Can ye' ride tandem ?

Older readers may recognise the title from a 1971 television advertisement for PG Tips tea,  one of a series featuring chimpanzees.  Although animals are still anthropomorphised more than ever on TV and cinema, it's usually done through animations and no doubt the use of live animals dressed in clothing and appearing in comic situations wouldn't be acceptable these days...  

Anyway, I thought I'd share a few pictures of our folding tandem, a wonderful piece of Italian engineering from the late 1960s.

Midnight Rendezvous....

Shed Electrics and low-Voltage Lighting ...

Firstly, a little quiz.    Take a look at this photo of these brand new light fittings I've bought, and the sealed boxes they came in, and see if you can identify what's wrong here....

can you see it ?

I only posted this photo because I thought it was so bleedin' obvious, and I just shook my head while muttering about the decline in educational standards, but then I showed it to a couple of other people.   

The first, like me, spotted it immediately but the second, after ten minutes of staring at it, still couldn't see anything wrong until it was pointed out to them....

Just in case, the answer's at the end of the post !

First harvest of the year...

Well, not strictly true, since we've already eaten a few radishes...

This year we did something we'd often read about, but never tried before, i.e. growing potatoes in containers.

We'd planted up eleven 30 litre buckets filled with multipurpose compost, each with only two or three small seed potatoes, the first five batches of which were started off in the greenhouse towards the end of February before being transferred outside in April.

We'd bought twenty of these large white buckets, which had once held ice-cream, for a fiver in an eBay auction.   The seed stock was procured from Wilkinsons, for £1 per packet with each containing around five or six small tubers.  They were of different varieties; Casablanca, International Kidney, Charlotte, Nicola and Red Duke of York.

Each container was initially filled to around a third of its depth, and was topped up in two further stages as the tops grew.

And today we harvested all the potatoes from the first five containers, around 110 days after planting.

first two containers were a mixture of red and white varieties....

Building a (big !) Shed

Ever since we bought the piece of land a few years ago to extend our garden, we'd been thinking about building something at the south end under the tree canopy.

the area in question, in a photo from 2013....

We'd considered a summerhouse, or a half-shed half-decked area, but in the end decided to go for a full length shed.