On growing plants, online knitting and bits of useful media.

It’s not often that I read the gardening section of the Observer magazine but today there was a picture of an avocado pear plant, remarkably like one I have sitting on my kitchen window ledge. so I took a look. James Wong was going on about how it has become a bit of a hipster thing and said that it is now possible to buy avocado seedlings in trendy garden centres. He went on to talk about growing your own, poo-pooing the theory that you have to perch an avocado pear stone on the top of a milk bottle, the old-fashioned glass kind, half filled with water, encouraging the stone to send out roots to reach the water. This always struck me as a bit odd and Mr Wong seems to agree.

Instead, he says, mirroring my own practice, you plant your avocado pear stone in a pot of damp compost, with the pointy end of the stone sticking up, so that about half the stone is visible. He then recommends covering the pot with a plastic bag to keep the warmth and moisture in. I have never done that. My stones just sat on the windowsill. Then you wait. And keep the compost nicely damp. Usually at the point when you have given up and are seriously considering throwing the whole shebang away a little shoot appears. And that’s it.

I have quite a long history of germinating avocado pear stones. One of my early successes turned into failure because I kept neglecting to water it and leaves kept falling off. One day I returned home to find Phil had radically pruned it, in fact simply chopping the top off, in an attempt to encourage growth. I have since read that on a healthy plant chopping the top of will encourage branching but there have to be healthy leaves on the rest of the stem. What Phil did, however, was just to kill the plant.

Another plant was killed by my daughter. She borrowed it as a visual aid during her final teaching practice, promising to care for it well. Unfortunately the youngsters charged with the task of watering the plant did not realise that when the leaves drooped this indicated the need for LOTS of water. The teaching practice science project went well but my healthy, leafy plant came home a leggy skeleton!

Okay, I can’t quite believe I have spent so much time writing about plants! But here is the current crop.

Now, how about racial tension in online knitting? Well, first of all ... online knitting? Is that real? Amazing stuff! On the radio I have been listening to a man who has a “Diverse Knitting” site on the internet. I think he calls it ”Diverseknitty”. He follows other knitters on twitter and instagram so on. One day he realised he was only following white female knitters and so he started to encourage diversity - black knitters, gay and lesbian knitters. It has been a great success. But who knew that there was racial tension in the world of knitting? But it seems that this is the case. Women who have knitting websites are receiving hate mail about their being privileged, white, nazi knitters. This aspect of the modern world is one I find really strange.

On the other hand, our obsession with media technology can have surprising uses. There was an article in the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine yesterday about people who had lost their homes in the fire in Australia, with pictures of the charred remains of people’s homes, often un-insured, and details of how they could or couldn’t rebuild. The surprising media technology thing is that some of them were following the progress of the fires on the Fires Near Me app on their phones. Without that bit of technology they might not have got out of their homes in time to save their lives.

 Amazing!