Space and aliens

All is not well on the balcony. Since noticing the first lot of greenfly we've found quite a few more. The mint has recovered from it's infestation but now I have aubergine, pot marigolds, strawberries and borage full of them.

I've been manually removing them and giving them a good spray with a mix of washing up liquid (of the environmentally friendly variety) but now I'm sticking to just manually removing them at the moment because we have some lacewing larvae coming. They were kind of pricey (we could have bought a Girlguiding UK centenary rose for that!) so I'm hoping to encourage the adults to hang around and lay (?) more without our intervention. We have an insect house set up for them. But what else would they like? What do they eat?

Until then our plants are over here in the naughty corner. I'm hoping they don't pass the green fly on.

In other news we where so incredibly lucky yesterday. Walking back from a trip to Cockington we found a skip. It was time for a good root. We where soon joined by another bloke who filled us in. From the 'for sale' sign we'd already guessed that this was a house clear out and we where right. The lady who lived their has left. There was plenty of good, almost new furniture in there. Like an almost new (still had it's energy efficiency sticker on it) washing machine.

We took two shelf unit things. I'm guessing they where shoe racks. Thinking they would also make good veg racks we carried them home. After a scrub with some soapy water and drying off in the Devonian sun we fitted them into one of our cupboards.

This rather large cupboard gets no heating, and there is no window. It was put on the plans to conceal the water pipes (which had to be re-routed at the last minute) Right now it's around 12°, the rest of the flat being 20°. We've kept our potatoes in it for a while but the shelving makes it a proper pantry. Well... if we took the coats out.

Right now the bottom shelf is the gardening shelf (it's perfect to keep seeds in) and the top three are for food. I know it's a little empty. We aren't due another box until thursday.