Tag Archives: greenhouse

Wednesday 27th April 2011 – The best-laid plans and all that …

… yes, I didn’t get very far with the greenhouse today.

This morning I dd the usual couple of hours on the website and then went outside to do battle. I’ve measured up everything and done my design, so I know how I’m going to build it, but the weather, which was pretty fair this morning, gradually deteriorated and by lunchtime we were having the showers, and I’m not talking about anything to do with OUSA either.

After lunch thr showers were persistent and it was clear that working outside was impossible and so I retired to the barn, where I spent all of the afternoon tidying up in there and making more room to store stuff. And it’s amazing what I found in there as well – tons of stuff. I also went through a couple of cardboard boxes from the garage at the old apartment and I’ve found all of my old songs that I wrote in the days when I used to be a rock star, and wasn’t that a long time ago?
“33 years” … ed

I also made another startling discovery in there, and that’s going to take someone by surprise. 1973 was a long time ago!

It’s still raining now, but I’m not worried. It will fill up the water butts and it’s not as if there isn’t anything else to do. Tomorrow’s programme depends on the weather.

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Tuesday 26th April 2011 – SO NOW …

… that we have the internet up and running again, I can tell you all about today’s little events, such as they are.

We’re back at work again now and I spent the first while working on the computer – carrying on with the Newfoundland web pages.

This is the kind of thing that will go on for ever, I imagine.

Later, I set about the garden. I’ve done more planting, some weeding and hoeing and I’ve also put the two raspberry bushes in – those that I bought two weeks ago.

But I don’t like the look of them. If I get anything at all from them I’ll really be lucky. But they stand more chance in the soil than they do if they aren’t in there, so let them have a go.

Tonorrow I’m going to make a start on building the greenhouse.

That’s the cue for a thunderstorm, isn’t it?

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Wednesday 20th April 2011 – I’m blogging early tonight …

… because I’m thoroughly whacked and I’m going to bed in a minute.

base of greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve been working hard on the site for the greenhouse and now I have all of the breeze blocks in place. But it wasn’t half a maul, digging up tree roots, tree stumps and all that kind of thing. It took me ages.

It’s hard work, all of this manual labouring in the garden. And tomorrow I need to start on building the framework for the greenhouse. That is going be exciting too.

This morning though I carried on with my Newfoundland pages and I’ve now arrived at the Avalon Peninsula. There’s still a long way to go though and it’s going to take me quite a while to finish this lot off.

And this afternoon I took some time off from digging the trenches. Now I know that I said that I don’t have much water left but notwithstanding, I did another load of washing and now all of that is up to date. But there’s a reason for this. I haven’t cleaned out the water butts for well over a year and there’s some sediment at the bottom of the tanks. Added to that, the tap has broken and so it needs to be replaced and for once I actually have handy a tap that would do the job

It makes sense therefore to empty the water butts (I have 2×203-litre tanks) while the water is low, putting the rest of the water into some clean containers, and then giving the tanks a good scrub and clean out and then replacing the tap, before the weather breaks (which is supposed to be Friday, so we are told). I can change the puzzolane filter too and also fit a sand filter if I can find someone who has an old pair of tights. I need to reorganise this water system a little.

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Tuesday 19th April 2011 – I’ve been in the garden again this afternoon.

This time though it’s the heavy engineering stuff.

You may remember that between the greenhouse and the mega-cloche was a patch of land covered by a tarpaulin – where I was going to erect the aluminium greenhouse. But following a donation by Simon of the old windows from his workshop, I changed my plans.

I promised the aluminium greenhouse to Liz and Terry and I was planning to build a balloon-framed structure that I could fit the windows into.

digging base for greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnyway, to cut a long story short, this afternoon I cleaned up all of the rubbish that had accumulated there, removed the bits of aluminium greenhouse, rolled up the tarp and set to digging out a square trench.

With the land sloping downhill quite steeply there, I’ve had to dig out so that the square trench is more-or-less level, and I’m setting a row of breeze blocks into the soil there – the purpose of those being to make some kind of horizontal level and keep the wooden frame of the greenhouse out of the damp soil.

