Making shapes

Between the kitchen and the rest of the house far years there has just been a rough hole in the wall which has been there since we arrived. well with both sides now finished it’s time to finally put the last piece in place the arch itself. So we built the arch former from ply and small bits of pine. Once the former was complete then came the task of fitting it into the opening. we screwed two boards across the bottom of the opening. Then the arch former was fitted between them and secured in place. Rebar has been put in to give the arch added strength. Note also that the other side has already had the boards fitted. We poured the concrete in and added the extra boards as we went along.

With all the concrete poured in and the boards fitted it was time to cross fingers and pray that we had got the concrete where it was needed. The following day it was time to take of the outer boards and see if we had in fact managed to get the concrete into the right places. As the photo above shows it looks like most of the concrete is where it needs to be, with just a few bits needing some surface patching…

Watering 2.0

Our efforts at using gray water to water our veg has hot been that successful, the first year worked ok , but after that it stopped working. The main problem is the gray water has not been filtered so that it clogs up the drip watering feeds etc.

After some web research and book reading, we cam across a method using plastic pipes with drilled holes to distribute water. These are buried in the veg plots and should provide adequate irrigation.

so we purchased some 20mm plastic pipe and added the holes.

Pipe being drilled.

All the bits ready to be assembled.

The pipe sections are 2m in length and have aprox. 20cm risers added so that they can be berried below the surface.

The water is derived by 16mm plastic irrigation pipes with a tap for each buried pipe. The main problem at the moment is getting all the taps balanced so that each of the berried pipes gets the same amount of water.

So far the system seems to be working but the real test will be through the summer.

The new irrigation system with some very young corn plants…
will it work?

Battery Box fail…….

There I was happily pottering around the house when I heard this sudden crash and thud from somewhere around the house. “Now what has fallen down!!” After 10 minutes of hunting I could not find a thing that had fallen..

Well about a hour later I was hanging up the washing and spotted the following:

What seems to have happened is that the plastic in the storage box that we used to cover the battery 3 years ago has degraded to the consistency of prawn crackers and finally collapsed.

Look out…Look out…..Weather about….

One morning as I was going about my normal  morning routine I walked outside an was suddenly surprise to spot the following. Yes that is a water spout. It’s a little mini tornado that appears over the sea, we do see them sometimes when the conditions are right. They disappear quite quickly and don’t make it to land and also it is very rare to spot one touching the sea. which if you look at the picture below you can see this one does.