Status of things here: The cat is lounging on my arms (and half on the keyboard) again, and if I have not cuddled her for too long, I get admonished that her ear needs kneading, or her belly needs rubbing, or that she generally needs some more attention. There's a package waiting to be packed and brought to the post office together with the already-packed one (which will happen very soon), the usual stack of emails to be answered and taken care of, and there are way too many tabs open in my browser. Which, as you well know, means:

Time for a link post!

If you like to look at weird design choices for... stuff, check out the Instagram account "uglydesign". It's curated by two designers who are trying to find the ugliest thing there is (just like the name hints) - but obviously, beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholder, and I find some of the things not predominantly ugly, but more "cool in a weird way". (Some are utterly horrible to my personal aesthetic sense, though.)

EXARC has a new section about textiles, with a collection of interesting articles that will be extended with new ones as they come up. I especially appreciate that someone else also writes about the "it depends" thing, something that has come up again and again in my personal research and crafting, and that I think is very important when discussing time needed to do something (which, in turn, is a frequent topic both in Experimental Archaeology and in explaining aspects of medieval or historical craft to the wider public).

Now some bits in German:
Here's an interesting article about how much food gets thrown away in Germany, and how much of that would be avoidable. Especially bread, one of the staples, and considered a Very German Thing Indeed, gets binned in a horribly high percentage. Altogether, a third of the food produced ends up in the trash. A THIRD!!!
We've recently had some more trouble than usual with bread getting mouldy, reasons as yet unknown (different types of bread, or the weather, or contamination of our bread box, or a mix of things, or something else, possibly), and it always makes me really sad to have to throw it away. I have a general tendency of seeing food going bad as a personal failure, and I consider throwing away still-edible things as a kind of disrespect towards all the people who have worked on making this food.
This is a combination that you might call... interesting. On the down side, it leads to much chagrin for every bit I have to bin because it's really not edible anymore, which includes those where there was no way of avoiding the outcome (such as fruit that was damaged during transport and instantly changes from "unripe" to "covered with greenish fur"). It also includes me eating dodgy stuff, or things I don't really enjoy anymore because they have to be used, on occasion. On the up side, it means that relatively few food gets thrown away here, and that I have a good amount of creative approaches to leftover foods and their use.

On to something more positive: A medieval shipwreck was found in a German river, the Lippe. The wreck was found by chance by a hobby diver, and now gets checked out by archaeologists. It's about ten metres long and probably about 1000 years old; whether and how it will be excavated is still being evaluated.

And a last German link - there's an Interessengemeinschaft Zugpferde! I didn't know that until a while ago, when I stumbled across it via an article about sustainability in field- and forestwork. For small fields and in some circumstances, it makes more sense to invest in draft animals instead of trying to go "all western, all modern" and get a tractor, or other machinery. The IG Zugpferde tries to keep the draught horse and draught cattle use alive and offers all kinds of stuff around this - from competitions to workshops and courses to learn how to care for and use draught animals. I'm utterly delighted - and I hope there will be more draught animals in use in the future!

Plans are something you make... and then revise according to circumstances. We had planned to go for a bit of a hike last Sunday, but then it rained (finally! though by far not enough)... which meant we spent it at home, doing diverse small tasks.

One of them was varnishing a batch of painted miniatures - four of them for the game "Faceless". As always, those minis look a huge lot better painted than they did unpainted, and much scarier as well (which is the intention, of course).



They are still sitting on their painting supports, and they are very shiny right now, having been treated with glossy varnish. As soon as weather conditions and our schedules permit, they and the other finished minis will get the second coat, matte varnish, and then they are finally good to play with.

We do the two coats because the glossy varnish is said to be more resilient, but doesn't look as good on minis as the matte one. Plus, with the two layers, you know that you should reapply varnish if glossy spots appear on the minis, but because there's still the glossy coat once the matte one has worn down (if it actually does from handling), the paintjob itself will not suffer. Not that our minis get such super-heavy use, but then, you never know...

I am quite, quite fond of tomatoes - though I remember that as a child and even teenager, I didn't really like them. These days, I do grow them myself, with varying success though unwavering fun. I find it especially fun to have a variety of different breeds, and I do take seeds myself to grow them again the following year (though admittedly I don't take too much care to prevent cross-pollination, so things may deteriorate over time...)

Here's some of the current crop, most of them still working on getting ripe:

[caption id="attachment_5480" align="alignnone" width="640"] This one's a Tigerella - with fancy tiger stripes. Not completely ripe yet, but definitely working on it!


I got the Tigerella seeds a few years back as a present from a friend who's mostly out of touch now - so having these tomatoes also holds some pleasant memories for me.

The next one is a "Sibirische Fleischtomate", literally "Siberian beef tomato". At least that is the name it was sold under when I took one of these from our grocery box, also a few years ago. The plants make just few, but rather large fruits:

[caption id="attachment_5482" align="alignnone" width="902"] Sibirische Fleischtomate!


And finally, a souvenir tomato - I brought back a few packets of different seeds from our last summer holidays, among them one kind of tomato called "Indigo Rose". They are blue on top and ripen to a red-blue mix; tasty both raw and cooked:



Depending on the plant and on how much sun they are getting, the blue part is smaller or larger, and might even go towards a black colour. Definitely also a fun tomato, and looking at them brings back fond memories of hot summer days spent paddling...

