinely give off a chocolate scent which can't be sneezed at!

Of course we have had our fair share of rain as well through Autumn. At one stage a couple of inches of rain in 2 days in W5. Great weather for ducks, unless the particular duck in question is an aqua-phobe I guess?

As highlighted above. More Autumn Garden snaps can be seen in my n the Autumn Garden Set on flickr. There is also a Summer Garden Set with loads more snaps contained. Need to decide next year maybe how I might organise this. Might make some monthly sets to track changes in the garden.

Cheers

M

IT's Days Like Today You Pray The Folks On Gardeners' World Know What They Are Talking About!

So inspired by Gardeners' World, from last Friday, I decided that I would scarify my lawn today. I have two areas of lawn, one at the front of the house, and rather surprisingly, one at the back of the house. The weather has hampered efforts to get both the front and the back done however. The Front is complete, as can be seen on the left but I only managed to get halfway through the back lawn.

As you can see the lawn now looks pretty grim, so right now I am praying that the folks on Gardeners world know what they are on about and next Spring I should have a nice lawn to start mowing again! I don't find out until Spring so by then they will probably be long gone anyway so I won't be able to chase them down ;-).

Maybe they are playing a horrible practical joke on lawn growers around the UK! "I know, lets make everyone stuff up their lawn this week. Then we'll open a lawn consultancy and make a killing" ;-). I am sure that they are not that way inclined! Still you never know.

So Autumn lawn maintenance is pretty simple but it is pretty hard yakka. Especially after spending an hour an a half this morning doing some back breaking community gardening in the Denison Ludlow Green. The people that live around the green own it, so once in a while we do some gardening there. This was the first time I made it, and today we were digging out the edges. OMG! Hard work! Not sure my back has recovered, although not helped by working on the lawn afterwards.

So the steps to take (and I will let you know next Spring if this actually works!):

• Mow the lawn first and rake up any loose cuttings
• Using a Springtine rake, rake through the lawn first up and down and then across. This will lift out any thatch and dead grass underneath the green grass on top. Thatch gets in the way of water and fertiliser (if you use it) getting to the roots of the grass so apparently you have to get rid of it once in a while! The picture below shows just how much thatch had built up in my lawn!
• Then aerate your lawn. Taking a pitch fork dig in and loosen the ground every 10cms. This lets air get to the roots of the grass allowing it to grow better.
• Then get some Autumn lawn food to sprinkle on. Something with phosphate and potassium. Whatever you do don't use a nitrogen based fertiliser! A bad choice in Autumn as it results in fast leafy growth which just gets obliterated in winter.
• Water the fertiliser in amd if there are any bare patches re-sow with some more grass seed.
• Rake the new grass seed in.

Simple! If somewhat backbreaking work! Below you can see how much thatch you get out of your lawn. This picture was taken after mowing and after I had raked all of the lawn clippings away! Crazy stuff.

SO I am hoping that after all of this work, and I still have the back lawn to complete, that next Spring the lawn will look something like it did when we moved in! See below. If it doesn't I will be disappointed and write a pointed letter to Gardeners' World ;-)

Anyway have fun! After 4 hours solid gardening I am off to sit still for a little!

Cheers

m