Once I’ve finished the breeze blocks I can make a start on building the framework for the greenhouse. The back wall will be covered in the cheap tongue and grooving that is on sale at Brico Depot – I’ve tons of that. The roof will be plastic corrugated sheeting like the verandah, although I’ll invent a system of roof openings to allow the air to circulate, and I’ll build a door for the uphill side. Everything else will be Simon’s windows.

This morning though Liz and I were in the recording studio at Radio Tartasse doing our programmes for the month of May. And Henri, the old guy who helps out there, had a chat with me about the Tacot – the old narrow-gauge railway that used to run from the lime kilns at Marcillat to the steelworks at Commentry. He showed me on the map the traces of the old line, and said that next month he would bring me all of the paperwork that he has on it, including a book on the subject.

Won’t that be exciting?

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Thursday 31st March 2011 – I’m making loads of progress …

in the garden right now. Today the first task was to tidy the greenhouse seeing as I can’t even get in there, let alone find anything. A load of plastic pots and yogurt container thingies went into the bin – and that’s another thing – I now have 4 bins. One for plastics, one for metal, one for glass and one for rubbish (the paper of course is used as fire-lighters). That was something else that I did too.

And so with a tidy greenhouse I made myself some potting soil – 4 parts garden soil, 3 parts sand, 2 parts LIDL compost and one part wood ash. And when it was all mixed I planted some seed in pots – 2 types of tomato, aubergine, peppers. cucumber and leeks. I colour-code my pots as you know and I’m lucky in that my soya desserts come in so many varieties with different shapes and colours of pots. I keep the same plants together in the same colour pots.

“But isn’t drainage a problem with plastic yoghurt-type pots?” I hear you ask.
The answer is “not at all” because if you put 10 or so together one inside another and then heat up a baked potato skewer until it’s quite hot, it will go through the bottoms of 10 pots three or four times with ease 

And so now I have my March seeds sown, this afternoon I tackled a few more raised beds. I’ve cleaned a few more out and there’s only 3.5 to go. Mind you, there’s not much hurry for those just now.

Tomorrow evening I’m going back to Brussels to rescue the Minerva and bring it back. And when I return I’ll be making a start on building the new greenhouse and the garden shed. High time I organised that as well.

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Monday 29th November 2010 – I’VE BEEN GARDENING THIS AFTERNOON

With the weather having warmed up today, I’ve covered over the beds of spuds and carrots with some of the black plastic sheeting that I used to cover them just after I dug the beds out. This will hopefully trap the “heat” (after all, 6 degrees is “heat” after what we have been having just now and help them to thaw out, as well as protecting them from the frost until I can get to dig them up.

I also wanted to put my herb beds under cover too so firstly I grubbed out everything in the mega-cloche  and then moved the strawberry plants from the smaller cloche and planted them into the mega-cloche.

6 plants went into that cloche last spring, and 21 came out. I was impressed with that. They should do well in the mega-cloche and I might even have a decent crop this coming year.

The smaller cloche wasn’t big enough to take all of the herb beds so I had to tidy up the greenhouse and put the other herb bed in there. All of the stuff that didn’t grow was consigned to the new compost heap and now for once there is plenty of room in it.

But the plastic covering of the greenhouse has decayed and so I need to turn my attention to building the new greenhouse out of the windows that Simon gave me. Last year I made a space to put that, and the space where the plastic greenhouse is, I’ll build a garden shed there.

I’ve also given the inside of the back of Caliburn a bit of a clean-out too, and then I spent a pleasant hour or so crushing tin cans – I had a load of them lying around and so I’ve flattened some of them ready to take to the recycling. Plenty more to go, too, and I’ll spend some more time on that.

But this evening the temperature has plunged dramatically. When I went downstairs it was -3.3 and there was a really heavy frost. Seems like the temperature is in freefall tonight and we could well be on our way to the coldest night of the winter. And winter hasn’t started yet – it’s still November around here.

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Friday 27th August 2010 – It’s been an exciting day today.

This afternoon I had a good wander around the vegetable plot checking up on things as it’s been a while since I’ve had a really good look, what with one thing and another.

cucumber cloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceOne of the things that I did was to check in the smaller cloche where I have the strawberries and the one surviving cucumber plant. That has just been growing and growing with plenty of flowers but nothing much else, however today I noticed for the first time that the cucumbers are set.

