The ascent of the spining fork onions to heaven

The ascent of the spining fork onions to heaven
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

There is a a project on Flickr caled the Iron Photographer, something like the Iron Chef where you are given a few ingredients and asked to concoct some meal from it, but in this case the creation is a photograph.

This time it was

Something from your fridge. I had some onions
Something from your toolbox. Well if you like eating the drawer where the knifes and forks are kept is considered your tools. Right?
One predominant colour. I went for the yellow of the onions.

To rig the whole thing up required very fine white thread. I think that was the most dificult part of the setup. Getting the forks and onions to hang just right. Then it came to taking the photo. I took it from many different angles bout none of them looked right. In the end I went for a shot from below.

To actually take the photo I set the camera onto infinate burst mode and spun the forks around, and shot 50 or more photos, and I selected the most pleasing one for post-processing

So how do you NEARLY get rid of the white threads. I bumped the ev up to over +1 was the first thing to do so as to over-expose the photo, and then in Picasa I croped and straightened and rotated until I got the look that I wanted, namely forks with onions spiraling upwards.

Once the composition was taken care of the saturation and highlights were increased so the background turned white and almost all shadows disappeared. In doing this a lot of noise and grain is generated so I got rid of that with a programme called Neat Image.

In the end the white threads holding the mobile together have almost disappeared and the chrome of the forks is smooth and sparkely.

The things you do when your wife is out of the country.

Living on an island

She was born and lived on an island that was 24 kilometres from Helsinki. Her father was a fisherman, and in the morning he would take her to school by boat. In the winter the sea would freeze over. That would have been fine because she could have walked to the mainland, but the ferry boats to Sweden passed her island everyday and smashed the ice, so she always had to make a short rowing boat trip through the broken ice.

To get an education it was long boat trips in the summer, and either walking or skiing in the winter. There were no taxis waiting on standby to take her to school.

At seventeen she was a nurse in the winter war, and saw lots of young men no older than herself die. They were brought to a field hospital near a lake by sea-plane. She married a soldier she met during the war. When death is so close at hand you have to make the most of life.

After the war she became a translator, and translated subtitles for movies. She remembers doing very bad B-movies westerns staring an actor called Ronald Reagan, and was very surprised when someone with so little talent for acting became the president of the United States.

The yard of her house is filled with apple trees. It has been a good harvest this year. She makes apple sauce with the ones that have fallen to the ground, and collects the best to keep in a drawer in the house or give away to her friends.

She wears a small silver oak leaf on her jumper. It is some reminder of the war and her part in it. She does not wish she had had a taxi to take her to school. She had the best father in the world to do that for ten years of her life.

At night she longs to be back on that island.

Momento

This is a medal won by my grandfather in 1905. He jumped over 19 feet 10 inches in the long leap, and I was told he won 10 shillings as a prize. He left Wick Caithnesshire and went to Argentina to become a Goucho.

He came back to Scotland and at the age of 40 married a girl of 16. They had four children. I never saw my grandmother. She died before I was born. The only time I saw my grandfather he was on his death bed, and a shell of the man who had rode wide horses in Argentina, and who had a 14 inch bicep from shearing sheep

But although when he died he was a husk of a man. I still have his medal to prove that once he jumped over 19 feet. It now has two nicks on the lower edge, because I use it to unlock trollies at the supermarket when I need them.

I do not have any medals to give my own children, and for them many things will remain locked.

We're like fire throwers man

Fire throwers before the parliment
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Hey dude like that is one firey stick you got there.
What you say we do some flame swirling in unison.
You know like Ugh them Berkley babes or something.
Like when they swim in the water an all.
Synchronised stuff with flames instead of water.
Wouldn't that be cool.
I mean like it would be kalidescopic.
Psychodelic even
Jees did I just say Psychodelic
I meant psychedelic
You can't half twirl that stick man.
What you say I toss my stick in the air
and at the same time you toss your stick in the air
Yeah that groovy
Now you toss your stick to me and I toss my stick to you
Hey man I can't see a thing
What the... you nearly had my eye out then.
Shit my hoodie is on fire
Man that's not cool
What you mean it's Hot?
I'll give you hot.
You sumabitch

And the band played on

Somebody drops down dead drunk in the street. People stop and stare. One person bends over him to see if he is OK. A woman with a shoping bag marches resolutely passed him. The man in the cowboy hat observes but continues to pick away on his violin and tap his toe in time. The models in the windows ingnore the whole scene. The man behind the camera he snaps and moves on.

