Tag Archives: compost

Monday 4th May 2020 – NAUGHTY ME!

Yes, i’ve been out of the apartment twice today!

But then again, anyone who has spent any length of time with me will know that taking to the communal waste disposal area here the kind of rubbish that I produce is a matter of extreme urgency, although many others will argue just as strongly that I ought to wait another day and let the rubbish walk there on its own.

As I mentioned yesterday, today was the day when I was going to do some tidying up. And while it was not as thorough as I might have liked, the kitchen worktop is empty and clean, the floor in the kitchen and dining area has been vacuumed and the floor has been washed.

That’s progress of a sort, I suppose.

But going back to the question of the rubbish, it’s quite true that since I came back from the High Arctic in October full of new resolutions, the amount of plastic waste here has fallen dramatically.

On the other hand, the amount of compostable waste that I’m creating with all of this cooking and freezing of vegetables that I’m doing is astonishing. I hope that what goes into the compostable bin really is composted by the local authority.

What else might be considered progress was that I struggled to my feet with just seconds to spare before the alarm went off. A close call, but then a miss is as good as a mile.

Nothing on the dictaphone either – I had a quiet night by the looks of things – and with no music to digitalise until my new hi-fi arrives (whenever that might be), I cracked on with the next radio project.

By the time I knocked off too, at 18:00, I’d chosen all of the music, combined the tracks in pairs, found a speech for my guest, written the text, recorded it and edited half of it.

Had I put my mind to it, I might even have finished it. But there was

breakfast
lunch
an hour or two off for a little personal distraction
the tidying up in the kitchen and dining area
a little … errr … relax

As for the lunch, my home-made bread was a great improvement on the previous loaf, although I have a lot to learn before it’s as good as I might like. But if I don’t keep trying, I won’t improve.

And for the relax, it wasn’t actually a sleep – I managed to fight it off, but not to the extent of being able to do anything for 15 minutes. As the Duke of Wellington once said about another occasion, it was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

The good news is that the memory sticks that I ordered (from China!) that have been in quarantine in a plastic bag on my windowsill can come out on Wednesday. No opportunity for social distancing though – they are all in it together.

And when they are out, I can move a pile of digitalised music out of the holding directory and merge it into the mainstream.

But I’ve been thinking (and isn’t that dangerous?) that with splitting up the music as I have done into random directories to rotate them through the radio programmes without playing the same artist in adjacent or near-adjacent radio shows, there’s a lot of stuff that is in these directories that will never be played on my programmes.

What I’m going to do therefore is to start another directory off with “miscellaneous” albums and so on, perhaps record it on a different memory stick and keep it in Caliburn to listen to while I’m driving.

There was a thoroughly enjoyable hour on the guitars this evening too and then I went to attack tea.

Having moved the oven rack up a notch for the bread, unfortunately the base of the pie wasn’t cooked as well as I was hoping. So my slice of pie (I cut it into 8) went into the oven to warm up upside-down, along with a couple of small potatoes and the apple turnover.

While it was cooking I tried to fit the rest of the pie into the freezer but I only managed to fit half of it in. The freezer is now jam-packed full.

The other half is in the fridge until tomorrow. If I have a curry out of the freezer tomorrow with a pile of veg, there might just be enough room to fit it in then. The only reason that I managed to fit some of the pie in today was that I had some veg out of there to go with my potatoes and pie.

How I’m bitterly regretting not having bought a bigger freezer but then I suppose that I would have filled it with other stuff and I would have just the same problem, only on a different scale.

There was only me out there tonight on my run. I’ve no idea where everyone else was.

There was quite a strong wind again, but this time it was behind me when I set off so running up the hill to the top of the hedge wasn’t quite as strenuous as it might have been, although it’s still finishing me off.

There was nothing doing out in the English Channel tonight but there was a fishing boat with its lights on, presumably because it was working, out in the Baie de Mont Saint Michel over on the Brittany side. They are giving that side of the bay a good going-over right now.

It was quite pleasant to stand there and watch it, but I didn’t stay out there for long because of the wind.

My run along the top of the cliffs on the other side of the headland was a struggle with the wind but I kept on going.

But something caught my eye down in the chantier navale and I didn’t know what it was. It looked different in there tonight and I’ve no idea why. I took a photo of it to compare it with a photo from a week ago, and there was no significant difference.

