Guttering

We are now on the third consecutive day of rain, with the added excitement that it is now raining harder than in the weekend and blowing very hard. The poultry palace is still in the right place and I'm hoping that it stays that way.

I've worked out a key problem with my former tiny herb bed which I converted to a salad bed last week. The guttering above it is leaking something terrible. It was pouring out is afternoon (and now I expect, but I'm not going out in the squall to check).

When we first moved in, the entire back side of the house was under water and my Dad explained how to dig a trench and make a gravel bed (I forget the proper word for this) and then fill it up with soil and have better drainage. A bit more standing round staring at different times of day soon established that the water from the bathroom and the wash-house (laundry) was leaking . Which is how I got to know Ken the Plumber. Ken and I had slightly differing ideas of how quickly this job might be achieved, but he did oblige beautifully and finish it after I left him a message explaining that I was eight months pregnant, planning a home birth and wanting to have the waterworks in the house functioning properly before I went into labour.

Tonight Favourite Handyman tells me that the spouting is blocked, not broken. Which does sound much cheaper to fix. Neither of us is in any doubt as to whose job this will be. I'll buy his favourite beer when he fixes it. I try to be lovely like that.

There is water pooling all over the place. This includes the area beside the tiny once was herb and now is salad garden. This is the grassy path to get to under the house. So that needs to be dug out and gravelled I think.

Water is also pooling all around the old chook run. This area is in desperate need of being dug out and some kind of free draining paths being laid. Did I mention that I love Favourite Handyman a lot? FH thinks that the actual garden needs walls so that it can be built up a lot. I'm still wanting to try this plot without walls. I think our rainfall is so high that we almost never get the opportunity for soil to get dry and crumbly and slide down. Of course we could have a mudslide. Hmmm.

I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow. We've had visitors this morning (we could because the house is still looking pretty swish from the grand weekend cleaning project), I've made banana cake, shepherd's pie, cooked chickpeas which I'll shortly turn into hummous, done some tidying (what about that aye?), knitted, read children stories, done the school run in the rain. I don't think I could sustain this level of domesticity without any leaven of gardening for two days running.

window of sunshine

Nearly two hours without rain yesterday afternoon and I got outside for some of that time. Bliss. I held on to the experience throughout the rest of the day as I cared for my chickenpoxed children.

I tied up some of the falling over broad bean plants. Favourite Handyman has nailed some chickenwire to the fence for supporting the beans. The chickenwire doesn't spread the whole way along yet. Next time I plant broad beans, I must remember to stake with bamboo at the same time as I plant the seed so I get to stake up close without disturbing the root structure.

It was very wet underfoot, too wet to bury the bokashi or do much weeding. I pulled some docks and sent the dill to the compost.

I used up some more cupboard ingredients by making a double recipe of oat bread and a double recipe of orange and date muffins. Most of the muffins are now in the freezer for school lunches. WShat I really want is the satisfaction of some empty packets but I'm still not quite there. Making muffins is helping use up some white sugar, which we seem to have mountains of.

I don't know what I'll use up today. I still have bread and muffins left from yesterday. Too cold for sushi.

The sun is shining outside though and I can see the breeze, meaning the ground could dry out enough to bury some bokashi. The gardening experts would probably still say it is too wet to be digging, but here in wetville in Autumn/Winter/Spring, you've got to take your chances while you can. The soil moisture often doesn't ease up for for months on end.

I bought a great magazine yesterday called Grass Roots. It is an Australian magazine, with the focus on managing in drought which never quite works for me. But it is a very good magazine in ever other way. It seems to be aimed at self sufficiency enthusiasts, both in suburban and in larger contexts. Lots of reader contributions. This issue has an article on how to replace a zip in clothing, which I found really useful. We are trying to fix rather than replace things around our house. We don't have a subscription to the simplesavings website, but we are on the free mailing list and I notice that May is 'fix it' month there also.

Last week Favourite Handyman went to buy us a new cold tap for the kitchen. It had been leaking for ages and the plumber told us when he last looked (he was over for some harder plumbing work) that we'd need to replace the tap next time. Turned out a new tap started at $120 (but mixer taps, which would mean throwing out the perfectly good hot tap started at $80), so FH bought a new washer for $4 and put it on to see if we could keep it going a while longer. Our tap is now working beautifully.

We don't have the ability to make a new grate for the fireplace though, so as ours is eroded away quite a lot, we'll have to shell out the $200+ required for a new one soon.

progress

My parents in law spent four nights with us recently. Fil and Favourite Handyman achieved great things around the section. We have an old shed right on the boundary line. You can't get planning permission to build new sheds in such places anymore and it's a really useful shed. Which is rotting in places. So fil and fh moved into the neighbours' back yard for a couple of days and stripped the shed wall of weeds, waterblasted it, replaced the rotten boards, used builder's bog liberally and the painted the wall. Ten days ago I hadn't heard of builder's bog; now I know it is very useful stuff. Probably environmentally bad, but still very useful. Then fh had to go back to paid work and fil fixed numerous doors and windows so they shut properly, fixed the gate so it hangs properly and the baby can't crawl through the bottom, made me a chicken wire cage for the leaf mould I'm going to collect this Autumn, noticed another broken fence and fixed it and fixed the broken part of the sandpit. Mil played with the children which I also appreciated.

Today I transplanted leeks, rainbow chard and lettuce. I watered much of the edible garden with seaweed and comfrey brew. I also sowed seeds of kale, purple sprouting broccolli, pak choi, mizuna, corn salad, florence fennel, coriander, carrots, beetroot and rainbow chard. Now it is raining which is excellent timing.

Last night I got home to a message about a chicken coop. b-i-g excitement. I've had a wanted notice at the local supermarket for the last fortnight asking for a small chicken coop. I'm off to inspect it tomorrow.

logic comes slowly,

more slowly to some than others.

. . .

Only six months after starting to blog, the value of labelling posts has finally dawned upon me. It took a change of calendar year for me to notice that you can't bring up monthly lists of posts earlier than in the current year.

So that would leave using labels as a method of finding out when I planted the first lot of marigolds, wouldn't it?

hmmmm

So I've been back and begun to label. I've labelled the first six or so posts.

The photo at the top is two years old. For an explanation of why this blog is woefully thin on photos and that when they do come, they are invariably at least two weeks old, please see here. There is some other complication on the other computer which is amplifying the photo delay at the moment. I try not to get too involved. Anyway, Favourite Handyman is busy replacing rotten bits of wood on the wash-house/toilet window. Yes, even at 9.30pm at night.