While discussing things about tea and coffee (and their availability, in specific types, in both Germany and England), a friend sent me a link to a company making real British tea. As in... tea grown in Britain.

Tregothnan grows tea bushes in Cornwall and sells tea (different kinds) as well as tea bushes (in case someone wants to grow their own tea). The prices for the "homegrown" tea might be a tad higher than the price for tea in your common supermarket, though.

Now if I didn't have all available spaces filled up with the current experiments growing chili peppers (most being surprise seeds from a random crossing, so nobody knows what kind of peppers they will grow), the Coffee Plantation (down to a more manageable ten or so plants now, as I've gifted a bunch to other people) and the Passionfruit Plethora (because flowers! and passionfruit!), I'd be tempted to get a tea bush...

Here's some more from the Not-Lawn-Photosafari... including some scenes of life and death. Literally.

[caption id="attachment_5454" align="alignnone" width="508"] Some kind of Hylaeus bees, in German Maskenbienen, mating. Why there are three of them? I don't know, and they didn't tell.


So much for the life - there were other dramatic things happening, too:

[caption id="attachment_5451" align="alignnone" width="428"] A wasp in a fight with a bee of some kind, probably trying to get some food for her young. (Both of them, in fact, were probably trying to get some food, but only one will go home successfully...)


And now for some calmer scenes:

[caption id="attachment_5453" align="alignnone" width="428"] Some kind of wasp, as yet unidentified. There's lots of wasp-like insects with a red and black abdomen, as I've learned! It was about 3 cm in length, so fairly huge.


There's not just the humming sound of bees and other flying insects outside, too. There's also the lovely sound of grasshoppers making their "music", and I managed to get one of them banned onto digital "film":



I didn't even try to find out what genus or species that one is, but I absolutely adore the patterning on the legs and body. A very beautiful guy (or girl?)!

Today's not much going on outside, bee-wise, as it's raining. Finally! Hopefully there will be enough water coming down during the day to refill our rain barrel, which was almost empty with all the watering of the potted plants. It's still too dry anyways for the time of year - another sign of the climate change. Sigh.

Good news, though: Yesterday was sunny and nice, and I did manage to take a few photos of the aforementioned red-listed little bee. No glorious photos, but decent enough to tell that it really is Andrena hattorfiana:



You can tell the species by the colouring of the abdomen - and the fact that the lady is gathering nectar and pollen from a specific flower genus, the Knautia flowers. Which happen to grow on our not-lawn...

Here's a second shot of the bee:



And as a bonus, an European peacock (Aglais io):



Actually it's two of them, one with closed wings is sitting right on top of the summer lilac flower.

The not-lawn is in blooming season now - almost all the wild thyme has flowers, and they are very much appreciated by a gazillion of flying insects. Which, to my great dismay, means that I actually have to wear shoes when crossing the not-lawn, or use the paved garden path, and keep to the more trodden-down other paths without bloom when going to the paved section. I got stung twice within a good week, even though I was walking very slowly and carefully, one wasp, one bee or probably bumble-bee. That is a good indicator of there being many more insects in our garden than last year, as I walked barefoot all year then and didn't get stung once!

Since I dislike wearing shoes at home, and the garden counts as "home", this does annoy me... but I can accept it due to the joy the number of bees, flies, wasps, grasshoppers, and butterflies the not-lawn brings. I even spotted one special bee that's on the red list, though I didn't manage to take a photo of it (yet).

There are some other beasties I did manage to get decent pics of, though:

[caption id="attachment_5441" align="alignnone" width="640"] Male Gallische Feldwespe (European Paper Wasp), polistes dominula. Note the yellow eyes!


That was the first time we saw one of these; that guy was quite a bit larger than the ladies of the same species, which can be identified nicely by their long, orangey legs that hang down when they fly. It's one of the many wasp species that are entirely unattracted by meat or cake; they are also far less aggressive than "the" wasp Vespula germanica.

Next up: A very distinctive ass.

[caption id="attachment_5439" align="alignnone" width="567"] Gelbbindige Furchenbiene, Great Banded Furrow bee, Halictus scabiosae.


The furrow on the abdomen is what gives the name to this kind of bee. They're a rather frequent kind of wild bee.

Next one is not a bee, but a kind of fly masquerading as a dangerous sting-posessing animal:

[caption id="attachment_5438" align="alignnone" width="902"] Probably Eristalis pertinax, a quite common kind of hoverfly.


Last one is one I haven't managed to identify yet - because there's oh-so-many different kinds of wild bees and other flying insects here in Germany. I'm actually content to roughly identify them (as in down to the genus, not necessarily the species, and not even considering the sub-species), but, well, with about 600 different species of wild bees in Germany... Sad thing, though: About half of this number is on the list of endangered species, as they are quite specific about their habitat or food plants. Which is one of the reasons I will handle wearing shoes to cross the not-lawn (and do it as little as possible).

So here's my unidentified red-ass-bottomed, ass-lifting little wild bee:



If someone happens to know what it is, please tell me!

And for the German readers among you, here's one of the many pages about wild bees in Germany, with some basic info. There'll probably be a few more posts about these small flying guys, as I'm entirely fascinated by them, and I quite enjoy going on photo safari with the macro lens!