But it was weird, whatever it was

My run all the way down the Boulevard Vaufleury and round the corner was quite a struggle. It’s the longest of the runs that I do and this evening it was into a headwind as well and that took the wind out of my ails.

The last hundred or so metres were agony.

Once I’d stopped for a breather, I walked back down to the viewpoint overlooking the port to see what was happening.

Nothing of any excitement going on down there, although I don’t recall seeing Chausiais moored up over there for a day or two, so I didn’t hang around.

At the viewpoint at the Rue du Nord there was nothing happening at all so I ran on back home.

As I was going in through the door, one of my neighbours was going out so we had a chat for a while then I came up here.

Now that I’ve finished my notes, I’m off to bed. It’s earlier than some times just recently but I need it. Tomorrow I’ll finish off the radio project and maybe restart the website updating that I was doing before I went on my transatlantic sail at the end of June last year, not to mention the photo updating from that four-month trip.

So I need my beauty sleep. All that I can get.

And before I forget, I hope that you all had a good Star Wars Day today. May the Fourth be with you.

Friday 30th October 2015 – ALL GOOD THINGS …

… come to an end. And today, the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump-load for the excess solar energy finally ground to a halt.

Mind you, I’m not surprised. What has surprised me is that it lasted as long as it has – about 4 years if I remember correctly. It’s a 500-watt industrial 12-volt water heater element that I can pick up by the dozen in the USA, fitted into the side of a 25-litre plastic storage box and sealed in with rubber gaskets, and a simple tap. The whole lot is stood on a thick sheet of polystyrene insulation, with some of this thick space-blanket insulation wrapped around it, and a plastic lid covered with an off-cut of a sheet of polystyrene-backed plaster-board. Down on the inside of the space-blanket insulation up against the plastic side is the sensor of a maximum-minimum thermometer.

It’s wired in (with a 70-amp fuse) to a 60-amp Solar charge controller that I have reverse-wired so that instead of being “on” and switching off when the batteries are fully-charged, it’s “off” and switches on when the batteries are fully charged – and so when the batteries are fully charged and the charge controllers on the batteries switch off, the current that would otherwise be lost is diverted down into the water heater element and so heats up the water in the immersion heater for washing up, washing, and all that kind of thing.

And so why did it all go wrong?

The answer is that it hasn’t really gone wrong. A year or so ago I noticed that the positive wire to the immersion heater was heating up dramatically, and so I rewired it. But the thread stripped in the connection on the element so I had to find a small nut and bolt. But I couldn’t really fit a spanner into it so that it wasn’t particularly tight.

Today, I went downstairs to the fridge to fetch something to drink, and I could smell the burning plastic. There was something or a record of 37 amps going down the cables and this was simply too much for the bad joint and the wire was so hot that it was melting the insulation.

I hadn’t designed it particularly well – I can do much better than this, and in any case I don’t have any rubber joints for the element which I’ll need to take out and remake the joint, and so that’s a task for next week if I remember to buy the things that I need tomorrow at the shops. However, I have plugged the fridge back in so that something is being done about the excess current.

And so what else have I done today?

Apart from work on the laptop, which you can take as read, I’ve been tracking down some wood. I went to rescue the wooden box that I used to use to keep my fruit and vegetables in, but I pinched it last year to store my potatoes. But that didn’t work as the potatoes all went off and the wooden box is ruined (but I did in passing cast an eye on last year’s compost and it’s brewing beautifully!) and so I need to make another one.

I found a 50cm pine plank and some 40mm aluminium angle and I’ll be using that on Monday to make my new fruit and veg box.

As well as that, I went to check over the Kubota mini-digger. The reason for that is that the battery in the Kubota tractor is finished and I need a new one, so if I’m ordering one it makes sense to order a second for the digger – after all, that hasn’t run since the end of November last year.

But much to my astonishment, the mini-digger fired up straight away with no difficulty. And so I checked it over and left it running for a good hour or so to warm everything up and top up the battery.

I spent some time downstairs tidying up the ground floor too. It’s now looking as if you might be able to see the floor if I keep up like this. But I need to make a great deal of room as pretty soon I’ll be starting work down there and I’ll need the space.

Last but not least, I had a shower. 33°C in the verandah and 59°C in the 12-volt immersion heater, and so I cleared a corner of the verandah, fetched a bucket of hot water with some cold mixed in, found the pouring jug, and hey presto! Now I smell like coconut. I finished it off with a shave too, so now I’m all ready for the weekend.

