Sunday 29th December 2019

Imagine Quentin Tarantino made a gardening program, and Samuel L Jackson was the muthaf#*^ing presenter, and you kind of get a nice image of me working to clear some undergrowth round the back of the barns a while back. As always, this task was the result of a chain of events, and not something I'd initially planned on doing. It started after we had some fairly heavy rain, during which I noticed some of it was dripping steadily into my wood store. Once the rain had stopped I decided to climb up on the roof to have a look for broken tiles.

I confess I have no head for heights at all. If I go up a tower in some tourist place it always makes my stomach churn to peep over the edge, and I have to move back for fear that the wall will suddenly irrationally collapse and down I'll plummet. Anyway, after clambering up the ladder and onto the neighbouring lower roof, I scuffled my way slowly across the tiles on hands and knees until I was in a position to look onto the higher part of the roof where the leak was. It looked like one of the tiles near the ridge had slipped down, leaving a gap, but I couldn't reach it from where I was, and couldn't muster any more bravery to heave myself up onto this higher roof. At that point I wondered if maybe I could do some kind of less risky repair job from under the roof. To access the loft part of the offending barn however, I would have to drag my ladder through an overgrown wilderness of shrubbery, hence operation ground clearance.

Why is it that the densest, most tangly plants are also the most spiteful? My path was blocked by enormous thorny rose runners, prickly brambles, and wild plum saplings with their huge spikes all along every branch. Armed with gardening gloves and loppers I hacked my way through, dragging the debris into a heap for burning later, and swore and swore and swore.

Several rage filled hours later and the way was clear enough for me to get my ladder in position to climb across into the loft where I did manage to shove the slipped tile up enough that it will hopefully prevent any serious water ingress until better repairs can be made. Look at that beautiful clear path!

If jobs aren't spiteful then by and large they tend to be stinky, and one such task cropped up the other night. I'd done some hand washing using the unplumbed in washing machine to spin the water out, and so several basins full of water had been thrown down the kitchen sink. One basin turned out to be too much and suddenly soapy water came pouring back up out of the pipe under the sink. Yikes!

Time to investigate where the blockage was. Not having any kind of drain clearing equipment I went and got some green garden wire and began feeding it into the pipe. This turned out to be too weak and after a few meters I could feel that it was just folding against itself in the pipe. Time for something stronger. I checked with a couple of friends to see if they had anything suitable, and during the course of this the suggestion of using a hose pipe came up. Perfect! I've lots of old coils of hose and picked out a reasonably rigid one and began shoving it down the pipe. Aha! About 6 meters in I came against the blockage. I tried ramming the hose back and forth, but it wasn't shifting at all. Pulling the hose back out was disgusting. Thankfully there's no actual sewage down there but none the less it came out coated in a slick black sludge that smelt appalling. On reflection I think the blackness was probably soot from wiping up after cleaning out the flue pipes after the rubber burning incident, but the stink? How many months of rot had been building up down there?

Unlike at my last house there's no septic tank here, and the previous owner vaguely mentioned that the grey water just runs out into the big drainage ditch which passes the house outside. Hmm, but how does it get there? So began various digs around the garden to try and locate the pipe. I found the one from the summer kitchen easily enough as it was under an obvious metal cover, but the house one proved very elusive, and in the end I found it by sheer luck. Having already dug in the most likely place (based on the direction the pipe seemed to go from under the sink) I then dug in several other spots but to no avail. For no apparent reason I returned to the first place and decide to dig down deeper and bingo!

The problem was that between the end of the pipe from the kitchen and another pipe leading off of the trench there was a gap of about a foot which had become full of soil, and hence the blockage. Nothing for it but to crouch in the pit and bail out pot after pot of black sludge until the pipes were clear. As a temporary fix I've put a bit of old stove pipe to bridge the gap, and have put some plastic sheeting up the sides of the pit to keep the soil from falling into it. After wedging the plastic in place with stone slabs and bricks I put the metal cover back over and job done. Well, at least till spring time when I plan to dig the pit out much bigger and line it properly with bricks and stone.

I'm still intrigued as to where the outflow pipe goes though. Once I'd cleared the soil I let the water run down the sink for a while to check it was working, and it wooshed away out of the outflow quite happily, but where to? No sign of it exiting into the big ditch outside. Knowing my luck there's probably some giant underground pool building up under the barn or something, but we'll worry about that later. Time for a steaming hot bath in the barn to remove all thoughts of what I've been crawling about in!