It’s a jungle out there

This week: It’s a jungle out there; There are always jobs to do; Kitchen woes;

The sun is at its lowest point in the sky and only touches my gardens and orchards between 08:50 and 12:45.

The main part of the village on the other side of the valley gets winter sunshine until around 16:00, so substantially more.

I’m waiting for some parcels to come – things I ordered during the Black Friday sales. Suddenly a very American day of discounts, after the Thursday of Thanksgiving, has become a worldwide excuse for shops and on-line stores to heavily market items.

You have to be careful though, because not every discount is genuine.

We have had a reasonable week for weather with a little light rain and bright clear days. The daytime temperatures have been around 14°C but nights have dropped to 7°C.

It is a time to do inside jobs, catch up with computer work and get ready for 2025.

I have started my “Springwatch” calendar, the earliest I have ever begun making observations.

Whilst I was in the Top Orchard, I saw that several clumps of Narcissi have flower buds. They usually open between Christmas and New Year, but I think this year they will be open next week.

Weeds continue to grow and the Daffodils which I planted last week and brought inside to force have already begun to sprout. It does help that they are in a black bin bag in the Dining room, where the wood stove is.

One of my Saturday morning jobs has been to cut up some pallet wood, so it is already for burning.

These are fairly flimsy pallets, not the EURO standard, but none the less the wood burns well and gives off a lot of heat, even though being thin, it burns quickly.

It’s a jungle out there

If it wasn’t cold, you wouldn’t know it was winter!

Although some plants have gone dormant and in the main, leaves have fallen from my deciduous trees, other plants are still very much growing.

When I was putting the last of the wind protection around my citrus trees, I realised that along the back of two trees, shrubs have expanded blocking access. It looks like a jungle!

The two shrubs in particular are Lemon verbena, Aloysia citrodora and Rosemary. The Lemon verbena is almost evergreen here and clearly likes its spot under the arbour.

I had to cut back some quite thick branches, just to be able to get around the cirtus frame, but I came out smelling of lemons…

The other plant is a Mediterranean native, the Rosemary, Salvia rosmarinus.

This has grown very “woody” but still produces a lot of growth every year and masses of fragrant purple flowers.

Once they were cut back, I was able to hang the netting.

Weeds are still growing and in digging up some roots, I also discovered I had dug up some of my Rhubarb. It has been so dry this year, I have had none to harvest and had forgotten exactly where it was.

The three small roots which I found when I was replanting the main stem, I have potted up and put into my heated propagator. They were really small bits of root, but I hope that with some warmth and TLC, I might be able to get them to grow.

There are always jobs to do

Back at the beginning of August, I replaced the cover on my mini digger. This week I was surprised to see that the cover has lasted just four months and has ripped from end to end.

The previous cover lasted some two years.

We have had some strong wind and I suspected that that, combined with sharp corners on the safety frame were the problem.

I bought a new 4 metre length of grey polythene from Volat in Stari Grad and fitted it this week.

First I cannibalised a polystyrene box to protect the corners. These were fixed in place with 100-mile-an-hour tape – so called because it will stay in place at 100 miles per hour (160kph)….

I also put polystyrebe over the end of the lifting arm, where there were also some sharp corners.

However it was as I was unrolling the new plastic cover onto the digger , that I discovered a possible reason.

As the new cover was over my head, I could see that there were manufacturing flaws in it. Every metre of so, the plastic was so thin that you could see daylight through it.

There is no point in taking it back, because the flaws were throughout the length, so the whole roll will be the same. But it does mean that this cover may not last long either!

I need to try and find a proper machinery cover for the digger. The problem is that there is no market for machinery covers, so I’ll probably finish up with a car cover.

Kitchen Woes

I have a rice cooker and plugged it in this week, in the kitchen.

My kitchen sockets are on a separate ring main, as per the IEEE standards, so I was a little surprised when I came back to check on the progress of my rice and found the cooker had switched off.

I quickly discovered that the problem was with a block of three 220v 13Ah plugs and the fuse appeared to have blown.

All my sockets are hidden under the kitchen cabinets and because of the mix of plugs on appliances, I have both Type F and Type G plugs (two pin and three pin) I use a multi pin block.

I have changed most plugs to the Schuko type F, but there are a few things with have a three pin, moulded transformer, so I need both types.

After isolating the kitchen circuit at the consumer unit, I dismantled the block. Immediately I saw that the the fuse unit had partly melted.

This is one of those fuses where a red button pops out if the fuse trips and you push the button in to reset. I don’t have any spares so I used a standard 13Ah cartridge fuse and holder as a replacement instead.

This type of fuse usually is usually encased in a plug, so because of limited space, I protected it with electrical tape.

After testing and then closing and securing the block, everything was working again.

I don’t know how these little button fuses work, but I suspect that the failure was in the unit, not in the rice cooker. This is because I have used the rice cooker since, plugged into a different socket, without any problem.

When I tested a toaster, which draw a lot of power, there was no problem with my new set-up. NCG