But I could have done with a shave and a shower last night, as I was on my travels again. It was Marianne who had the pleasure of my company, going to the airport for a flight to Portugal. At the last minute she asked why I didn’t come with her, so with three hours to go before take-off I nipped off to my apartment for some clothes and the like, and to run one or two errands.

Once I’d done all of that, I had to return to the airport so there I was, driving through North London (flitting in and out of another nocturnal ramble from ages ago) on my way to Brussels Airport. The road was certainly very familiar to me, but I wasn’t convinced that it was the road that I should have been taking. But I arrived at the airport and reached the security gate with just 15 minutes to take-off and I still had a long way to go, not to mention passing through the “security”. And here I was, panicking in case I missed the flight, which was looking more and more likely as time passed by.

Friday 25th April 2014 – NEW TOY!

You may remember the other week that while I was out shopping one Saturday I spent a huge pile of money – more than I’ve ever spent on any previous shopping trip?

Well, here’s the reason why – delivered this afternoon.

It’s a Kubota B1220d mini-tractor, diesel-engined, 4-wheel drive with tri-point lift and power take-off

Anyone who has followed this rubbish for any length of time will have seen me spending three days with a hand-winch moving an old van 20 yards, or seen me shifting a couple of tons of rubble two buckets at a time, or shifting a trailer-load of sand in a wheelbarrow, or dragging logs one by one up from my forest.

Well, the fact is that I’m fed up of doing all of that and I’m not getting any younger. And on my birthday the other week I had a small insurance policy come to maturity.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray!" – ed … when I was in St Eloy the other week, the local DiY place was just taking deliver of four of these for sale with the price slashed something like 40%, as they are old stock and a new model is coming out.

Not only that, the French government’s “cash for clunkers” programme also covers agricultural machinery and if I traded in an old auto-tractive machine, I’d get another €1,000 off. As it happened, I had an old, rusting, rotten auto-tractive field lawnmower that’s done nothing at all since I brought it here in 2002 and never will do either.

And so I thought “what the hell!”

What I need for it now is a flat-plate mower, a tri-point blade, a chain harrow and a small trailer. I already have an electric winch and that’ll do me for now. I can think of loads of other things, but all of that in due course.

So here I am now, totally broke, but ask me if I care. I’m as impressed with this as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin. It means that I won’t get to go on Trixi’s week in Corfu in May, which is a huge disappointment as I was really looking forward to seeing her again, but that can’t be helped.

So after the usual morning’s activities were dealt with, I went outside at midday. With not being sure of what to do, I had a look at the little greenhouse and it now seems that I have a cucumber, piles of lettuce, three leeks, some broccoli, some chives and some basil. It seems that things are very slowly coming to life.

And the … errr … 37mm of rain that we had in 12 hours late yesterday has caused a huge pile of weeds to spring up. I need to look at them.

Where I cleared off the space for the new raised bed the other day, I noticed that I had covered it over with sheets of corrugated iron. That had prevented anything from growing in there, which was the aim, but also loads of stuff had fallen on there over the last three or four years and was well on the way to making a nice compost.

I cleaned all of that off – there was 4 barrow-loads of it – and all of that has gone into the compost bin, which has filled that.

So this afternoon, after playing with the Kubota, I dug over where the raised bed will be and then made the framework. I’ve put some wood-preservative on that to see if that will slow up the decaying process any, and I’ll do a second coat over the weekend. That can then be laid down at the beginning of next week.

That took me up to 19:20.

Yes, I’ve been very busy today but it’s all been productive.

And I’m really pleased that I bit the bullet and bought the Kubota.

-1

Wednesday 26th March 2014 – IT’S AMAZING …

… how much you can accomplish when you have a prompt start and no interruptions (and also, you don’t fall asleep at lunchtime).

This morning though, it was hard to leave my warm and comfortable bed because it was anything but here in my little room. And I had been busy during the night. I’d been up on the Yorkshire Moors watching two Reliant Scilitars (they were really 1970s Jensen Interceptors but never mind) come into this parking area to turn round. One of them had no numberplate and my friend said something along the lines of “just typical – they spend all of their money on buying a fancy car and so have nothing left over to buy the number plates”.