There’s just three of them at the moment, still quite tiny but it’s nice to see some kind of progress in there. If the way that the courgettes have burst into life is anything to go by, within a week they should be monsters.

After that I went and checked on the tomatoes in the mega-cloche. They are just growing and growing with tons of flowers and fruit and so I took an executive decision and topped them all. No point in growing stuff that is never going to ripen and letting perish the fruit that is already there. Topping them will hopefully concentrate all of the energy into the fruit and they may even ripen.

gherkin plant greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceThere’s a stray tomato plant in the greenhouse so I went to check on that. And fighting my way in past the gherkin plants I noticed that they are finally starting to do stuff.

And that’s about time too. Thousands of flowers and not the least sign of a fruit, and all of a sudden a few of those have burst into life.

Now what do you do with a gherkin? If I could get malt vinegar over here I might be tempted to pickle them but I can’t so I’ll have to think of something else. All  suggestions are welcome

I followed that up by pulling the veg for tea. I had a veggie-burger lined up and so I pulled up some carrots and spuds, and picked some beans, spinach, sage and rosemary. Add a garlic clove and an onion to that lot and it really was a nice tea. Quite enjoyable. And I sowed the last of my parsnip seeds in where I’d removed the carrots. I’ve no idea what they might do but they won’t do anything in the packet.

The rest of the afternoon I’ve been sawing wood. I need to move the wood to erect the dividing wall in the lean-to where the composting toilet is. I keep on moving this wood around and nothing ever happens to it so I’ve decided to remove it by cutting up for burning, no matter how long it takes (and it will take a while). Winter’s not far away, you know.

This morning though I spent until midday working on my website. It’s almost up-to-date – I reckon another week will see the monthly pages done up to August 2010, and about time too. Nevertheless I was interrupted by a buzzing coming from across the yard – the water boiler that Smon gave me sprung into action at about 10:00. The weather today was terrible (it’s still pouring down now) and there wasn’t enough current to really fire it up, but it ran for a total of 3.5 hours. And more of this anon.

Once I’d knocked off computing at midday I went with Caliburn round to Lieneke’s and tidied up there. It seems that Terry and Simon have finished.

sankey trailer caliburn hardstanding tractor les guis virlet puy de dome franceI rescued the breeze blocks, the sand and cement, a huge pile of buckets my tarpaulin and ladder and a host of other stuff, heaved it all into the Sankey trailer and brought it round here.

I reversed it down the lane (hard to think that 20 years ago I did that for a living) and parked it next to Terry’s tractor where it can live for a while.

And it’s amazing how much room there is on there. I still reckon that the money I spent on having that done was money well spent. There’s room for another couple of cars on there I reckon if I tidy up a little bit better.

But the exciting bits involved the water heating.

Of course the day that I get everything ready for blast-off is the day when the weather turns miserable. The immersion heater in the house ran for a grand total of two minutes. But it was trying its best to fire up as the charge in the batteries bounced along the critical voltage. It was quite a windy day so I reckon that if there had been a wind turbine on the roof it would have worked a treat. I’m going to have to sort out this wind turbine.

As for the water boiler, even though the solar energy levels were pretty miserable it fired up in early morning once the batteries in the barn were fully-charged and ran for a total of about 3.5 hours. And the water, all 2.5 litres of it, was boiling away merrily to itself. So much so that with it being POETS Day ….
“POETS Day?” … ed
“Yes, that’s right. P155 Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday!”
… today I had a lovely hot wash and shave out of that boiler at 17:30 when I knocked off. And had it been less windy, I would have gone for the hybrid shower – the solar water (that struggled to reach 30°C) diluted by the 2.5 litres out of the boiler. Now THAT would have warmed it up.

I topped up the water with cold water once I’d emptied it, and it carried on warming itself for a short while until the sun went down and the solar charge stopped. And when I went to do the washing up after tea at 22:00 it was not very far short of being hot enough to do the washing up. A couple of minutes on the gas ring sorted that out.

All in all, I reckon that this is major progress and I’m really pleased with all of this. This place is slowly starting to take shape one way or another. I just want a nice sunny day now so that I can see what the immersion heater will do. But with all this rain that’s going on right now that isn’t going to be for a while.

