One of the novelties of the house is that it has a back yard, with some garden beds, some lawn and an outdoor space - not just a concrete balcony space.

I am already spending more time in the back yard than I ever did on the balcony and we haven’t even started thinking about improvements. There are some tomato plants to tend, a couple of trees to water, cobwebs to sweep, a lawn to weed and mow - plus a family of European wasps I keep trying to evict.

One thing that is becoming clear is that there’s a lot more work to be done to make the back yard into a pleasant space with a garden.

It makes sense for us to try to do something with our food waste, to reduce how much of it goes to landfill. We also want to plant a garden around the new house, so we have started to think about how we can build up and improve the soil.

Those are a couple of the reasons why we have recently re-started our composting efforts.

We have been looking for more condiments to add flavour to our meals. A special offer at the local market presented an opportunity to try fermenting a hot sauce.

‘Ollie’ is my Surly Bridge Club. My ‘go anywhere, do anything’ bike. Slow and steady, but adaptable to lots of functions.

The steel frame, wide clearance for tyres on 27.5" rims and multiple mounting points make it ideal for bikepacking. It can also run narrower tyres on 700cc rims, as a rock solid utility bike.

By design, this is quite a simple web site.

I use a static site generator, Hugo, to roll markdown files I have written into a website (HTML and CSS). The (default) ananke theme gives the files a consistent look and feel.