Saturday, June 26, 2010

The corn is as high as a mouse's eye.

A while a go we started the experimentation with the new warring system (see post Watering 2.0) on the boniarto and corn patches. Well it seems to be working though the corn is not that high yet it seems to be growing ok.

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And the boniarto seems to be thriving. Well its green anyway.

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The only problem is adjusting the taps so that an equal amount of water is supplied to each tube. Well the proof is in the pudding as they say or in this case in the pot. we will just have to wait and see how the crop is.

Friday, June 18, 2010

The walls are rising

Two weeks work and it does not look like much has happened. The ramp is taking shape but not by much.

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The idea was that this should only take 2 weeks to get the new ramp built but I don’t seem  to be getting a long that fast at the moment. Mind you it building these rock (or stone) walls can be quit therapeutic.

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The main worry I have is if we have enough rocks to finish the walls.

Well we will see how it all goes.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Battle of the bulge

No I´m not talking about our waist lines that is another story..

What I am talking about is the curious bulge that has always been in the wall on the front of the house. It look very much like something inside the wall was pushing it out. So one time while we were working on the lower patio we decided to chip it off and see what was causing this part of the wall to be pushed out, This is what we found DSCF3403 Yes you can clearly see that it is a horseshoe. We have found loads of these around the place and it looks as if this one has been placed in the wall while it was being built, possibly for luck. However as this wall can get very damp sometimes the horseshoe has started to rust which is what was pushing the wall out. So we removed it and put it with the rest of the interesting things we find in the garden, there is a spur somewhere…DSCF3404Then we just need to patch the hole and it shouldn't get pushed out again as there is now nothing to push it.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Raising the Ground.

Our house is quite normal on the la Palma in that it is built on a slope, the front of the house is two stories but the back is only one. The lower part of the front of the house consist of two rooms that in the past were used for ether storage or animals. Outside these “rooms” is what could loosely be called a yard, which is about 2 meters wide and bounder by a meter to 1.5 meter drop down to the next terrace.  The problem is that this so called yard is not level in fact it drops by almost 1 meter from one end to the other.

So we plan to level this ground and use the opt unity to construct better access to the terrace below. To do this we need to build up the rock walls and add a ramp.

So the first thing to do is dismantle the rock wall so that we can build the ramp.

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Once we have the walls done the we need to bring the ground level up to meet the house and convert this yard into some thing that we can use and that will not break ankles…