Perpetual Spinach

I should have said perpetual spinach yesterday instead of New Zealand Spinach.  The two are different (I couldn't find the seed packet)  I need to get some seeds....

It has a long cropping period.

When we took over our allotment, it was the only plant there (the previous plot holder had left it in really good condition, covered up beds with black fabric as he removed the crops, so we had very few weeds to deal with).   For many months, until stuff we had planted grew, it was the only crop we could harvest.  We came to appreciate its merits and to know how well it responded to a mulch of grass clippings.

It's definitely worth letting one of them go to seed - the seed comes up in places that are just right for the plant - it seems to like areas that were manured the year before.  and, conveniently, they only start to put on real growth about the time you are harvesting other stuff, so they don't really get in the way until space is becoming available anyway.

It isn't actually perpetual, but it does crop for a long time. 

More books

 I suggested to the shop manager that one way of dealing with the overflowing back stock of books was to increase the space selling books in the shop.  

Menswear isn't selling very well at present, so if we can find enough shelving, we're going to replace a rack of trousers with three more shelves of fiction.

We'll do the swap over on Monday, so that should keep me busy...

I'm also hoping that they'll go over to a sticker system for recording how long fiction has been on the shelves.  Our current technique is to record the date a book enters the shop on the price label and to check regularly for books that have been there a long time.  Oxfam use a four week colour rotation system which is a lot quicker.

The idea is that all books put out in week 1 have a small red sticker on the base of the spine.  Week 2 books have a blue dot.  Week 3, yellow and week four is green.  

In week five, you remove all the books with a red sticker and replace with a new lot of red books (or use a fifth colour if you want to avoid confusion).  It's much faster to check for books with a red sticker than it is to check the date individually on the back of each book.

It's not such a useful technique for non-fiction as the prices are often higher so the books get a longer shelf life.  There, it can still be useful to use the date labels.  However, for non-fiction worth two pounds or less, I want to start using coloured sticky dots.