A place to stay

Buildings that stay in one place have been around for centuries. Before that there were movable dwellings. A few sticks covered with skins. When the herd moved on the dwelling place moved with them. When the grass was no longer, the skins were rolled up and the sticks bound together, and new pastures were saught.

Mongolians lived in yurts, Indians in wigwams, Arabs in tents, and the Jews had a tabernacle to worship their God

This tent was pitched in Helsinki for the night of the arts. It did not have a door, and from a distance it sounded that druming was coming from inside it. The rythms were ancient, played by modern people, living in flats with treble glazing, and central heating.



Behind the National museum on the night of the arts they sang opera. For opera it would seem you need opera houses. Big solid buildings made of marble or granite. Halls designed to give the best acoustics. Plush velvet seats and lights that can be dimmed at the flick of a switch. Dressing rooms, heavy curtains and an orchestra pit to house the violin players and the man with the big trombone, not to mention space for kettle drums and tubas. The singers take the stage in all their finery and it is all about glamour and glitz.

As I stood on Mannerheimtie I was caught between the two sounds. The pagan acoustic druming in a mysteriously closed tent, and the amplified tenor doing a mighty John Mc'Cormack.

I will let you guess which one I was drawn to.

A fishy story

In the summer the well runs dry, but this year because of the really warm weather the well was empty earlier than expected. Still, being a few meters underground the well is the coolest place to store food, since the summerhouse does not have any fridge, due to the fact it does not have any electricity.

So a side of salmon was put into a bucket and lowered into the well to keep it cool. However the bucket tiped over and the salmon fell to the bottom of the well.



It was then that the intrepid Riina decided to go down the well to recover the fish. She had read all the Tarzan books ever written and this looked just the job for someone imbuded with Tarzan exploits. It was all a matter of doing a spiderman thing, feet against one wall of the well, and your back against the other and edging your way down to the bottom.



For some reason, as with many things in life, theory is one thing and practice is another. The narrowness of the well, and her adult size was a bad combination, that no amount of Tarzan novel reading, could have prepared Riina to accept failure. Some ideas just don't work.



But in the best Zane Gray tradition a pow-wow was held and various suggestions were put forth as to how to recover the fish from the well. Grab it chop-stick fashion with two long sticks. Catch it with a fish hook. In the end Olli, since he had a REAL spiderman suit decided it was his duty to save the fish from the murky depths of the well.

The final solution was to loop a rope around Olli's armpits, which had been suitably padded with cushions, and Harrison Ford style, lower the minature spiderman into the dark pit of the well, to recover the precious fish for dinner. Was hunger his real motivation, or did he have the heart of a hero? Those philosophical questions will perhaps forever remain unanswered.



Rinna and Raisa donned thick gloves to prevent rope burn and gradually lowered Olli down the well, while Noa and Jasper added vocal encouragement. Having secured the precious fish Olli was hauled out of the well to the mighty applause to the rejoicing crowd.




Having returned triumphant from his adventure down the well Olli proudly held the slab of smoked salmon aloft. He was like a champion standing on the olympic podium, cushions still tied under his armpits, and the smile of victory on his face, while and admiring audience gazed raptly at the fishy prize in his hand.

There would be fish for dinner after all.

Photographing the moon and other things

Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ1
Exposure: 15 sec (15)
Aperture: f/4.1
Focal Length: 28.2 mm
ISO Speed: 80
Exposure Bias: 0/1677721600 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire

We think that if we know the details of something, then we have a better understanding of how that thing came to be. The existance of a photo depends on the presence of a camera and a person taking the photograph. That is only stating the obvious, but when I look at the information contained in the EXIF data that comes attached to every digital photo, then I have no idea what the Exposure Bias is, or what would happen if that value was changed, or even how to go about changing it.

