Wednesday 19th August 2020

Exactly one year ago today, I transferred the balance of payment for the house, and officially became a resident of Mezhdene. The year has flown by, and when I think about it, an amazing amount has been achieved already. All the old belongings have been sorted through and stored or disposed of, most of the windows have been replaced, rewiring done throughout, the house and three barns reroofed (third barn currently being done, but more on that in a moment), solar panel on the roof and water storage system installed, front wall rebuilt, bathroom begun, veggie garden begun, all outdoor areas strimmed and tidied (apart from the big field which is deliberately being left wild), front garden paved and flower beds created (click the link for a look round the garden  https://youtu.be/_alKNGcL6mM ) ... not bad going really.

The veggies have been a story of two halves, hopefully it'll be better managed next year, especially if my rainwater storage system comes to fruition. The little patch in the orchard suffered most, and to be honest it's because I really didn't tend to it much other than a bit of weeding and the occasional bucket of water. I have several rows of sweetcorn, with onions planted in between, some climbing beans, and the courgettes and squash plants as I figured they could trail away to their heart's content. Well, the beans produced maybe a dozen pods between them, and barely grew at all, so I gave up on them quite early. I think I've got one actual pumpkin growing, and I've had two or three small courgettes. The corn only got to a couple of feet high, but did start producing ears. When I went out a couple of weeks ago to harvest them, this is what I found:

Rotten jays have scoffed the lot! Every single ear peeled open and not a kernel to be found. Luckily I had a bumper crop last year, so there are still two big bags of cobs in the freezer which I can enjoy till next year. I'm thinking I shall need to make a frame round the entire crop next year though, and drape netting over it all to stop the birds getting in. Clearly I need to get used to being that bit closer to nature than I was back in Gostilitsa! At least the onions were unscathed so I have quite a few drying out in the shed.

Veggies in the beds have fared a bit better, and the tomatoes especially look like they have a lot of heavy trusses developing. I investigated one of the potato bins the other week, just to see how they'd done, and was pleased to find a good number of spuds, though a lot of tiny ones. I'll wait until the plants in the other bins have properly died down before emptying them, to give them a chance to develop more.

Something I've had for the first time has been fruit on my tomatillo plants. I tried growing them a couple of years ago, but only got one to germinate, and apparently you need more than that for the pollination. This year I was given four plants which all grew nicely, and I've now got some tomatillos inside their papery lantern shells.

They're unusual tasting things, kind of like a lemony melon, with a hint of tomato afterwards. Nice though, and equally useful in sweet or savory dishes. I'll try to save some seeds and grow more next year.

I read recently that there are a lot of crops you can plant again in mid to late August in order to get a nice autumn crop when most of the first plants have finished producing. I must admit this has never occured to me before, but this year I've sown more bean, courgette and cucumber seeds which have rapidly germinated and are growing well. The theory is that in mid-summer the first plants don't like the extreme heat and so rapidly bolt or just die off, whereas by the time this second lot have grown a bit, the temperatures will be a bit cooler for them and they should happily produce veg until it turns too cold.

So, to the third and final barn re-roofing. It's actually bigger than the house, so I knew it would be a mammoth project, and to keep prices manageable I've decided to have this one done in corrugated bitumen sheets, with a few clear ones to let some light in on one side. The guys arrived early on Monday morning to begin the back breaking job of getting all the old stone slabs off the roof. Some of those slabs are absolutely enormous, honestly, you could use this one as the lid on a family sized mausoleum:

It's about 2.5 metres long by nearly 1.5 wide, and probably weighs close to 600kg. The guys used two long beams and a lot of old tyres to slide the slabs off the roof - I dread to think the manpower that was needed to get them on the roof in the first place! Here's a link to the guys levering off one of the smaller chunks https://youtu.be/HxZUdt6hnKo . After two days the old roof is finally off, and today they are in the process of replacing the worst timbers and putting the cross beams on ready to screw the bitumen sheets to.

When it's done I shall store things like planks of wood, useful beams etc in the left-hand side, and then I will have some proper space in the workshop barn to organise workbenches, tools etc. That's my winter project!

Work has begun on the bathroom in the house. The workmen removed the old wooden flooring and cleared out sackfuls of soil, dust and rat poop from between the joists, before adding metal reinforcement and pouring a thick layer of cement. I had loads of water from the cement dripping down into the pantry, so that day I was constantly moving buckets around and mopping up the worst of it. I think this, added to all the stress and annoyance with the solar panel guy finally knocked me down, because literally half an hour after the bathroom guys went home, I found myself shivering under a blanket unable to get warm despite the 32 degree temperature outside.

Concrete floor in the bathroom

Has anyone else been suffering from Covid-19 paranoia? As soon as I get any kind of illness I make myself worse by wondering if I've finally succumbed to coronavirus. It happened a month or so ago when I'd returned from walking the dogs. I'd been wearing open sandals, and when I got back, the toes on one foot were really itchy, and later became quite hot and swollen. After a few days blisters developed, though the itch was still maddening. I presumed initially I must have trodden by and ant nest or something, and been bitten several times, but then I saw in the news there was something called covid toe! Sufferers reported red, itchy toes, a bit like chillblains. Naturally I panicked and began comparing my feet to all the online pictures. It all looked horribly similar, even though the voice of reason said open sandals plus countryside equals bites or an allergy. After a week it all began to go back to normal, so that was the end of that. But then it happened again, when I started with the chills and aches after the workmen left I couldn't help but stress over whether this was 'the' virus. How long do I wait before reporting it? What if the doctor assumes I have it without doing any testing and everyone I've been in contact with is forced into quarantine? What if I say nothing and people are unwittingly passing it on? I ached and shivered and fretted for five days and then the fever finally broke and after another couple of days rest I was okay again. The silly thing is I've had this sort of summer fever before, exactly the same! Chills, aches, exhaustion and then it passes. A year ago I would have thought nothing of it, but now I always think is this it, is it Covid?