My dog’s got no nose. How does he smell? Awful. To prevent olfactory problems with snowmen the traditional nose of choice is the carrot. To most westerners, the carrot is a bright orange tapering root vegetable that can be eaten raw or cooked and that forms a vital part of Christmas lunch. To the allotment…
And so we begin….to kick off four years of redevelopment, we had an all staff half day on Monday 6th June. It was a jam-packed afternoon of activities, led by our Director Nick Merriman, setting the scene for the Courtyard Project and getting everyone up to speed on where we are now and what we are planning for the future.
Susie from Modern Designers then took over for a great session on branding, which helped us to think about what makes a successful brand and how we currently communicate about the Museum.
Henry (our Head of Collections) and I then led an activity – based on some excellent work done by Common Cause Foundation – that explored what our personal values are and also the values we think our visitors associate with the Museum. It was a really insightful piece of work that helped us to capture the variety of…
As it reaches the time of year when the Museum allotment is always thirsty, I thought I’d share this post from Bryan Sitch (Curator of Archaeology) about his favourite object from the collection……
Here we all are in this morning’s team meeting with our favourite objects. Kate had a shark’s jaw bone with some nasty looking teeth, Steve had a copy of the Salford register because it had details of the most important ethnographic objects in the Museum collection, Phil had some parasitic flies, Campbell part of an ivory chariot fitting, Rachel had some saffron, Lindsey had some rubber stamps, Henry a mounted Ross’ gull and I took along a post-medieval watering can made of fired clay (accession no. 20838). The latter is one of my favourite objects in the collection. I kind of fell in love with it as soon as I saw it in the Museum store.
Ceramic watering can
It’s about 36cm tall and as you can see it’s made of orange-red clay with a brownish glaze. You can see where the separately made rose…
It’s been a while since I’ve been down to the Museum allotment, and while our windows are relaced with double glazing we no longer have a view over it either. So it was high time I went along to see Anna Bunney and the allotment voluteers, Scott, Bernard and Beryl, to find out what’s growing. The peas and beans are looking good, the nasturtiums are flowering enthusiastically and the garlic chives are just about ready to open their buds. The kiwi fruit which must have grown from the remains of someone’s lunch is still going strong too. The potatoes have been coming out over the last few weeks and so there’s now new spinach and pak choi seedlings and some small celery plants. I thought I’d better make myself useful and so I tidied up the runners from the alpine srawberries so that Anna could sow some new beetroot seeds.
It’s raining on the allotment volunteers again. Still, they’re a dedicated bunch and despite the drizzle, here they are this afternoon tidying up more nasturtiums, picking peas and finding hidden potatoes. We’ve now got some huge sunflowers planted up around the allotment courtesy of our friends at the Turing sunflower project at MOSI. This year Manchester mathematicians are hoping to study the spiral patterns visible in sunflower seedheads to see if the numbers match to the interesting Fibonnacci number sequence. Later in the Autumn we will be hosting sunflower spiral counting events. If you have grown a sunflower this summer why not get involved with this huge science project?
Collections Team with their favourite objects
Ceramic watering can 
Herbology Manchester 