I have a vague idea that the Aperture or F-stop deals with the amount of light getting into the camera and that it works in a way that the bigger the f-stop then the smaller the hole, and vica versa.

The ISO speed of the film gives some idea of how sensitive the film is to light. The higher the ISO speed then the more sensitive is the film to light, but since digital cameras do not have film, what is the point and what do the values really mean.

The exposure tim of 15 sec is easy to understand, since it was a dark night and the aperture had to be held open for a long time so enough light would get into the camera to be captured by that none existant film.

Sometimes I wonder if we analyse our lives like this, and we treat our lives as photographs. We think. I am a bad photograph because I have been exposed to long. I have a bad conscience and I am not sensitive enough. Or perhaps the photograph that we are depends on some value like 0/1677721600 EV and we have absolutely no idea what that means or how to change it or how it has affected us.

Is there such a thing as perfect values to give a perfect photo? I think not. Even if everybody set the controls of their lives to perfect values, there is no garuentee that the photo that is their lives would turn out OK, since some have shakey hands and others use a tripod, some use a Nikon, and some use a Kodak, some are born with a golden tripod in their mouths, and millions of megapixels in their bank account, some only have a cheap Holga and discount film from a bargain basement, yet they make better and more exciting photos of their lives than those who are more privilged.

Then there is the question of composition and framing. Some people do not have the eye for the right thing. The always seem to make the wrong choices, always make the wrong settings, and the photo of their lives is blurred and out of focus.

Perhaps we are who were are because the Flash did not fire

Finnish fireworks competition

The last camera I had it was impossible to take photos of fire work displays. By the time the shutter clicked the fireworks were gone. My new camera does much better.



The run up to the fireworks night was not so good since I failed miserably trying to take photos of a full moon which was blood red... (something to do with the smoke and pollutants coming from the forest fires in Russia). Then I tried to get the photos by holding the camera steady in my hand, but at a 10x zoom and on a dark night with a long exposure it is just impossible to focus.



And even though the new camera has an anti-shake mechanism the moon was dancing about the LCD screen like a skittish firefly. So for the firework night I invested in a tripod, and read up on how to take firework photographs. The TZ1 has a fireworks setting.



On the night I went to Lautasaari, and was surprised that there were hundreds of cars rolling off the Lansivyla and down to the beach. It was impossible to find a parking space, andI eventually found a space about a kilometer away, down an alley-way and parked up on the pavement. When I finally got to the beach area it was thronging and it was difficult to find a place to set up the camera.



The camera in "firework mode" does a longer exposure and it is noticeable that it takes time to write to the SD card, and I seemed to be missing some of the most spectacular displays, so I set the camera to "burst mode" and just held the shutter down so there was a continuous capture onto the card.



Over an hour period between the shows I must have shot over 200 photos. Some of them were rubbish but some I felt were excellent. The battery was half drained by the end of the night, and when everyone had left I sat down by the seashore and edited out the bad photos. So at the end I had about 50 photos of the event which I liked.



It was then that I noticed the crescent moon over the docks and I set about trying to capture the moon I missed about a week ago... but that is another story.

Run and Spit dance

Run and Spit dance
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

The run & spit dance is not very complicated. I basically has two major moves to it, namely running and spitting. You can also flail your arms about like a windmill, and shake your hair about wildly until it gets all tangled and knotty

The dance has been successful if you hair gets in such a mess that your mother can not get a hair brush through it, and it can be counted a roaring success if in the aftermath, as your mother brushes your hair, she exclaims, "Your knotty."

You can then argue in depth with her that you are not naughty, and that she should join you the next time in the run & spit dance, cos it is a dance to bring you joy.

Your grandfather remarks. "Modern people try to solve their problems by being rational, whereas primative people solve their problems by dancing," and wonders if the run & spit dance was a rain dance, to end the drought in Finland.

Sunflower Sutra

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955

And the eyes in his head see the sun going down

In Vantaa there is a field of sunflowers and on Sunday I went for a walk in this field. Vantaa city has a policy that anybody can go into the field and pick the sunflowers for themselves or to give away as presents.