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Saturday 31st July 2010 – Tomorrow the world!

tryffid squash plant greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceI can’t get into the greenhouse for the moment because this monster is in the way. It’s supposed to be a squash plant and it does indeed look as if it’s quite a squash in the greenhouse.

That’s especially the case seeing as yonder tryffid is being backed up by another one of its ilk as well as a rogue tomato seed that fell onto the floor and is now likewise threatening to take over the world. It’s quite impressive in there.

tomato plants mega cloche puy de dome franceI actually have piles of tomatoes ripening in the mega-cloche, as well as peppers and chili but these are the plants that I bought at the St Gervais d’Auvergne plant fair. The ones I planted aren’t doing much. The brassica are doing well but the one surviving pea plant has turned brown and died.

Elsewhere in the garden the beans are going berserk (especially those I planted the other day), the spuds have gone wild and the carrots are doing the biz. The onions are now swelling at long last and the garlic is dying off so that will be ready to lift in early course.

Today is Saturday and just for a change there was a brocante at St Priest les Champs. It’s not natural to have a brocante on a Saturday – it’s like your body clock is all wrong when you have other things to do. But not to worry – it’s Pionsat’s brocante tomorrow. I’m still looking for a milk churn, and Liz saw one at St Priest today and rang me up to tell me about it. I went round there chaud-pied, as they say around here to have a look but it was only 15 litres and that isn’t big enough.

I’m also after a car CD player so I can build a unit to play all of my CDs around the house, and that’s not as easy as it sounds either.

Nothing of any use at Carrefour or at Lidl so it’s been a bit of a non-day today. But they were selling tubs of sorbet at LIDL for €0.89 and they looked ever so enticing and after all it has been quite a while since I had an ice-cream …..

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Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

home grown lettuce radish les guis virlet puy de dome franceLunch today consisted of the usual salad butty only today it featured home-grown lettuce and home-grown radish as well as all of the other ingredients.

I’ve been using home-grown garlic and home-grown herbs for a while but today was the first time that I had pulled something important out of my new vegetable patches for food purposes. I’m well-impressed by how well they seem to have grown and while the taste at the moment is a little insipid it will improve over time.

In fact the lettuce would have definitely done with another fortnight in the ground but things are getting rather tight in the lettuce bed and it needs some thinning out, so pulling up a usable lettuce to eat was probably as good a way as any of making a space for everything else.

But in the greenhouse the tomato plants that have been dormant for ages have now started to go berserk. Rather too late now to expect anything profitable but never mind. It also seems like there might be some pepper plants coming up now that I have bought some, and another pea plant is now emerging from underneath the soil. That makes a grand total of two.

mini digger les guis virlet puy de dome franceI went round and had another look at the digger today. This is what it looks like, in case you have forgotten, and it’s huge!

I bet it made short work of the rubbish.

I’m eager to see it back in action shovelling the stones into place but there seems to be some kind of difficulty about that and I don’t understand why.

I have to have the stones delivered by a lorry as I need over 30 tonnes of the stuff and 15 trips with the Sankey down to the quarry at Montaigut is a little too much. I have the number of someone with a tipper but they can’t give me a precise date for coming to deliver the stuff. And I need to know a precise date as I need to have the digger driver here to shovel the stuff and spread it out.

I can’t believe that it’s so complicated. Arranging a one-hour spec for a lorry to deliver two loads of stones seems the simplest thing in the world to me. But at least it gave me time to pull up all of the roots and brambles and thistles that were lying around in the way. And I also met the farmer who has taken over the field next door from the late Farmer Parrett. We had a nice friendly chat too.

In other news, the Zionists intercepted this aid convoy and stopped it delivering the supplies to the Palestinians by the simple expedient of murdering the aid workers. It’s high time someone put a stop to this behaviour and if the west is refusing to intervene then you can’t blame Hamas and the rest of the Arab world for having a go.

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Friday 28th May 2010 – It further occurs to me …

greenhouse plants les guis virlet puy de dome france… that you haven’t seen inside the greenhouse at all so far this year and so that was worthy of a photo.

It’s a cheap greenhouse from LIDL that I bought last year and it came complete with detachable staging. €49.99 if I remember correctly and that was a good purchase as well.

Most of the seeds have been planted in soya dessert containers. I learnt that from last year and the year before that – planting in seed trays just swamped me out all at once and having 24 lettuce all ready at the same time with none following on was bad news. Doing things like this – a few at a time – ensure a decent succession of crop.

You’ll notice plastic spoons and plastic knives in the pots. I write in pencil on them the name of whatever is in the pot so I don’t forget. Real plastic tags are quite expensive whereas plastic spoons and knives cost me 50 cents for 20 at the local cheapo shop.

plants outside for hardening off megacloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn fact this isn’t everything – not by any means. It’s pretty crowded in the greenhouse as you can see and so a pile of stuff has been moved into the new mega-cloche where they can be hardened off ready for planting.

Some stuff, such as the borlotti beans (they are the only ones that have taken) and some more sprouts were even further-advanced than that and so they have already been planted in the appropriate raised bed.

I can see that I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with all of this succession planting. And I’m having to start weeding too. That’s a novelty, isn’t it?

Once I’d done the garden I did some more work in the bedroom and then at 18:00 I nipped into St Eloy les Mines for some shopping seeing as I’m out tomorrow at a chantier communal at Jean and Elizabeth’s. I met Julie and Rob in LIDL which was a surprise as normally I meet them at Brico Depot.

And I still didn’t get to the two new shops either. They both close at 18:30 and I had the privilege of having a door shut in my face on two occasions.

At the chantiers we have to bring along some food to share and so I cooked a huge aubergine and kidney bean chili, some of which I had for tea and the rest I’ll take tomorrow.

But it’ll upset the locals – it’s …errr… rather spicy.

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Friday 14th May 2010 – Tomorrow, if I remember,

salvaged hardwood windows les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ll post a photo of a whole pile of wooden windows. They are about 6 feet tall and about 18 inches wide – something like that, and there’s probably a dozen of them. They were in Simon’s house when he bought them and he ripped them out for double glazing and asked if anyone would like to take them away.

As you know, in my drive for self-sufficiency I’m growing my own food (assuming that this perishing weather relents and we have some decent late-spring weather) and a greenhouse is an essential. I have the cheap little LIDL plastic one and someone gave me a complete aluminium greenhouse but minus all the glass. However a big pile of wooden windows fitted into a frame like an American balloon house (and how I built my verandah) and stood on breeze blocks and that’s an admirable greenhouse, especially as I can make it to measure.

And see – I did remember the photo!

My day of rest following yesterday’s exertions was broken in the afternoon as Terry decided to try his hand at driving his van. We went round to the Lady from Luxembourg who is looking for a handyman and I introduced them to each other. She was impressed with the size of Terry’s equipment and has signed him on, which is good news for Terry. He’s registered himself with the French authorities as a handyman and so now he needs some clients.

Once that was out of the way we went to Mazan to see Simon. He’s looking for a digger to dig the hole for his septic tank and I know a man (Bernard, the President of the Pionsat football club) who just happens to have one. Simon was out though, but his windows were in and he did say that I could have them, and there were two of us with Terry’s big van (which was empty). And so the rest is history.

Shopping at St Eloy les Mines was boring – there was nothing of note – and that was my day today.

Tomorrow the removal has been put back until 10:00. It seems that I’m not the only one who doesn’t recognise the existence of 09:00 on a weekend morning.

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Monday 10th May 2010 – I was working this afternoon …

space blanket insulation counter battens bedroom wall les guis virlet puy de dome france… in the bedroom. I’ve put the first layer of battens on the left-hand wall, added another strip of insulation (the last I have as it happens so I need to buy some more) and put all of the counter-battens on the back wall.

Tomorrow I’ll be putting some on the side wall and then starting to put the polystyrene insulation on top.

You’re probably thinking that it’s due to the weather that I was working inside, but ohhhh no. It’s true that when I first woke up it was raining heavily but by the time I had woken up definitively there was a beautiful blue sky and for much of the day it stayed like that.

This morning after working on the computer I planted out the first sprout plants, put the beetroot out to harden off and did some more sowing. I also noticed that the cauliflower are now starting to show themselves. And with the damp conditions in the greenhouse for the last few days followed by the heat today I’m hoping that a few more might take off.

After lunch it was working in the bedroom. I might have to go back to Brussels in a couple of months or so and I’ll be bringing a pile of domestic stuff back with me. I’ve nowhere to keep it as yet so getting the bedroom ready might come in handy so that I can use it as a storage space for now.

This evening we had just a couple of little showers and a thunderstorm as a weather front moved across from the East. But I hope this weather keeps up for a while – we need it.

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Tuesday 13th April 2010 – Just for a change …

… I woke up early this morning. So after breakfast I came back up here and carried on with my website updating for a couple of hours until it was work time.

gardening raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce I had done a couple of hours of that it was downstairs and working on this extra bed again. It’s finished now thank heavens for it wasn’t half a backbreaking task. I reckon I uprooted 12 trees and pulled up about a mile of root segments.

I also pulled up a load of exciting bits and pieces of which the most interesting was part of the brake mechanism for a racing bicycle. I wonder what that was doing there

And while I was at it I started to locate amongst all of the undergrowth the original fruit trees that I planted in 1999. So far, one apple tree and one pear tree and they are both budding.

The new bed will be about 3mx1m and just the job for sowing a load of spuds for this year. The earlies are not far off being ready and they will churn up this new bed quite nicely. But germination of seeds  in the greehouse is soooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooow. Not very much has germinated so I reckon I need to sow another load.

And you know how they say that if something is too good to be true then it usually is? Well I have something simmering away on the back boiler that sounds a bit like that and I am waiting to see what the catch is.

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Thursday 25th March 2010 – God it was hard this morning …

… but that’s enough about Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as much as she ought to.

It was agony in bed last night with the muscles in my legs tightening up continually. It kept me awake for much of the night, as did the French Air Force, who decided on carrying out night-time manoeuvres … “personoeuvres please” – ed … until gone 02:30. Getting up for a gipsy’s at 06:00 was probably the most painful thing I have ever tried.

Going downstairs for breakfast was interesting too, and I was clearly in no fit state to go out working so I came back up here and did a load of outstanding work on the computer – much of which was the preparation for our radio broadcast next week. I managed a fair bit too – but that’s enough about … “you’ve already done that” – ed … and that’s got me thinking.

When I was in Brussels I used to do my computer work from 11:00 until 14:00 and then work on the apartment in the afternoon and evening. Pretty soon the clocks will go forward and we will have more daytime daylight  so bearing this in mind I could easily work from 10:00 until 12:00 up here on the computer and then work until maybe 19:00 or 19:30 outside. That would be much more useful.

By about 12:00 I felt a little better so I went outside and did another raised bed. That’s 5 in position. But the weather has changed. It was blowing a gale when I went outside, so much so that it’s lifted the cucumber and tomato seeds off the shelf in the greenhouse and spilled them all over the floor so I needed to replant them which was a pain.

Now the weather has really turned and it’s pouring with rain outside. I have mixed feelings about that. I love the hot weather but I’m getting low on water and also the plants that I have sown need the water. This is the sign if a true rural peasant, definitely a distinction from the vacancier.

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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 – If you look in this photo …

raised bed garden greenhouse water butt les guis virlet puy de dome france… you’ll notice a few changes. From right to left we have the outline of the greenhouse. It’s far from being erected as I said previously as I don;t have the bolts for it and there’s no glass. But at least it’s in position.

Next to it is a water butt. It’s one that has been hanging around here for quite a while so I reckoned that I would put it to use. There are loads of receptacles full of old rainwater so I filled it with that. Bucket by bucket as there is no way of connecting it to my water system. Not yet anyway, but I have a cunning plan.

Thirdly you will notice a third raised bed. I installed that this afternoon too. I need to get a move on with these as I noticed to my astonishment that the radishes seem to have germinated (since Thursday!) – there’s definitely signs of movement in that seed tray.

So that was this afternoon’s work. What about this morning? Well there wasn’t all that much of that. I had to get up in the middle of the night to go for a gipsy’s but the next thing I remember was that it was 09:54. A leisurely breakfast on the terrace was followed by the realisation that –

  1. it was a gorgeous bright sunny day
  2. all of the batteries were fully charged (and it was only just 10:30)
  3. there was a decent wind blowing

That can only mean one thing – WASHING! So I scouted around and found a machine-load of stuff

While the washing was a-doing I did a bit of housekeeping and general arranging so as to keep on top of what there is to do around here.

And did you all hear us on the radio this evening? Yes, Liz and I were on the air!

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