The Plot Thickens

National Shed of the Year 2008

National Shed of the Year 2008 is the Rugby Pub owned by Tim from Suffolk. Cheers Tim, congratulations on a quality build. The Rugby Pub is not just a celebration of shedness but a celebration of friends and family and that makes it a worthy champion.

The Plot Thickens got a creditable second place, and that’s a huge endorsement of the respect and affection that people have for allotments and their architecture. There are many allotment sites that don’t allow sheds, or have silly restrictions like banning home-made sheds or limiting their size, and I hope that Shed Week will get through to these councils how people enjoy their sheds and why they shouldn’t get in the way of that. Judge Lloyd Alter from Treehugger has some very nice things to say about The Plot Thickens here.

Third place was my tip-for-the-top Gar-Den, with it’s excellent curvy design. It’s the shed I’d most like to have in my garden at home.

So thanks Uncle Wilco for another successful Shed Week. I’m going to be putting up the bunting on my shed and it’ll be tea and cake to celebrate at the weekend.

The Plot Thickens

Shedtastic news! The Plot Thickens is through to the finals of National Shed of the Year competition. It’s a huge compliment and I’m tremendously grateful for all the votes - thank you. It’s a nice shed, sure, but I’m taking it as a vote for allotment sheds everywhere and a celebration of the long and glorious tradition of allotment shedonism. The distinguished panel of judges have convened to vote over the weekend and the winner will be announced Tuesday. All the very best of luck to my fellow shedonists then. Some musings on shedonism and photos of the build here and here.

Alex over at Shedworking has picked up my idea for allotment shedworking. Basically the idea’s that shedworking should be encouraged as part of what’s acceptable on an allotment. Working from home can sometimes be difficult to maintain that work/life separation although shedworking makes that very much easier, but allotment shedworking means you keep that notional journey to work and in your lunch time you get to do a bit of pottering. You wouldn’t need a huge allotment either. You could have a tiny one-pole plot. It would really help of course if the council were to lay on green mains electric and mobile broadband, and a site hut with a loo and shower would be excellent too, but shedworkers could be encouraged to shell-out for these extra facilities because it’s still good value, and then the whole site benefits too.

If you like the idea pop over to Shedworking and take a look.

It’s been National insect Week this week, and today’s featured six-leggedy is the best of all, the ant. Ants aren’t just social animals, they’re distributed animals - one ant is no more a living creature than my toe, it’s the colony as a whole that’s alive. Individuals within a colony have different roles like hunters, fighters, undertakers and manager, and come in different shapes and sizes, not unlike the different cells in the bodies of what we like to call higher animals, and the colony’s operations are controlled with a complex language of pheromone messages not unlike an endocrine system.

Bull Ant

Many of the hymenoptera have painful stings, but it’s an ant at the head of the table. This is an extract from the Schmidt Sting Pain Index:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

And as gardeners ants are unrivaled. They have arable farms that they tend and feed in climate controlled atmospheres and livestock that they move around to the best grazing and defend from predators. They are even studied by computer scientists because it turns out that ants look for food more efficiently than telecoms networks route messages.

It’s National insect Week, and today’s featured six-leggedy is the hornet. Had to really, have you seen the size of one of those things?

As it happens hornets are not particularly belligerent, less so than wasps, and you’re only likely to get stung if you go poking you head into their nest - and although you’d think that was a pretty stupid thing to do, it’s just what I did, and yes, I did get stung. Not badly as it turns out - it seems hornets give you a bit of a warning before they get all medieval on you head.

Still, they are magnificent insects. The books say they’re becoming rare but I see loads around here all the time. It’s quite impressive when the queens come out in the Autumn - now they are big - about 2″ long.