We were then in a garage – a motor trade workshop I mean – and an old friend of mine was running it and he was repairing cars like these Reliants. There had been a problem though and the sliding door to the premises had come of its runners and he, helped by some school friends of mine (whom I’m certain he never met) was trying to fix it. They could fix the bottom runner in its track but every time they lifted it up to fit the top runner in its track, the door fell inwards on top of them all.

But anyway, a couple of hours on the website and then promptly outside. And I worked hard all day today too, and with just the usual lunch break.

Here’s another one of the raised beds completed, with a row of carrots and a row of parsnips. The parsnips are some that I bought in Canada in 2012 and designed, like most Canadian plants, for short growing seasons. They might do well here.

As for the carrots, I had 4 viable varieties, another that expired last year, and a 6th that expired in 2012. But anyway, I mixed a few seeds of each lot in with a handful of moist sand, and sowed them all.

The sand serves three purposes, namely –
1) it gives bulk to the mix of seeds and so makes sowing easier and quicker
2) I can see where I’ve sowed
3) with the soil being clay, there are lots of air pockets and so the seeds are sometimes trapped in them and don’t have enoug water to germinate. The damp sand clings to the seeds and helps them to germinate regardless of the heavy clay soil.

There are also a few radish seeds mixed in with each row. The radish germinate in about 10 days so I can see from their leaves where the rows of seeds are.

But if that wasn’t enough, I cracked straight on and by knocking off time I’d finished a second raised bed. The courgettes will be going in there.

So two raised beds in a day! That’s good news and means that I won’t be disappointed if I take a day off some time.

But I had company today while I was working in the garden. There were two deer in the field down the hill.

It’s *that* time of year again, isn’t it? So I imagine that it was Strawberry Moose that they had come to see, not me.

But they were nice anyway. Much nicer than the usual company.

I’m trying a new tactic this year. With my soil being wet clayey claggy mess, every time I pull up a weed, I pull up half the soil with it. I’m fed up of seeing my soil disappear and so I’ve resurrected a little old water butt that I’ve had for years, bought in the UK.

I’ve put about 20 litres of water in it and I’m throwing the weeds into it. and at the end of the night I bash the weeds around a little with a spade.

The aim is to soak all of the soil off the weeds and when the raised beds need watering, I’ll draw the water off here, which will be nice and wet and muddy, and I’ll pour it onto the bed, which will wet them of course but also add back the soil. And if any of the weeds rot and decay, the wet decayed plant matter will aslo be added back.

Whatever remains of this rotted mixture will end up in the compost.

-4

Friday 12th October 2012 – A RIGHT PICKLE!

I’ve been pickling today, and it looks as if I shall be eating beetroot for the next 100 years, with the amount that Rosemary and I bottled today.

And that tarragon-flavoured white vinegar didn’t half smell nice. By the time that we had added all of the spices to the vinegar and boiled it up, Rosemary’s kitchen smelt like a Babylonian boozer’s bathroom.

Still, it’s all done now.

We also shelled all of the peas and beans and I ended up with two jars of those. A few of them have chitted and so I’m going to try them out as winter plants under one of my patented plastic-bottle cloches. It might be worth a try.

Another thing that we did was to sort out the garlic and onions. I have enough garlic to last me all my life, I reckon, but not as many onions as I wanted.

I’ve no idea what happened to the shallots though – I had plenty of those a few weeks ago but I couldn’t find any the other day.

So first thing in the morning I went off to St Eloy-les-Mines. Firstly, to buy a recharge for the mobile phone, but the Post Office is closed for renovations for a few weeks so that was that.

Secondly I went to the dechetterie to dump all of the rubbish, but they are on winter hours so the blasted place was closed this morning.

After doing the weekly shopping though (seeing as I’m out, I’ll stay out and it’ll save me a trip tomorrow) I nipped off to Rosemary’s for the pickling session.

On the way back this evening, I “picked up a hitcher, a prisoner on the white lines of the freeway” to quote Joni Mitchell.

Only from Menat to St Eloy-les-Mines, but in my youth I spent lots of time hitch-hiking around the UK and France and I was always grateful for the ride, and so it’s nice to repay the debts that I owe.

I made it to the dechetterie and emptied a van-load of rubbish, mostly papers and glass bottles, and enquiries revealed that it is indeed true – if you go to the dechetterie during opening hours but during office hours, you can indeed help yourself to compost, which is freely available

So Saturday I’ll be having a working day – doing the radio programmes. I’m not going out at all, especially as there is not footy anywhere at all around here tomorrow.

