Tag Archives: tree roots

Wednesday 30th July 2014 – THIS MORNING WAS THE FOURTH TIME THIS SUMMER …

… that I’ve disconnected the fridge as there has been insufficient power this last 24 hours for it to function adequately. I recall having done that twice in summers in the past since the current set-up was established in August 2009, but four times from May to the end of July (and this is before we talk about August and September) is verging on the absurd.

Last night too I closed all the windows in the attic and I was sitting up there in a sweater. That’s the second time that this has happened this summer. All in all, it just shows you how depressing this summer has been so far

There was a similar summer to this once when I was living in Brussels. Everyone who went away in July came back drowned, many of them long before their holidays were over. Together with the wet, mild winter that we had, this is probably one of the worst years that I can remember so far.

Going downstairs to make breakfast there was a big hanging cloud everywhere again and we were totally stuck in it – hence the decision to unplug the fridge.

However as the morning went on this strange orange thing in the sky did put in an appearance and by the time I made it outside there were even some bits of blue sky visible. That was the cue to put a great big bucket-load of lime mortar into the cracks in the wall on the lean-to. That took me until 14:25 when I knocked off for a rather late lunch.

After lunch I dismantled the scaffolding as I no longer need it. Everything else that needs doing I can reach from the floor. It’s not as easy as you might think dismantling a scaffolding on your own and I nearly dropped part of it on my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon digging roots out of the main wall of the house. The stinging nettle and thistle roots came out fairly easily but the bramble roots are proving to be difficult and the two big tree trunks that represent the base of the ivy
are proving to be almost impossible. I’ve made some progress, but only with the help of an axe, a couple of masonry chisels and a large crowbar.

If the weather is fine, I’ll carry on chiseling out the tree roots. Then I can fill in the gaps with a load of lime mortar. Hopefully whatever tree roots still in the wall would be killed off by the lime mortar and I shan’t be troubled by ivy again.

But with the blue sky and the sun that came out, I plugged the fridge back in. Now I can unplug it again next time we have a spell of a couple of days of hanging cloud

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Monday 10th September 2012 – OH DEER!

Oh deer indeed.

And to the deer that ran out in front of Caliburn somewhere between St Gervais d’Auvergne and Gouttieres on the way back from our Anglo-French Group meeting, Caliburn and I are really sorry.

But it’s a good job that I’m a vegan otherwise you would be in the pot right now.

Caliburn has a slight mark on the front bumper, which shows that he’s much more solidly built than the Chevy Malibu that I hired in Canada in 2003 (mind you, it was a stag that I hit back then) but I’m very much afraid that the deer went in all directions.

Ahh well 🙁

So apart from that dramatic end to the evening, what else?

After the usual bits and pieces on the computer, I went out and attacked the wall again.

collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut astonishingly, only 3 buckets of mortar went into the wall. And for a whol assortment of reasons.

  1. I had to take down part of the scaffolding. That’s major progress in itself
  2. But before I could do that, I had to move a pile of stuff.
  3. Once that had gone, I had to hack down a pile of brambles and small trees to make some working space
  4. I had to clear away all of the sand and cement  that I’ve raked out of the wall and was piling up against the foot of the wall. That took ages, and I DO mean “ages” too


But I did make two startling discoveries

  1. I knew that I had another garden rake somewhere, a big heavy duty proper one with real metal prongs.
    And I would love to know what I was doing with it because it was under the stones that fell when the wall collapsed back all those years ago.
    The handle has long since rotted away but I’ll buy a new one on Saturday at Cheze.
  2. I now know the secret of why the lean-to is collapsing.
    There’s a whole network of tree roots from the walnut tree that has infiltrated into the wall below ground level. Much of the day was spent extracting them, and I need to think of a permanent solution to deal with that issue.
    Also, this is the bit where the wall is really bad.
    Rainwater has infiltrated and washed the old mortar away and many of the stones are loose. They need extracting where possible and replacing with larger stones/
    Either that or they need to be well packed in with other stones so that they can’t move and the forces above them are spread out horizontally.

So now you know why that’s why it’s taking me ages.

But anyway, at 18:45 I called it a day and had a quick a solar shower and following that, legged it to St Gervais d’Auvergne where we had the biggest crowd for quite a while.

And that is always pleasant.

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Tuesday 6th March 2012 – I’VE FINISHED …

home made compost bin les guis virlet puy de dome france… the compost bin as you can see.

Well, when I say “finished”, I don’t really mean “finished”, because as you can see, it’s a modular structure. I have aboout 10 of these square modules and I can stack them one on top of another, increasing the height as I build up the heap and decreasing the height as the contents compost down.

As you will note, there are air gaps to aerate the heap. This helps the composting process.

The base of the heap is an old air bed that has given up the ghost. I did have some special stuff to use but like anything else around here I can’t find anything when I really want it. The air bed will have to do.

The purpose of that is to suppress whatever weeds might want to push their way up through the heap.

There are currently two other active compost bins. One has rotted down nicely and when I empty it (by adding the contents to the raised beds) I can take it apart and use the modules to build up the bin here.

They will fit of course because the modules are all the same size – namely 875mm long.

“And why 875mm long?” I hear you ask.

That’s because they were made from a job lot of 3500mm planks that were cut into fours.

The other bin won’t be emptied for another year. That bin was only started a year ago and so it still needs time to settle down. The routine is that you spend a year filling a bin, and then leave it to stand for a year.

