Another huge gap in blog entries, and this time I’m not going to back-fill them. The past couple of years have been pretty brutal, and I’m not mad keen to re-visit them more than I already have, even in the form of light and breezy entries with pictures of animals and unfinished renovation items.
Well ok, I might. But not now.
Highlights (you may get cheery posts accompanying these):
Got a shipping container.
Installed a polytunnel and we grew a lot of crops.
Finished building the well pump house walls, a door, and most of the roof.
Got a well water filter installed – no more brown staining or e.coli (probably).
Got rid of the barn roof and all the junk the barn used to contain.
Got some chairs, a sofa, and a table.
Took custody of an old, manky-nosed, deaf, blind and cranky cat. He was ace.
Put up some outdoor lights.
Some of the not-highlights:
Didn’t get to feed the cows this year.
Mostly trapped in Ireland.
Had to have the cat fecked over into the meadow at the rainbow bridge, where he’s probably up to no good.
Sorting out the foundations went ok. They were wildy wrong, but I have used the experience as an opportunity to learn and grow:
F-irst
A-ttempt
I-n
L-earning
To be clear, I absolutely don’t believe that as a concept. I learnt some years ago that being careful and precise saves time overall. I’m just not patient enough to avoid doing myself over every time!
I’ll stay up with you / By your side ’til you repair — Not my words, but those of the “Sartres of Sligo”: Westlife
Today’s apology for a lyric headline is from Kate Nash’s “Foundations”. Who knew that in a matter of 10 years she’d go from performing live on Jools Holland to being one of the stars of Netflix women’s wrestling drama GLOW? I digress…
So as optimistic as I was at my first building activity, I waited for the foundations to dry, then put the blocks in roughly the place they would be.
I know it’s not right
Somewhere along the (wonky) line, I must have moved the markers I was using to denote the bounds of the area. I’d done the measurements last autumn, so plenty of scope for that to have happened.
I ended up with foundations to cover three blocks’ worth one side, and four the other. The bottom-right of the above photo illustrates the slight issue.
It does look a bit ridiculous that I didn’t notice as I was doing it, but I really didn’t. I have attempted to remedy the situation by extending the foundations out further – it’ll end up not needing a floor at this rate.
Hoping that the weekend weather will permit progress, but I’m concerned at the prospect of rain and freezing weather again. Apparently the water in concrete can freeze (and consequently expand) in freshly-poured concrete, which messes it up badly.
I have been mentally building a well pump house extension for some months now. Unfortunately, this hasn’t caused the project to actually happen… until now. The water from our well is undrinkable (see previous post). We’d ideally like to be able to drink it, and also not have its ridiculously high manganese content stain stuff. Removal of E. coli is on our “nice to have” list, too.
I spoke to a water filtration company last year and paid a deposit to get the system I wanted. It’s a Strong Acidic Cation setup, which should remove water hardness and manganese. They’re going to supply a UV filter too, so bye-bye E. coli.
One of the complications of filtration for our well is that anything capable of removing all of the crud from the water also needs to be able to clean itself out frequently, so the filtration medium doesn’t just get clogged-up. This is called “backwash”, and involves sending a lot of water back the other way through the filter (at speed) to eject the bad stuff.
As also previously mentioned, our well is not… err… well-endowed on the water yield front. So the backwash setup needs a holding tank and a booster pump to do the job. Which require more space than the current tiny pump house can provide. Hence the grand extension plan.
One other thing to note is that the backwash has to go somewhere. As luck would have it, there’s a plastic drainage pipe below the planned extension, so I used a hole saw to drill into it. The backwash can then go into that and wend its merry way down to a convenient ditch.
The existing pump house is (imperial measurements ahoy…) 8ft x 5ft (so about 2.4m x 1.5m). I can’t remember how tall it is, except to say that the existing pressure tank has the corrugated iron ‘roof’ resting on it, so it’s not tall. Maybe 3ft (under a metre)?
