Tonight Dol doesn’t sleep!

This week: Last Sunday’s storm; Finishing the kitchen bed; Some deconstruction;

I am writing this at 11am on Saturday, having just come inside, covered in a fine film of persperation.

There is 80%” humidity this morning, which when combined with a temperature of 33°C and almost no wind, all mean that there is little evaporative cooling!

Being in the hot sunshine was probably not the most sensible of decisions. However I have some outside jobs which I really need to be getting on with.

The rain allowed me to ease off the irrigation for a couple of days. However being followed by more heat means that I am still watering to keep things alive.

We have another hot week in prospect next week and then as mid August is reached, the daily temperatures should start to subside.

I have picked the first of my Figs. These are mostly the Brown Turkey variety, a large and juicy fig with the flavour of caramel.

Tonight is the night when Dol doesn’t sleep.

This week has been the annual village festival, the Puhijada. The Puh is our native Edible Dormouse, the size of a squirrel with huge eyes and a long bushy tail. The Puh also has a penchant for Pomegranate.

They are a very secretive, normally nocturnal mammal which I have seldom seen. However they were considered to be a delicacy by the Romans. Personally I like to see them in the wild, not on a plate!

This year sees the 21st issue of Tartajun, the village magazine too.

I have just been down to the park. The area is crowded with families and kids. The children’s entertainment will start shortly. Meanwhile the sound stage is all set up ready for the start of the music, singing and dancing.

The music will start around 20:30 and will continue until 04:00 tomorrow. The wind direction is from the stage, so I know I will not get much sleep tonight and the rest of the village will be the same….

Last Sunday’s storm

We had a fast moving thunderstorm on Sunday evening, which brought a very useful 22 mm of much needed rain.

I run a weather group on Facebook, to provide accurate local weather forecasts, just for the Dol area.

The problem is that the nation forecasts are both general and cover a huge area. Doubtless they will be accurate somewhere in Dalmatia, however that is a 350 km long and 60 km wide strip from Zadar to Dubrovnik.

For the islands the forecasts are seldom anywhere close! This is because of the way that the unique topography affects our local weather.

On Sunday morning the weather service issued a warning for the possibility of severe thunderstorms for Dalmatia, so I was watching on Blitzortung, a website where you can see active thunderstorms.

In the mid-afternoon I could see some small storms forming on the coast of Italy near Pescara. With a south westerly airflow, the storms would move across the Adriatic towards Hvar, so I kept watching.

By teatime, there was a “squall line” of five storms, three large, very active ones, moving across the central Adriatic towards the islands.

From various weather web sites, I could see they were fast moving and would arrive in about an hour. I posted a thunderstorm warning on the Facebook group.

One of my jobs was to go round and check my home. Battening hatches and closing water tight doors is the euphemism I like to use because it conjures up an image in people’s minds. I don’t have any “watertight doors”!

After I finished, I could hear the thunder rumbling. The clouds were dark, ominous and racing across the sky from the south west.

As I took the last photographs, the first rain was falling, so I retreated inside.

The rain was beating down and cloud to cloud “sheet” lightning was flashing everywhere. However there were also ground lightning strokes.

Although we perceive that lightning moves from the clouds to the ground, high speed cameras have shown that lightning streamers reach up from the ground, until they make contact with a descending “stepped leader” from a cloud.

Once contact between the two is made, an electrical path opens with the current passing along grounded streamer to earth.

That is the flash we see as the current discharges along a conductive channel, from the ground upwards.

The sound of thunder is the air around the high voltage discharge violently expanding and then contracting.

At 20:12 there was a blinding flash outside my window, followed by the instantaneous thunder and all the power went out. Fairly normal for here because our electrical supply is all on over-ground pylons.

The power was out for around 40 minutes. However because of the frequency of power cuts on the island, I have all my critical infrastructure protected with UPS units (Uninteruptable Power Supplies), so my weather stations, internet routers and network storage all remained powered up.

For 30 minutes between 20:05 and 20:35, the storm was over Dol. At one point the hourly rainfall rate was 105mm per hour.

Dol only received 20mm of rain, but a little to the east, the storm intensified and dropped 70mm of rain. This is a video from Slobodna Dalmacija.

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=766105582452654

Within the range of my lightening detector, I recorded more than 200 electrical discharges.

Finishing the kitchen bed

It seems ages ago that I started digging bulbs out of the kitchen bed and riddling the soil to remove stones and debris.

One of the objectives was to reduce the soil level because after heavy rain, water and soil simply ran off, over the wall and onto the patio.

That worked because after more rain on Monday, the bed was flooded, but water didn’t overtop the wall.

I found some bulbs were starting to break their summer dormancy this week, so needed to be planted PDQ.

This spurred me on to finish the annoying, inaccessible corner (on the left) behind the old grape vine.

First job was to move a circular stone which I am told was a “salting stone”.

This was a stone used to weigh down fish inside a barrel of brine. Brine was used as a preservative and the fish would be stacked in the brine, in a small barrel and the stone placed on top to keep the fish under water. This ensured salt penetration and good preservation.

The shape is too perfect to be a natural occuring formation. It weighes about 20 kg and I moved it to somewhere it can be decoration.

Digging out the bed did not take too long and revealed some more bulbs which I didn’t know about.

Once the soil was riddled to remove the stones, I replaced it.

Next job was with some paper and a pencil to plan which bulbs to plant where.

What I want to have is some successional spring colour next year. I am also using the design principle of tallest at the back, smallest at the front.

I planted the December flowering Narcissus papyraceus, Paper White, which are Mediterranean natives. These perennial bulbs are quite large, however what I really like is that they bloom in the middle of our winter, on the shortest days of the year.

In front of them I planted a row of Daffodils, then a row of Hyacinth.

Right at the front I planted the Crocus, another early bloomer.

At the back I planted a patch of wild Gladioli, another Mediterranean native. These readily self seed and have brilliant pink flowers in early summer.

There are already sprouts of the wild Asparagus growing. This is the second crop of the year.

Some deconstruction

Rain has a habit of getting in where it is least wanted. It show up where there are any imperfections and is a good warning signal!

Following the rain I noticed that my covered walkway between my buildings was wet, as were the roof timbers which hold up the plastic corrugated roof sheets.

This always was a temporary fix until I can get my building permission. The Architect told me this week there was no progress on that front!

When I looked at the roof timbers, they are bowed downwards.

I built this roof in January 2020, so it has been up for five and a half years. By and large it has done a good job of keeping the walkway dry.

However as the timbers have bowed, so the water now pools on the roof and comes through the joints between the sheets.

It is unsurprising. I used cheap timber (remember it was temporary) which were 4 metres long and 5 x 3 cm in profile. They were OK, but over time and with exposure to the weight from above, their unsupported length and being exposed to the elements, they are now bowed.

We have some 10 days without any forecast rainfall, so I decided to start removing the plastic sheeting so I can remove the timbers and build with something a little more substantial.

With temperatures still above 30°C from 11:00 every day, the window for comfortable working each morning is short.

I used the correct fittings, so unscrewing the fixings which hold the sheets in place is not difficult.

What I have found though, is that the corrugated plastic sheeting is deteriorating and where the fixings were, the acrylic sheets are cracking.

Materials here have a very short life her, outside in the fierce Mediterranean sun

Something which in Northern Europe would last 20 years, will start to fail after five.

Do I have a plan? Well sort of, may be… I am going to remove the roof, then the bowed timbers and at that point see what I need to do, to make a stronger support framework.

This in the hope that I don’t have to wait another five years before I get my building permission! NCG