-2

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.

-2

Sunday 8th August 2010 – It was Sunday today.

And there was a vintage vehicle exhibition and brocante at St Maurice pres Pionsat as well.

And so I stayed at home.

Mind you it was … errrr …. 11:30 when I woke up and so I’d missed a good deal of the day. And then with working on my web site until 14:00 I missed a good deal more. But I went into Pionsat to the baker’s – and it was shut! It seems that last Sunday was a one-off seeing as how it ought to have been Pionsat’s brocante last week. But as I was quietly GRRRRRing to myself, out of the door came the boulangere, and so she sold me what I needed. It must have been my lucky day!

Back at the ranch, seeing as I wasn’t going anywhere I lit a huge bonfire and burnt a pile of stuff that has been lingering around here, and I also burnt the dried weeds that I had pulled up when I was working with Lieneke. In fact one of the reasons why I’m still awake now is that the fire is merrily burning away and I can’t go to bed leaving it unattended. But make the most of the sunny day – it won’t last, this weather.

I also installed the compost bin properly in its proper place this afternoon after the temporary installation last night and added the compost from the collapsed plastic composting bin. At the moment it’s four sections high and the three that are currently unused are in shot. I’ll have to think of a place to put them.

You can also see the chassis for the Citroen 2CV that formed the basis of the Lomax kit car I once owned. There’s also a solar garden light and one of the solar cookers for the composting toilet. The others have now been incorporated into the compost and given a liberal dosing of potash.

Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are the essential ingredients for any fertiliser. There are plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus in the contents of a composting toilet and wood-ash is a good source of potassium. So all the essential ingredients for my garden are right to hand. Now all I need to do is to work out how I can move the methane digester and add the contents of that to the compost. I reckon that I ought to neutralise its contents with plenty of wood ash and sawdust first though but that will just add to the weight.

Nevertheless, things are slowly moving around here. The composting bin was another thing that I’ve been meaning to do for ages and I’m glad it’s in position now.

I was so engrossed that it was 18:30 when I knocked off. And on a Sunday too! A nice hot 41°C shower rounded the day off quite nicely. Tomorrow I imagine that we will be back on that blasted roof.

-3

Saturday 7th August 2010 – If you don’t maintain your property ….

… then this is the kind of thing that can happen. I was on my way back from the Mairie this afternoon when I happened to notice this property. I’ve no idea how long that it has been like that because I don’t go this way all that often.

This is a holiday home owned by some people from Paris and whenever they arrive here for the summer they are going to have a surprise. Part of the wall of the barn has collapsed and it’s taken all one end of the roof with it. Luckily the house is unscathed (just about) but it’s still pretty serious.

I was at the mairie this morning to have my passport photo signed. I have the wanderlust again and I feel like I’m ready for a voyage. As the passport has expired I can’t go anywhere at the moment so I need to get that all sorted out.

I also took the opportunity to find out about this land I want to buy (STILL receiving attention – it’s only 16 months) and to ask about having my name added to the list of local artisans, now that I am registered.
“Do you have your SIRET (the registration certificate)?” asked the mayor
“It’s in the van” I said, going to fetch it
So he photocopied it and promised me that he would update the information board.

Talking of going anywhere I shoud have gone to Montlucon this morning – and I was up and about even before the alarm went off, which is something of a surprise for me. I should have taken someone there to pick up a mattress and I rang him up to see if he was ready but all I got was a groan. Apparently he’d been to a barbecue last night and had stayed out late.

Still – no matter. We can always go again.

Instead, I stayed at home (apart from my trip to the mairie) and built myself a compost bin.

The plastic one that I bought has definitively collapsed and as I rely heavily on composting I designed and built one.

It’s modular in that you start off with one level and the lid level (the lid will be hinged just as soon as I buy anyhinges) and that will give you a height of 300mm. As your heap expands you can add more 150mm sections to it to increase the height.

As your heap settles down you can take away sections to start your second heap. You need two on the go at any one time – one for filling and the other one festering away. When the one that you have been filling becomes full you can empty the festering one (it would have been festering away for about a year) and start to fill that from scratch, leaving the other one to fester for a while.

So now I’ve put it in place and tomorrow I can start to fill it from all of the stuff lying around. It’s time I had a good clean-up.

-3

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality