Graded grains make finer flour

This week: Foggy bottoms; Graded grains make finer flours; Designing with stone;

We’ve not had the best of starts to the week.

Bearing in mind that my Dol house is almost the last house on a narrow rural lane, one of the kittens managed to get hit by a car, belonging to my neighbours at the very end house.

First thing on Monday we were at my local vets. Fortunately nothing is broken, but Pongo is badly bruised and shaken.

We have Meloxoral, an oral painkiller and some antibiotic. He has spent the week tucked up in bed, with a hot water bottle.

I’ve told him that he has used one of his lives and now only has 8 left so he must be more careful!

He is still very wobbly today and has spent the day sunbathing – I mean who wouldn’t – but obviously he has had a nasty knock.

I must pay tribute to Doctor’s Prosper and Fabian for the standard of care that they provide at their Lota veterinarska ambulanta clinic.

On Thursday morning, the neighbourhood Tom cats were paying unwelcome attention to Pongo’s sister Bljsac.

Although the kittens are only just seven months old and Bljsac is small, weighing just over 2 kilograms, she has obviously come into season for the first time.

I called the Vets and they asked if I could bring her in at 11am for spaying. We were there a little before 11 and I left her for the surgery.

Picking her up at 2pm, she was still sleeping soundly, but the operation was successful. By Friday morning, she was back to normal and bouncing everywhere.

There are very few veterinary practices where you can get a same day service like this and their standard of care is absolutely first class. Thank you!

Foggy bottoms

It’s been over 20ºC on several days this week. In Stari Grad, the weather station there has recorded 25ºC, so we are rapidly moving from early to middle spring weather.

The very warm days has meant some radiation fog in the mornings. As soon as the sun appears over the hills to the east the fog quickly burns off.

I came across this fantastic time lapse video of fog this week in Abu Dhabi. This is a city I know well from my 8¾ years of living there. It does show what can be done by someone with an eye for a good photo.

My Myrobalan plum is in full blossom this week. Not only does it look fantastic, but it also has a lovely “plummy” scent.

My show of blossom rivals the Japanese Hanami.

I’ve taken some photographs of one particular branch, as the buds swell and then burst open.

If I had thought a little more about it, I should have set up the timelapse camera. But then there is always next year!

One of my indicator species for my Springwatch calendar is a clump of daffodils under the Šipac tree on the edge of the drupe orchard. This week they have their first flowers.

These are not the first daffodils in the garden to flower, but they are the ones I record flowering dates for each spring.

They have come into flower on exactly the same date as last year.

Graded grains make finer flowers

Aside from the interuptions, my week has been about digging out the path around the workshop.

I had to ask my friend Cvjetko about how deep I should go. We settled on 40cm below DPC.

With an eye on the weather forecast, on Tuesday set up the rotary riddle. But I have to say it has been hard work digging out the soil for the path’s foundations.

Although this was the fold yard, there is just so much stone in the soil.

After every two or three shovel fulls’, I have to use a pickaxe to break up a bit more of the soil, before hefting it into the machine.

The resulting soil is beautiful and much too good to waste, when most of my soils are thin and impoverished.

However I think that by volume, close to 50% of what I dig out is stone. Like the old saying goes, “Graded grains make finer flowers!”

The stones come in all sizes from large to small pebbles. The biggest pieces of stone I remove by hand. The medium to small stones are removed by the riddle, leaving me with a large pile.

It has taken me all week to dig out around a single cubic metre though, so the going has been very hard, but at least I can now see progress.

Designing with stone

Thinking ahead to the next week’s work, I have been moving some of the stones which were left where they came out of the ground, when I dismantled the very old buildings.

I drew a sketch of how I want the path down into the top orchard to look.

There is one very large, flat stone, more than a metre ling and 25cm thick that I am going to use as a step from the path to the route down into the orchard.

A number of these stones are in the way of where the path round the workshop will go, so I have been moving them in preparation.

With some of them weighing in excess of 500 kilogrammes, I need to move them carefully and slowly. It does call for lots of spinach.

Tonight is full moon – the end of another month here in Dol. This is the photograph I have just taken as the moon rises over the hills to the east. NCG