The planned extension makes the pump house wider than it is long (green shading is new part):
We dug out the foundations a while ago, and today was promised to be a dry one for pouring the foundations.
Brand new cement mixer, foundations and existing pump house with fetching roof
A mere four hours and a *lot* of concrete later, the foundations are done:
Foundations complete
I mixed the concrete 1 (cement) : 3 (sand) : 5 (aggregate). I don’t really know what I’m doing, but a builder told me to use that mix so I did.
The foundations need to set for a few days before the block work can be started.
Blocks
Visible stuff left-to-right: 1 tonne bag of sand, 176 4″ blocks, 1 tonne bag of gravel, some other chip and dust bag left over from the spare room floor work. Will probably end up in the pump house extension flooring.
Like the zombie mink of Denmark, the blog returns to life once more to herald the dawn of a brand new year. The delay was to check whether or not 2021 was a significant upgrade on 2020. Turns out, it isn’t.
Since my last post, not a whole lot has happened. Well, nothing good anyway.
Highlights of past 6 months:
Feeding the cows.
Collecting the cows’ output and spreading it on the garden.
Putting up another two curtain rails. I can only apologise that you missed the live stream of this work – very much a fusion of film d’auteur melancholy and Tarantinoesque splatter cartoon.
Collecting seaweed and spreading it on the garden.
*apologies to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” – it’s had enough of a mauling the past few years. Or about time too, really.
Another visit from a young hare today, anyway.
They seem to like popping up and eating the grass near our living room window, despite dozens of acres of the stuff all around. I like to think they’re coming to say hello, although that does seem a bit unlikely.
I just finished reading another book about hares – this time, it’s “The Private Life of the Hare” by John Lewis-Stempel. His assertion that Ireland is in the UK aside (which is clumsy at best), it’s a nice collection of history, lore and verse about the little furry fellows. I’m in total agreement with him about the magic of them.
Not only has the paint stripper arrived, but the very long-awaited rake handle did too.
Fully-assembled rake
As you can imagine, raking is significantly easier with a 1.2m long handle attached. Ordered 27th April, arrived 5th May. Truly dark times we’re living in.
Obviously we’ve tried it out, and were both delighted with its ability to move bits of soil around from a distance. It is no overstatement to say that it has opened up a vast horizon of opportunities within the horticultural field, quite literally.
The fence is complete. The gate is “fashioned” from the mini-pallet on which the wire and posts arrived.
Completed fencing
The stones I lined the perimeter with have been covered with soil as planned.
Apart from that, the other excitement today was our first sighting of a squirrel here. It was going spiralling up and down the larch tree, presumably after seeds that have long since been snaffled by the birds.
We’ve been working on a veggie patch for a few days now. This involved a lot of digging, but is mostly done. The plot measures 6.2m x 6m, and is on a gentle slope, reminiscent of rolling Tuscan hills (but likely to get slightly less sunshine, and a lot more rain).
I used 50mm diameter, 1.8m high round posts (cut with spikes in the bottom) around the edge of the plot, then something described as ‘lettuce wire’ that’s 3 feet high (and rising), with 1 inch wide hexagonal holes in it. The wire roll is 50m long (hey, they can do metric for something, it seems), so plenty of spare wire left over.
Plot fence
The base of the wire is buried a bit, and there are stones from around the place put on top (to give any digging creature a discouraging bash on the head). I’ll be covering the stones with earth tomorrow to tidy it up a bit.
Have planted some potatoes and beans already, so there are hopefully crops to protect.
Guttingly, we still don’t have a complete rake to work the soil with. Due to lockdown and its logistical challenges, everything we’ve been using has been bought online. I had a rake head delivered a couple of weeks ago, but the associated handle hadn’t even made it to dispatch. I’ve tried sourcing one from somewhere in Tipperary, but that hasn’t come either.
On reflection, I probably shouldn’t have bothered with the concept of interchangeable tool heads (from Wolf Garten), but I’m committed to it for now.
