The idea of continuous learning

Since the last post we have had a very busy few months here at Bingham and Jones which meant despite our best intentions the fun stuff like this blog had to be put on the back burner for a while but we are back again for a while now hopefully.

The idea of continuous learning is quite simple - if you ever tell yourself that you know everything about a topic, its not going to be true. If you ever refuse an opportunity to learn you are only really doing yourself a disservice. Continuous learning and how to go about it is entirely up to the individual but the simple philosophy is learn a single new, useful fact every day. While reading huge piles of books or research papers are the typical way to do this - there are other ways and they can be enjoyable in their own right. Here is a little about one of our new project that allows us a source of continuous learning.

There are a world of ingredients out there that we have never tried before, things that arent generally for sale or cant be imported/exported for various reasons and we have a vested interest in these ingredients as it allows for innovation of a different kind. In order to address this we have taken up residence in the university allotments and began to grow our own weird and wonderful fruit and vegetables.

This is the university allotments as of a month ago, they are devided up into plots that normally use the fence posts as markers.

They even have a small pond in an attempt to attract some wildlife.

This one was ours. The soil was like dust and it was covered in weeds but we had the benefit of a few herb plants left behind by a previous owner. We ordered some stuff to improve the soil a bit and a large supply of unusual seeds.

One of the sage plants was threatening to take over the entire plot. cutting this monstrosity back resulted in 3 big bags of sage.

Our first real task was weeding as much as possible. After that we broke up the ground on half of the plot and turned it over in anticipation for our manure, mushroom compost and worm castings to arrive.

15 bags of manure/compost and 3 bags of worm castings later this is what we had. It was left like this for a few days with the hopes that some rain would help wash some of the nutrients into the soil below.

In this time we took over a small area inside the polytunnel and prepared that with the same mix of manure, mushroom compost and worm castings.

Seeds were planted both in trays and directly into the polytunnel patch and some new herb plants went into the border outside.

That is really it for now on the subject of our allotment project but continuous learning takes many forms and this is one of many for us. Balancing the workload and learning is sometimes quite difficult but it is always rewarding.