Tuesday 14th July 2020

Nature's supermarket is running superbly at the moment, at least the fruit department is. Last month it was mulberries and cherries, which I scoffed by the punnetful, then there was a brief burst of strawberries; big juicy ones from the garden and tiny wild ones with their intense hit of flavour, and now it's pears and sour cherries. I love fruit, and even the sour cherries are refreshingly tasty and absolutely packed with juice. I've frozen a bunch as I've read they're good for cooking with, and I'm envisaging a sweet sticky banana loaf sprinkled with dots of cherries to give it zing.

The pears are falling by the bucket load, literally, from the big tree in the front garden. Sadly, the ones that hit the ground are instantly pulverised (lucky for me, my head hasn't taken a pounding yet, despite my sun lounger being positioned under the branches) so I picked a lot from the branches I could reach. I'm going to can these for winter as they don't tend to go as mushy as apples, but that will still leave hundreds for eating now. I've strung an old net curtain under one section of the tree, hoping to break the fall of the fruits, but so far about six have landed unscathed in the net, and the rest have continued to smash themselves elsewhere. Next year I'll prepare earlier with more netting fixed up.

Stefan, the previous owner of the property, popped in the other day with Kamen, who might be buying a bit of land adjacent to mine. Whilst here he told me what the mysterious shrub, with the enormous dangly branches, in the orchard is. It's a goji berry! I've just noticed today that a couple of the branches have purple flowers, so maybe I'll have a few berries this year. I've never eaten goji berries before.

The veggie garden isn't doing too badly, considering I'm not really paying much attention to it this year. The onions are pretty much ready to lift, and the broccoli, beans, cucumbers and courgettes are ripening daily. My cucumbers are of the stumpy hairy variety that you find pickled in jars, and I must admit I do like a plate of ham, cheese and pickles, so I need to do some research and find out how to preserve my own cues. That's if I have any spare, as lunch at the moment consists of at least three whole cucumbers, cut into wedges and smothered in salad cream, accompanied by a wodge of ham.

The reason for not attending so much to the veggies is that I've been absorbed in more labour intensive work in the garden, mostly lugging chunks of rock around. I mentioned last time how I've begun laying big paving slabs in the front garden. Well, that's continued this past month (I know, I'm a slow worker) though to be honest there isn't too much left to do. I'll probably leave the section directly under the vine trellis for now, as I need to make a more sturdy frame for the vines, which I'll probably do in autumn, and which might involve digging holes for concreting in the support posts. Here's a bit of an update taken a couple of weeks ago:

You can see the ground's still looking pretty damp there, so it was probably just after yet another downpour. I managed to solve the problem of water pouring straight off the lower roof though, by use of a length of French drain piping (which you can see in the photo) which now leads directly into a large plastic bottle which feeds the water butts. I chose this method, thinking the pipe would be quite light and flexible, and therefore easy to fit. Wrong!

There's a big DIY shop in Gabrovo called Paros, mostly specialising in plumbing things, though they sell other stuff too. I went in and asked for 14 metres of French drain hosepipe, having had a quick measure up of the length and depth of the roof (my plan was to run it along the house wall and then straight down the edge to the water butt). The guy printed off the usual order form but then told me I'd need to pick it up from their warehouse over on the industrial estate a couple of miles away, as they didn't store bigger things like that on the shop premises. Luckily I drive through that estate each time I come to Gabrovo so I at least knew where it was.

After a bit of driving around the units and asking various factory workers, I eventually found the relevant warehouse, and presented my receipt. Where's your van? They asked, and looked aghast as I pointed to my little Ford Fiesta. As one guy went off with a forklift truck to retrieve the piping, I went and folded down the rear seats, and moved my shopping bags and other bits of assorted junk to the front of the car, trying to ignore the smirks and mutterings from the watching workers. When something the size of an overgrown anaconda approached the car I realised why a van might have been in order.

Miraculously, with much heaving and shoving, the coil of pipe was rammed into the car, though I did wonder if it would ever ping out again at the other end. Well, surprisingly it did, and was duly rolled into the front garden to wait whilst I pondered a plan of action. It didn't have to wait too long.

I awoke, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at the unearthly hour of 5am the next day, and decided I'd fit the piping before breakfast, whilst it was still nice and cool out. As I cut the layers of sellotape which had held the beast in a coil, it promptly lashed its way out and ended up stretched across the garden and out through the side gate. Hmm, how to get it onto the roof...

It proved to be a task of Herculean proportions, as it was both weighty and pretty much rigid. I could only shove it so far onto the roof before needing to release my grip in order to climb onto the roof and pull it up the rest of the way. As soon as I let go, the wretched thing slithered back down the tiles and crashed to the ground. Ugh, it was exhausting! Eventually though, I managed to get enough of it onto the roof, and got the remaining length to stay still whilst I flew up the stairs and out onto the roof. As I started heaving the rest of it up I quickly realised there was no way it was going to sit neatly against the house wall, and that it might be better to take a more direct route. A few hacks with a knife and several metres were dumped back into the garden, leaving a slightly more manageable amount.