I think it is a wonderful policy that flowers are grown for the pleasure and joy of the public. When I was there, many families were out for an afternoon walk and were moving through the fields of green. One small boy was almost lost in the jungle of greenery. One small girl was collecting ladybirds and was not interested in the flowers at all.

It has been dry for 6 weeks in Finland, with no rain at all, and even though the flowers are over the little boys head, they barely reach his parents knees. On the radio there has been talk of crop failure. My own crops at my allotment have suffered because I have not been watering them regularly.

I think of famine in Africa. People sowing seed, but nothing growing. I am reminded of a BBC documentary "Global dimming" and a poem by Alan Ginsberg about a sunflower covered by the pollution of cement dust from a factory.

It is a precious thing to be able to enjoy the wonders of nature, and to see the sunflowers turn their heads from the rising of the sun until the setting of the same.

life in the slow lane

I remember when I was driving to India in a 1954 80" SWB Land Rover. We decided to be economical and drive there at 40 mph so as to get the best fuel consumption.

You do not do this on an autobahn in Germany because truck drivers have schedules to meet, and business-men have to do their business, and they don't want a bunch of long haired hippies sauntering along in the slow lane at 40 mph.

Taking things easy has always been frowned apon if you belong to those germanic or northern countries where the protestant work ethic hold sway.

Taking things easy is ifrowned apon and is often classified as laziness, and you know what they say... the Devil always has work for idle hands. It would seem that there should be no peace for the wicked, yet God himself took a break on the seventh day and rested.

It has been said that the Finns have only recently come out of the forest and at every opportunity they go back into it. I think this is a very wise thing to do. It is what keeps people sane. Living life in the slow lane with no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets, no cooking facilities, tends to slow you down.

You have time to fish, time to swim, time to paint, time to dance in the grass, time to relax.

To fish you have to dig for worms, bait the hook, pick your spot and time of the day, and then wait. Fishing is mostly about waiting. Fishing helps you to be patient. If you catch a big fish it is an incredibley joyous occasion. There is a fight with the fish and then the struggle to land it. The fish has to be taken off the hook, and if you are in a mind to eat it, it has to be cleaned and cooked. All of this takes time.

If you want to really relax then there is no better way than to watch paint dry. This is a very time consuming process. First of all you have to prepare a good wooden surface, let's say the side of a wooden house. Take a steel brush to get rid of all the old blistered paint, and then give the surface a good going over with a course sandpaper. Experts who are serious about watching paint dry can then give the wall a second going over with a finer grade sandpaper.

Now comes the most difficult part, making the decision as to what kind of paint to apply. I ask you where is the fun in using some quick drying paint.? If you are at all serious about watching paint dry then you need to choose an oil based paint. It will take ages to dry, and it will give you hours of pleasure, first of all when you apply it to the wood, and secondly as it slowly changes colour during the drying process.


Best results can be had on days of high humidity, The paint takes so much longer to dry. Painting on a sunny day is a short lived pleasure, and presents no challenge to anyone who is really serious about watching paint dry.

I watching paint dry seems too frenetic for you then a really worthwhile substitute activity is holding the ladder steady while somebody else does the work. That demands lots of patience.


If you do not have gas or electricity then the only way to cook is on an open fire. So the wood has to be sawn and chopped, and kindling made to get the fire started. Fire-lighters are not allowed. That makes starting a fire too easy. The kindling has to be built up in a criss-cross fashion on top of a layer of paper which has been screwed up in a secret way that has been passed down from generation to generation.

Twisting paper to make a fire is an essential skill.
It is imprper to throw a couple of newspapers, untwisted on to the fire. Twisting paper correctly takes time, and the more time it takes to make the fire then the hungrier you will become.

Then when it comes to preparing the food, it is a heresy to buy something ready made from the shop. That is just too quick. If you are living life in the slow lane then everything has to be done from scratch. First you kill a cow and saw its leg off... only joking... you can get away with buying micemeat but the incorporation of herbs and spices has to take place in a large bowl and it all has to be mixed by hand with a wooden spoon made from a 60 year old juniper tree. The frying should be done on a Hackman's cast iron skillet. Cook for lots of people, and eat everything slowly with plenty of talking.

