Harlequins again

Evidently they have decided that this is a harlequin-friendly house (see 13 May 2007) and so have come to spend the winter in a corner of the ceiling of the front porch. It'll be interesting to see if they survive - not that London winters set much of a test these days.

The cupolas of Camberwell Green

This the most modest of the three, and it looks as though it was built in accordance with a new building line on Denmark Hill. But then the Kennedys Sausages building and the one next to it didn't get redeveloped. It is a pity, for it means that from many angles the view of the cupola is marred. Perhaps in the future ...

Ideally also in the future we'd have a fourth cupola at the Green end of any redevelopment of the east side of Denmark Hill.

A bit more bioscience in Camberwell 2

Again the effect of varying strengths of Ecover washing-up liquid, but this time on wheat. The result is much the same as it was with mung beans (see 8 August). Rocket next time.

A bit more bioscience in Camberwell

The plants on the right are clearly doing better than the ones on the left. That is because as you go to the left the plants are growing in increasingly strong solutions of Ecover washing-up liquid. But, interestingly, the weaker solutions, and I think .001 is typical for our washing up, seem pretty harmless, possibly even beneficial. So we can safely put the water on the garden.

These are mung beans. I'll try next with wheat and with rocket, and then do the same with washing-up liquids that are not advertised as being environmentally friendly.

Another use for old bricks

It is wonderful how quickly a pile of bricks gets colonised. I suppose when the pile is six bricks deep and twenty bricks high, low down at the back it is always dark and cool and moist. Ideal evidently for yellow slugs (Limax flavus) , of which we found dozens when we took the pile down. They'd even laid eggs (I own up to some rearrangement to make a convenient picture). They are entirely beneficial, just eating rotting stuff and so helping to speed up the cycle, and thus common inhabitants of compost bins.

But it beats me what they find to eat in a pile of bricks.

Bricks and mortar

Part of the garden wall was threatening to fall down, so we are having it re-built. Most of the bricks that were whole in the old wall can be re-used, and the new wall is being done with lime mortar, like the original, i.e. no cement at all. And thus was most of Camberwell built.

This isn't just conservation fussiness - lime mortar has a hugely lower carbon footprint than does cement. It also has the indirect effect that when you take a wall down you can get the mortar off the bricks. The only bricks we couldn't re-use here were the ones that had been repaired with cement. When you lay bricks with cement you doom them to single use.

So reclaimed London stocks are only available because of the lime mortar they were put together with.

Great tree

This wonderful tree, which I take to be a black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, looks as though it belongs in a park or large garden rather than where it is, on the pavement in Wyndham Road. Certainly the tree is much older than all the surrounding buildings and, in its solitary splendour, it doesn't look as though it was designed for the pavement. Perhaps a large garden is where it used in fact to be, and Edwardian children played under it; but the garden has long since been taken away. How good that it has survived.