Friday

Good morning, everyone.  It's yet another overcast start to the day but things are brightening up nicely and we should see the sun soon.  In fact, here it is, just as I typed that last sentence!  Lovely,

I took a few photos of the tomato plants.  A couple of months ago I was concerned that I wouldn't have any tomatoes at all this year after disasters with last sowing and some online buying but I underestimated the resilience of the plants and now I'm wondering if I have too many!  Can one have too many tomato plants, I wonder?  Is fourteen plants too many?  There's also four at the allotment but I'll leave them for Beth to harvest in due time.

There's three kinds.  Gardeners delight, Sungold and a surprise type, self seeded sungolds which will not have baby sungolds (my Dad tells me) because they were F1 plants and what I have are F2 plants which are not likely to produce sungolds.  It's a bit complicated for a Bear of very little brain so I will just wait and see what I get, if anything as they may not be fertile, I suppose.

 The four in the cubed pot are the gardeners delights.  Much more advanced as they were first.  The two on the right are the surprise ones (I think).  Goodness, I need to sweep around the pots, don't I?
The smaller pots are actually two pots.  Those green tops are bottomless pots, intended to use with growbags but I thought they would work well with the brown pots which are just a bit too small for tomatoes.  It almost doubles the root depth as well as having a water reservoir around the top and they're working well.

It's a bit hard to see but there are six plants here.  Three at the back are surprises.  The strawberries around the edge are from last years runners.  Not much fruit this year but they have grown well and will be great next year when I will move them to the main bed.

Alex, as he is home from university, came round for lunch yesterday and we have made this a regular date for some weeks.  After some initial hiccups, he's loving uni, the work is suiting him down to the ground and he seems to have done very well.  For the first time ever, he's not stressing mightily about his results (which come back next month at some point).

After lunch, he sat with me to explain some algebra which I am supposed to be teaching.  I was terrible at algebra at school.  For a start, we didn't meet anything algebraic until secondary whereas now they start simple 'missing number' stuff in year 1.  For two terms my Dad had to 'help' me with my homework - in other words, did it for me - until the most absolutely basic stuff sank in which was that the letters represented numbers.  This was a grammar school, I wasn't stupid but I didn't pick that one up.  Geometry, on the other hand, was fantastic, I loved it so much!

Anyway, Al did a great job.  He was patient with my need to always apply his abstractions and taught me a few new things at the same time.  I * think * I've got it now but will go over the specific stuff I will be teaching, just to make sure.  And yes, I will be able to teach it at that level.

We also decided that next week I will go round to his and help him sort out his room and the following week he is going to teach me how to use the local bus.  I have my aging person's bus pass but am not au fait with the local buses while Alex is.  He's coming round, we're getting the bus into town, having lunch there and getting the bus back again.  Should be very educational for me.

Today I have a list of small tasks to get done so need to get going.  Have a super day and stay cool.