Gali @galadhir@sunbeam.city

One of my two yakon plants is still flowering and looking reasonably healthy, so I’ve left it. But I’ve brought in the crown of the second one to hibernate away from the full rigour of an English winter.

All the Jerusalem Artichoke foliage had gone brown, so I’ve composted the foliage and harvested the tubers. There’s a pot of Jerusalem Artichoke soup on the stove:

500g Artichokes,
1 chopped onion
800ml vegetable stock
tablespoon olive oil

Peel & thinly slice the artichokes. Fry the chopped onion in the olive oil. Add the artichoke and stock, simmer for 20 minutes, then blitz with a hand blender.

Not the prettiest of soups, but a tasty one! This is my first time of making it and it’s way nicer than you’d think, creamy, nutty, lovely! It needs a bit of black pepper and then it’ll be perfect.

I’m never going to feed myself all year round from this garden, but it’s nice to occasionally get a free soup.

Putting the garden to bed

How nice it is of the neighbours’ trees to give me mulch for the winter. I raked the fallen leaves off the lawn (which doesn’t need additional fertilization) and then heaped them deep on all the growing beds. I figure that mulching and fertilizing with fallen leaves is how nature does it, so it must be okay.

I’d already spread last year’s completed compost on the beds, but I’m not going to waste free mulch. And the fallen leaves will also provide warm homes for over-wintering insects.

Ooh. Just found out about Climate Grief Support Groups. Seems like a thing people might want to know about.
https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org/

Currently reading the Foundation trilogy again. It's hilarious how low tech his imagined high tech future looks today.

Today, I’ve gathered together my pro writing websites, my etsy shop for bargeware, my cover-art portfolio, and a blog on which I’ve barely posted, and smooshed them together into Galadhir’s home on the internet. http://beecroftbooks.com/

I’m fully aware that nobody will ever find this site or blog, but that doesn’t matter much. In fact it may be a bonus. It’s my site, after all, and I can do what I like with it – mix genres as much as I want. Talk about movies seen, books read, morris dances danced, fanfiction written and enjoyed, gardening and permaculture triumphs and cooking experiments with no concern about branding or consistency.

Going backwards to a simpler and less frantic past seems to be a theme of the new world I’m living in – trying to travel less, buy less, reduce, reuse, recycle etc. We are busy drawing down, de-growing, or whatever the phrase is, and going back to tending my own website feels like a step in a similar direction.

So, I just read a number of articles about the indie internet and efforts to use personal websites as an alternative to social media profiles. Basically, I read through this list of articles on Sad Girl Online, https://sadgrl.online/newoldweb/manifesto.html

I thought, “you know what? It *was* more fun in the old days when we all had our own homepages to archive our own stuff, and we just hung out on e-mail groups. Maybe I will give myself one over-arching website to collect all my scattered webpages into, and instead of spreading myself out over Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dreamwidth, etc, I’ll just use one central location for everything I want to put online.

Maybe it's time I tried to learn gaelic

Yes! Guess whose Irish passport arrived today 🥰 👍
I had always claimed that being born in Ireland made me Irish - it turns out the Irish government agrees.
Back in the European Union, baby!