If you succeed in doing this on a regular basis you will have learnt a secret that keeps Finns sane. Namely take a break from the hustle and bustle of the hectic life in the city and for a change live life in the slow lane.

Planing for a succession of blooms

 

Birds, birds, birds

Birds are a problem since they seem to like strawberries even more than humans. So what can you do to keep them off your berries. Well one enterprising lady painted stones red and then laid them out amongst the strawberry plants. Now that will give their little beaks something to think about.















Some people show no subtlety and they just enclose the strawberries in netting. That is just pain unfair. There is no competition.Birds stupid enough to try and get through the netting just get their legs caught, and they never have the patience to methodically use their beak to get free. It is all a wild flapping of the wings until they die of exhaustion. Birds should learn strawberries are for humans and not for them.















Then you have the dummy owl, the bird of prey that never moves a muscle, just sits on its perch and stares. If I were a bird I would be dead scared of a motionless wooden owl. But perhaps the dummy owl combined with a spining whirlygig is just that combination of ying and yang, stillness and movement, that causes enough confusion that the birds are too perplexed to even think about eating strawberries.




















But the top top scary method is to make a video of youself wringing a chickens neck and cooking it in a pot, and all the while the viedo is rolling you make diaboical curses about what you are going to do to any birds caught eating your strawberries. Then once the tape is finnished you string it over your acursed strawberries, and let the magic take its course. But then again it might just be the black tape making strange noises in the wind, or they way it shimmers from coal black to silver that is a little bit disconcerting for the birds.





















But I think birds are basically stupid and never learn. If they want strawberries then they will go for them. Birds are like humans when it comes to doing stupid things.

Beauty for ashes... or there abouts

I saw a woman painting her toolbox and I strolled over to her to say that I wanted to paint some flowers on the black toolbox that I had made from some scrap wood I had found at a dump. She said that she already had some acrylic paint and was just waiting for the cream paint she was applying to dry and then she would be doing some flowers as well. Do you ever get that feeling that someone steals your idea and you are left in second place because you are slow off the mark.

Anyway I returned a few days later and indeed she had painted some flowers on her toolbox. I think she did a good job of it. Better than I could ever do since the representation is of actual flowers. I did not want to appear to be a copycat so I had to come up with something diferent. Something simple with only a few colours and I thought that some art deco motif in the style of Alfons Mucha would be easy to do.




















So I decided on a poppy mitif for the front and some tulips for the top. I like the sparceness of the lines, and the simplicity of the drawing. They looked good on paper but when it comes to transferring them onto a rough black wooden surface then that is a different matter. Once the paint brush is dipped into the paint and the paint is applied to the wood then there is no going back.

I know from experiance that you get a line or a shade of colour wrong and you see the mistake instantly, and if it were a water colour on a bit of paper you could scrumpple up the paper and start again, but with a toolbox it is a bit heavy to throw in the ditch if you paint something you don't like and it is left there as a legacy to you ineptitude. Or if you are writing, and make a spelling mistake, or construct a sentence that you don't like then there is always the possibility to correct it, so that the words come out to your satisfaction.

Having the will to correct things rather than abandon them is a very powerful quality.




















But perhaps the best thing to do is to do some research and prepare. Take things easy and advance slowly. I bought some chalk to do a rough outline of the motif I want and have gotten as far as doing an outline on the top of the toolbox. I bought myself some chineese tubes of acrylic paint and some rubbish paintbrushes.

















My way of thinking is that if you cobble together a tool box from some scrap wood from a dump then it is a bit ridiculous to spend lots of money on paints and brushes. My attitude is OK I have some scrap wood, let's build the best box we can from it. That is the best feeling to create something useful from something that has been discarded as worthless. The decorations are just a little bit of frivolity.

Painting a poppy on an old black box is like pinning a medal on the chest of a soldier. It is a way of saying. Yep!!! you'll do for me. 

Flowers from below

Everyone takes photos of flowers from above and they take a long shot so there is some sort of perspective, but I thought I would take a worms eye view of some flowers... do worms have eyes???

Well first of all you can never frame the picture properly, and you never know what kind of picture you are going to get since you can not look at the LCD to see what you are aiming at.

