Closing the doors and windows
This week: Germinating bean seeds; It doesn’t fit anywhere!; Closing the doors and windows;
We are in the middle of Autumn now. The days are comfortably warm at around 20°C however our overnight low, Friday into Saturday was just 10.1°C.
Just a week ago it was 20.4°C overnight and 30.8° during the day. I have noticed in previous years that around the Autumn equinox it is almost as though a switch is thrown and we go from hot to cool.
The 35mm of rain this week has been most welcome and bulbs and plants in the garden are starting to grow again.
Again this is an autumnal Mediterranean trait where plants go dormant in the heat of the summer and return to life once the winter wet season starts.
After the storm on Monday, I thought there might be a nice sunset, so I went up the hill behind my home for the best view. I was accompanied by the felines who had not appreciated being stuck inside while it was raining.
On the way home, as the dying rays of the sun lit the underside of the clouds, there were Mammatus cloud forms visible.
These are somewhat unusual and are caused by descending pockets of cold air from inside a storm system, breaking through the base of the cloud layer. Although you don’t often see them after a storm has passed.
The rainfall has done a lot of good. These are the Alstromeria I planted just two weeks ago.
Already they are 20cm tall.
My friendly neighbourhood Squirrel look-alike the Edible Doormice have been eating the Pomegranate Fruit too.
In the courtyard my Shropshire Damsons are almost ready for picking.
We are at the start of the headlong rush to the shortest day of the year, in three months time.
There is so much I want to do between now and then as well…
Germinating bean seeds
As I promised last week, I have planted up a couple of varieties of Broad beans this week.
In some countries these are known as Fava beans and in the Middle East and Levant are the basis of Ful mudammas, sometimes just called “fool”.
I finished preparing the beds for sowing with a strip against the south wall of the polytunnel and a strip in the east orchard.
With warm sun at the start of the week, I put a handful of bean seeds from a bought packet into a bowl of tap water, then let it stand out in the sunshine until the water was luke warm.
I left the beans in the water overnight and after about 20 hours of soaking, all the bean seeds had absorbed water and had swollen and several were staring to germinate with the root radicle clearly visible.
I needed to get a move on to plant the beans before they spoilt so put them into the polytunnel, so they should be the first to show shoots.
All I did was to poke a hole in the prepared bed, drop the seed in with the radicle end down then raked soil over the top and watered every thing in.
The east orchard was a little different. Because the sun was beating down on the area I had prepared, I waited until late afternoon before I planted the beans, so the sun didn’t immediately dry them out.
As previously, I covered the seeds with raked soil and watered them in. All this was on the 11th September. All I am waiting for now is the first shoots to appear.
This year, I am going to record exact dates when I observe the milestones and will see what difference the different planting locations make to their growth and harvest.
It doesn’t fit anywhere!
This week I have been trying to install book shelves in the Konoba.
These are modular and can be installed in several configurations which the user can choose.
They are the Oak shelves which last week I cleaned up after finding some had developed mould on damp areas.
This week I assembled them then tried out several configurations to see which would work best in the available space.
During the assembly, I found that some of the galvanised steel plates had also started to deteorate, so I used a 95% zinc spray to essentially rust proof them again.
Because the wall is concave and of rough stone, the shelves do not touch anywhere, so they are completely freestanding.
However, I need to fix the shelves to make sure they do not topple over.
To do this, I am using a 90° bracket attached to the wall and then I am bolting this to one of the shelf fixing brackets.
This way I can actually decide the best place to make the fixing, even if it is not the best place to fix the shelves.
Because the shelves will not carry heavy weights, the wall fixing is for stability more than anything. I finished the visible fixings with Dome Nuts, so at least they look nice.
The final job was to move books around and empty some more boxes to populate the shelves.
Closing doors and windows
I don’t have mechanical air conditioning, rather I use the natural air conditioning of my old buildings. They were all built with very thick walls and tiny windows.
I use differential pressure, the difference of air pressure on different sides of a building, to keep air moving inside during hot weather.
This means that I have windows and doors open on opposite side of the buildings, protected by mosquito netting, throughout the summer.
It keeps the inside cooler than out doors, although not by as much as an AC unit would.
As the temperature has dropped by ten degrees celsius this week, I have started closing the doors and windows at night to keep the warmth in.
During the day, I have some open, however I have removed the summer fly screen doors and replaced them with the winter polycarbonate doors.
At the start of the week I closed the ventilators and one end door of the polytunnel, then on Friday I closed the main door as well. The day time temperature is averaging 25°C, a drop of five degrees from last week.
I’ve also been up on the roof and have removed the second cover from the solar heating tubes.
Our autumn’s are long and drawn out, with temperatures declining steadily until January, when spring arrives and temperatures begin to rise again.
We actually need cold, to kill off the pests and diseases and to provide some winter cooling hours for the fruit trees.
So as our very short winter approaches, I feel I am gradually becoming more and more prepared. NCG