Anyone who's dealt with this kind of piping knows it has a series of holes along the length of it which I wanted to have on the upper side, so that only really torrential rain would overflow out, allowing the majority of the rainwater to be saved in the butts. Of course this particular pipe much preferred to lay hole side down. It was like wrestling an uncooperative python as I gripped the pipe between my knees, under my arms, any which way, trying to twist and bend it until I lay the right way. Finally I managed to force it into submission, and drainpipe and plastic bottle were connected. Hurrah!

It was a few days before we had another mega downfall of rain, but when we did, I was thrilled to see it all chugging nicely away, and no more waterfalls smashing onto the garden and newly laid slabs. Julie 1 : Rain 0.

Apart from making the front garden look much neater, it's been one way of using up some of the tons of roofing stone which has been laying around all over the place since Stan reroofed the house and two of the barns last year. The big slabs are great for the patio, and some of the thinner slabs will be used later to put a better cap on the front garden wall. As you can see in the picture, lots of the smaller broken pieces have been used to create the borders of the flower beds, and I plan to do a similar thing round all the fruit trees in the orchard, to make it easier to strim the grass in there without risking damaging the trunks. Various amounts of stone has been sold to others for their projects too, but that has still left an inordinate amount of rock, particularly the tiny broken bits which aren't any use... or are they!

I hit upon the genius idea (my genius standards are a tad lower than those of MENSA) of using all the shrapnel in gabion walls. You might not have heard of them but you'll definitely have seen them: huge wire baskets full of rocks, used to shore up hillsides. I have rocks and I have crumbling garden walls, so, why not use all the left over rubble to fill wire baskets and hopefully stop the walls from disintegrating any further. Round the back of Paros I found a little outlet selling all sorts of metal grids, and had 5 of them delivered, ready to create gabions.

The first ones are going next to the retaining wall at the back of the veggie garden. I've basically cut and bent the metal grid to size, and then used more wire to tie the sides together. The holes in the side are pretty big, so I've lined the basket with green nylon mesh, and have built the sides up with big flat rocks before filling in with all the smaller bits. This is the first one half full:

Once it was completely packed full of rocks, I put some flat slabs on top, and have put my strawberry plants there for now. I might make a wooden frame of soil or something eventually, and have the strawberries there permanently, trailing over the side. The second gabion next to the first is underway already, and will help support the sides for the big compost bin I'm creating.

So, between the front garden and the gabions, I've managed to use enough stone to clear the route again back into the small meadow behind the barns.

Before:

After:

Another mini improvement to life has been the addition of hand washing facilities by the outside loo. The water's stored in a purpose made metal canister with a tap, which I found in one of the barns. You have to shake the towel before use as there's usually half a dozen earwigs snuggled under it, but it means I don't have to go all the way back to the house if I'm in the middle of gardening.

So posh, right?

That's all outside stuff, but what about the house? Well, I'd hoped to be well on the way to a bathroom by now, but that's proving to be a long slow process. Back in May I organised with a worker to come and fit a solar panel for hot water, and to connect the mains up to two big water storage tanks and a pump, so that even in summer when the water's off or the pressure's low, I'll always have a decent supply. He arrived on June 25th with all the main things (boiler, panel and pump) then came two days later and started putting up the pipes which will connect the mains and the storage tanks. And that's been it.

It's been a while since I've had someone who does an hour here and there, though it was pretty much the way all builders worked when I first moved here, and I'd forgotten just how irritating it is, especially when they don't bother to say when they decide not to show up. Being on my own it means I find myself waiting in for no reason, and it feels like wasted days. Guys like this one tend to have several jobs on the go at one time, rather than taking on one job, finishing that and then moving onto another. I think their logic is that it means they have a more regular income rather than risk losing a potential client who doesn't want to wait for work to begin, though frankly it puts me off asking that sort of worker back again. Can you imagine if a Bulgarian surgeon worked that way? Yes, I've cut you open and removed your appendix, but excuse me for a few hours whilst I carry on with the heart transplant next door, I'll be back to stitch you up later, maybe.

I was going to wait until he'd finished before getting the actual bathroom done, but I've now had Ruse round to look at my plans, and he's going to start work soon on the bathroom regardless. If Yordan doesn't get his act together soon, I might end up renegotiating his work and just get Ruse to do the mains connection bit. My dream is to be able to take an indoor shower before my next birthday. Haha, watch this space!

Finlay cat has been in full on hunting mode recently, and for the first time has been bringing his live catches into the house. So far I've gone in the kitchen and found a live rat (hiding behind the freezer), a live grass snake (curled up on the carpet), and half a live green lizard (the tail had been ejected somewhere). The rat managed to flee back outside, and the two reptiles were scooped into containers and put back in the garden where they hopefully lived to see another day. I'm now trying to remember to shut the kitchen door every time I go out into the garden.

This pretty little fellow was in one of the barns one day, looking at me quite confidently as I worked nearby. I've warned him about Finlay.