The contents of that particular bin will go into the raised beds next winter and then I can move it to behind the one there – where the spade is standing up.

gardening raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce that was organised I started to dig over the ground to the right of it – where the garden fork is lying down.

I have a raised bed from the first attempt at gardening, one of 3500mm x 1000mm, left over from those days and the plan is to run it across there, behind the last row of raised beds, and plant the soft fruit bushes in it. This year though, I’ll use it for the new potatoes.

Preparing that patch is not easy. It’s part of the primeval forest and there is a ton of ground alder in it as well as huge masses of thick tree roots. All of these have to come out and it’s taking ages. It won’t be finished for a bit.

In other news, regular readers of this rubbish will recall me talking … "on numerous occasions" – ed … about Yakima Canutt.

He was a stunt man from the late 1920s who was picked up by a very young John Wayne and co-starred with him in many of his earliest films of the 1930s. When acting became much more sophisticated, Canutt was one of the thousands of actors who were clearly not up to it and disappeared from the silver screen.

Wayne didn’t abandon him, however, and on the later (as in 1934/35/36) batch of Wayne’s B-feature movies, the second-unit director is none other than one Yakima Canutt.

So what’s the interest in him tonight? Well, this evening I was relaxing with a DVD, Breakheart Pass, starring Charles Bronson.

Based on a story by Alastair Maclean, it’s easily one of the best of the “non-western westerns”, even if the directing is totally awful and we have to put up with Bronson’s appalling floozie Jill Ireland, without whom he won’t go anywhere even if she can’t act to save her life and who hasn’t recovered from co-starring as the outrageous Kenneth Williams’ grilfriend in Carry On Nurse [DVD].  

But anyway, before I bore you all to death with my own polemic, I happened to notice the credits of Breakheart Pass as the rolled by. And who was the second-unit director and stunt co-ordinator? Yes, none other than one Yakima Canutt. He kept on going until he was 90.

And the snow that I mentioned yesterday? Well, you can see all about that in the photo above.

Not a flake.

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Monday 5th March 2012 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday about the snow.

At about 15:30 this afternoon the heavens opened and for a couple of minutes we had a snowstorm.

Not totally unexpected either, because between about 14:00 and 15:00 the temperature dropped from 8.3°C to 4.1°C – quite a dramatic fall in temperature in such a short space of time – and it carried on dropping too.

Having spent much of the morning doing computer things, I went out to move these tree stumps that are in the way of where I want to put the compost bins. But rather than spending all of the time moving the stumps, I spent much of that time taking the handle out of an old abandoned spade to put in the garden fork.

That’s another tool handle broken – I’ve lost count of how many just recently. I’ve no idea what’s causing them all to pack in.

However, when I was at Bricomarche the other day I noticed a pile of tool handles. I shall have to go and mortgage my life away.

“But why did it take so long to change a tool handle?” I hear you say.

Probably because the handle in the spade was well stuck in and in the end it was a job for the angle grinder to cut away the neck of the spade. As for the fork, that involved drilling out the broken bit of handle and that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either.

But now the big tree stump is out, and so are a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t have time to remove the rest so that’s a job for tomorrow, always assuming that I can see them through the snow that is forecast to fall tonight

Another thing I did was to plant the lettuce. Did I mention that I bought a dozen baby lettuce plants on Saturday? A dozen cost €2:95 and the price for 6 – also €2:95. So seeing as a dozen lettuce all ready at the same time would overwhelm me, I planted 6 and gave 6 to Liz at the Anglo-French group this evening.

What I will be doing is buying a few small lettuce plants every few weeks and running them throughout the year.

A big mistake that I made last year was that I left the final lettuce out in the open and the frost got to them even though they were stiull going. I’ve therefore planted this lot of lettuce in the cloche with the strawberry plants and put the glass (really two old caravan windows) over them to keep the bad weather out.

And the lettuce from September onwards will also go into the cloche to see how long they will keep in there under cover

I also bought a few packs of seeds from ALDI and LIDL – €0.29 and €0.49 a packet depending on size. Not many varieties but enough to keep me going. I imagine that temperatures of -16°C have done for the seeds in store from last year.

I also need to think about seed potatoes, onion sets, garlic and shallots. It’s getting to be about that time.

All in all, things are starting to become busy around here. I need to put my skates on.

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Tuesday 8th June 2010 – How about this for bizarre?

As you know, I spend some of the winter cutting down trees for firewood and the first that I cut was the old tree just in front of the house that looked like it had died (and a good move it was to do that too as it immediately revitalised itself and went berserk)

rooted tree offcut les guis virlet puy de dome france.The wood that I cut down I chopped into lengths and stacked neatly (for once) at the side of the barn to dry out ready to burn.

However, one of the the lengths sprouted a branch or two so I reckoned that there must have been tons of sap still in it. But not at all. In fact when I tried to move it during my tidy-up session I noticed that it had pushed some roots out and grown back into the soil.

Now THAT‘s unusual.

But I’ve not done much in the way of tidying up for the simple reason that the weather has been against me. I did a machine load of washing yesterday and it was such a beautiful evening last night that I left it out to dry. So of course we’ve had nothing but torrential downpours all day and everything is thoroughly soaking. I spent the morning computing and after lunch did some of the moving around but dodging the showers was difficult and in the end I made a coffee and came up here to watch a film.

But there’s been so much rain that my hardstanding is like a squelchy sponge again. I was hoping that it would stay dry to give me a chance to tamp it down. And ironically the puddle that was soaking wet and into which I spent a day embedding rocks into it, that’s currently the driest and most stable part of it now. That’s weird too.

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