Tag Archives: raised beds

Thursday 18th March 2010 – My progress knows no bounds

2 raised beds old ford cortina mercedes 240d w123 greehouse cloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceWe now have, from right to left, a greenhouse, a cloche with 5 strawberry plants, a home-made bird scarer, a raised bed with garlic and onions, and a raised bed that is empty but covered with a sheet of black plastic.

First thing though was to scrape up all of the wood ash from the big fire. That’s my source of potash and it’s threatening rain – I don’t want to lose that. And I noticed something curious, namely that I’d set the fire over some tree stumps in the hope that I could burn them out but despite the raging fire all day Monday they are but scorched and it took me ages to pull them up today.

When I finished the raised bed I started on the organising of the seeds and I’ve now sown in seed trays some lettuce, peppers, aubergines, chili peppers and turnips. There’s loads more stuff to do. And I’m down on seeds too – there’s about 6 missing so I’ll be doing a megashop on Saturday.

I had a surprise visitor this morning – Liz came round with some of this compressed hardwood that a friend of hers sells. I invited her onto my terrace and we had coffee. It’s getting mighty civilised here these days – not like me at all. But it’s a major sign of progress all the same.

But there’s a couple of things that aren’t quite right. This compost bin is …errr … not much good and when I heaved a load of stuff into it, it all came apart. I had to empty it so that I could reassemble it and now it’s held together with a load strap. I dunno how long it will last – not very, I suspect.

The second thing is not quite so good. It concerns the composting toilet and a manure-water distiller that I’ve invented. This isn’t the place to discuss it – you’re probably eating your tea right now – but basically I wish I had put it somewhere else as it’s in the wrong place and it’s now too heavy to lift. The hot weather we have had is accelerating the distillation process and it’s making its mark on my close environment.

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Wedesday 17th March 2010 – I now have a little terrace …

terrace outside table chairs les guis virlet puy de dome france… as you can see – and it’s less than 60 cms high too.But it’s amazing the things that you can do with old pallets and continually give them new leases of life. These were formerly part of the attic floor and before that they carried loads of paper into the European Commission.

And it was nice to have a terrace to sit out on to have my breakfast – at 09:30 it was already 17 degrees outside. And today has been the warmest day since October sometime – a max of 22.6 degrees outside and another 270 amp-hours (over 3KwH) of solar energy.

If you look carefully you’ll see that the cloche has gone. That’s now taken up residence in front of the greenhouse. And furthermore when moving the cloche I uncovered 2 strawberry plants from last year. So a ferret around where the outdoor strawberry plants were last year salvaged another 3 so I now have a cloche with strawberry plants in it.

cloche raised bed onions garlic les guis virlet puy de dome franceI pulled up a raised bed from out here too and moved that down to the area in front of the cloche. I gave that a thorough digging and that’s in place, with onions and some left-over garlic from last year. I haven’t half been busy!

Tomorrow I’ll be digging some more and moving another raised bed. This will be for the spuds at the end of the month. When that’s done I’llbe taking an inventory of the seeds that I have, finding out which ones I need (to be bought on Saturday) and then starting to sow them in trays. The garden needs to get under way.

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Tuesday 16th March 2010 – Well, I moved the greenhouse!

old frod cortina greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is where it will be staying for the foreseeable future, gale-force winds permitting.

I had to dig out six tree stumps and that tookabsolutely ages. I broke the handle on my pickaxe but luckily Claude (Laurence’s father that is) many years ago gave me a kind of digging axe and I put a shaft into it, and that came in really handy. There was a whole warren of tree roots under there and they took some moving.

This afternoon I had to dig over the patch a few times ( and that wore me out) and then dig out the greenhouse from where it used to be, in front of the verandah. In fact the empty space there makes a nice place to put my outdoor table and chairs. I rounded off the day by chopping wood but I really didn’t need it as it was an absolutely beautiful day today. The  warmest so far this year an I had 270amp-hours (over 3KwH) of electricity – enough to run the electric heater in here for 5 hours and the temperature up here reached 18.6 degrees.

Tomorrow if the weather keeps on going I’ll be moving the cloche and making the first of the raised beds – you can see one of the shuttering planks leaning up against the Cortina.

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Saturday 13th March 2010 – What a night!

If you remember about a year ago I had a series of nights where I had some really bad attacks of cramp in bed. Last night I had another. I can’t think of anything more painful than that and in stretching my legs out to ease the pain I pulled mycalf muscles -both of them! It took ages for the pain to subside and another age for me to go back to sleep. No wonder I didn’t wake up until after 10:00.

I hope that this isn’t a portent for another series of attacks like last year.

I finally made it off to St Eloy for the shopping and spent quite a few bob there today. LIDL’s gardening sale was ongoing and I bought a 1.5×10-metre roll of black plastic mulching. My new raised beds are to be 1.5×1.5metres so I’ll cut this roll to size, make up a handy framework and use it in winter to keep out the weeds. Carrefour also had a gardening sale so I bought some seeds and a new lopper – €12.99 which is three times the price at LIDL but I hope it lasts 3 times longer. The LIDL ones have a weak spot, the aluminium jaw plate, but these don’t have that – just a simple scissor mechanism.

I popped round to see the European Cardboard Box Mountain that is Claude and Francoise’s apartment to see how they were all doing there, and then the final visit was to the new tyre place. They were advertising Caliburn-sized tyres for €70 each which isn’t too bad a price but by the time they had added on the valves, the balancing, the fitting and the VAT it came to almost €200 for a pair. I’m thinking that I may as well get the Goodyear tyres that were the original fitting seeing as they are only €50 extra for a pair all-in. One thing is certain – I’m not going to waste my snow tyres by running them through the summer. They’ve been invaluable in this weather.

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Saturday 23rd January 2010 – I didn’t sleep through the alarm this morning.

I had all three going off in close proximity and that’s enough to awaken the dead – such as the OUSA Executive Committee. It’s well-known that they spend most of their meetings sitting round a table holding hands and trying to contact the living. So much so in fact that Caligula and her horse’s predecessor was once heard to say
“Is there anybody there? Knock once for yes – and twice for no“

So after I heaved myself from my stinking pit I made a coffee and went chaud-pied round to the Intermarche to find out why they hadn’t rung me (or Liz, for that matter) about this famous flight in a chopper.
“We didn’t have time to ring everybody” the manager wailed. And me, having amongst my many and varied talents the ability to read upside-down, noticed that in general all of the people with a French name had been contacted, and none of the people with a foreign name had been contacted.

So we just turn up a l’improviste tomorrow. well, we’ll see.

Then it was off to Montlucon and shopping. Apart from the usual items I bought a pile of plasterboard, a load of wood and some more insulation. I’ll be starting on the cupboard on the first floor next week if it’s too bad to work outside. And learning from the work in the attic, I won’t be wallpapering it. In one of the cheap shops (the VIMA) they were selling indoor crepi (that’s the cement-based paint for brick and stone walls and looks a bit like fine pebble-dash) for €9:00 for 15 litres so I’ll be covering the plasterboard in that.

I also bought 12 x 3-metre lengths of shuttering for concrete. That’s 175mm by 25mm rough-cut and cheap. I’ll be making my raised beds for the new vegetable plots with that. The current raised beds are 1.33 square – these will be 1.50 square and I have enought wood to make 6 of them. I can salvage the others in due course. I like raised-bed gardening.

In the other cheap shop (the NOZ) they were having a DVD clearout with titles as low as €0.78. I spend €20 in there on seven or eight DVDs, including a copy of “the Definitive Barclay James Harvest”.

Now see if you can guess what the first track of this DVD is? Yes, you’re right. It’s “Mockingbird”. Barclay James Harvest is another one of these 1970s groups that lost its way after the first 4 or 5 albums and the early stuff is incredibly good. But no matter how good the group might be, it will always be remembered for “Mockingbird” and that’s one of these tracks a bit like “Hotel California”, “Freebird” , “Stairway to Heaven” and a couple of others. A reasonable example of a group’s output but by no means the best, and totally ruined and spoiled by being played and played and played to death.

BJH has done much better stuff that “Mockingbird” and thankfully “Medicine Man” is on the album. But where is “Galadriel” ? And where is “For No-one”? And about half a dozen others that I can think of? This is going to be some “definitive Barclay James Harvest” but at least it only cost me €1:99.

On the way back I noticed that is was 17:00 just as I was passing through Neris-les-Bains. So I went for an hour in the swimming baths. Twice in 8 days! I’ll wash myself away at this rate.

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