But the one good thing is that on bright days you get a wonderful blue background from the sky. The petals of the flowers also take on a transluscent quality that you would not see if you were shooting downwards.


The daisies and the poppies look different somehow... more beautiful. Sometimes you only get blue sky when you take a shot since the flowers are moving in the wind.

Sometimes your own eyebrow finds its way into the picture and you have to crop the composition to get rid of it.

Sometimes the photos are so bad you have to delete them from memory.

They photos also look wrong since everybody is used to viewing things from above that the prespective from below can be a little disconscerting.


On occasion you capture a photo where the sunlight is making the flower glow, and there is a gradient of blue across the sky. These things you could not plan and they are happy accidents that make shooting plants from below an adventure.

Light and airy plants seem to be the easist to photograph. When you get into the jungle og asparagus fronds there is too much visual noise in the photo, and the yellow squash flowers deep on the jungle of green foliage are difficult to capture since the big leaves block out the sky.



The best picture I came away with was of a Peony. There is something very delicate about the colouring of the petals. It has a very Japanese feel to it. Transendental even. It is as if this flower is whispering a secret about summer. Telling of the mystry of creation. Longing for redemption when flowers will bloom forever and never fade.

Sunhats at the communal gardens

This is Irma and her friend they were at the Soukka allotments tending their flower garden and wearing big sun hats. The weather has been glorious and most days it has been 25C.

Irma has a large patch of pumpkins and she wanted to thin out the plants so she offered me one to plant on my compost heap. I took it and made it a mound of horse manure to grow in. It is bordered on both sides with Krass. I have also built a box for a watermelon called sugarbaby, and I have lined the box with stones so that they collect heat. Perhaps the plant can be fooled into thinking it is growing in Spain. So far it seems to be thriving.


Women are so sensible when it comes to being out in the sun. They wear big sunhats whereas I do not wear any hat at all and my head gets burnt. Most mornings I get down to the garden before I go to work, and I give it a good watering. Everything seems to be growing well, although some of the shaws on the potatoes seem to be pecked at by pheasants. Stupid birds!!! I only wish there was a motorway nearby for them to walk out on and get run over. Pheasants think that they rule the world. It comes from being so beautiful. They think that no harm can come to them since they have such wonderful plumage. It is the male of the species that gets dressed up as Beau Brummel. They do it to attract the female of the species.



But it is women who wear hats. The bigger the better. Just think of the outrageous confections that dangle from the heads of women at Royal Ascot. If I ever was to wear a hat it would be one made out of a hankie tied at the corners with four knots like the gumboot men from Monty Python with their fair-isle sweaters and braces for their trousers. 

The soukka allotments

So I have got a new allotment down by the sea in Soukka. The ground is in a clearing in the forest and it receives sun most of the day. There is a cool breeze coming off the sea so it makes it easy to work. The people on these allotments are mostly Finns and only two "refugees" from Iran and Afghanistan have migrated to Soukka. It would appear that there are quite a lot of free allotments that have been left unattended, and they are either a mass of dandilions, or a tangle of nettles.

Some people have fenced their plots in, others have turned them into flowers gardens with tables and benches and pathways laid down with bark pathways, others have real proper hedges of siberian-pea to create and enclosed area. My ground is bare and open save for the plants I am trying to grow.

When I came about 4 weeks ago the ground was covered with the dried stalks of jerusalem artichokes. Someone had planted them and never lifted them. Since I don't particularly like the taste of this plant I dug them up and gave most of them away to people who wanted them, and there were about five takers. I then had to get rid of mint that had run wild in the centre of the plot. Long white roots that had spead out about 2 meters from the original plant and was now putting up new shoots.

Once the ground was cleared I dumped 12 barrowloads of well rotted horse manure on to the ground. It took an hour and a half to accomplish the job, and then to was tilled into the soil with a rotavator. The first plants to go in were Stutgart onions and as you can see from the picture they are well on their way.

The Finnish summer may be short, but it truly is glorious. I spend a could of hours a day at the allotment. It is better exercise than at the gymnasium and it does not cost a penny, and at the end of the season you are feeling pretty fit, have a tan that would cost a fortune in a health spa, and you have fresh chives to go with your new potatoes and butter. What could be better?