Just a pure fabrication

This week: Bring more wood!; Siding and doors; Just a pure fabrication; Sow x weeks before the last frost; We are now in early spring…; Polytunnel postscript;

I have had another busy week here in Dol.

More building, more woodwork and more problem solving, however as you will read further on, I have finished the Polytunnel project.

There is something satisfying when a project finishes, even though there are several more which are already under way, or waiting to start.

A walk around the orchards and flower borders at the moment reveal there are a lot of spring plants in flower.

The Hyacinth are at their best and fill the air with their intoxicating scent.

A little further on my Mānuka, the Tea Tree, Leptospermum scoparium, has a lot of flowers. This is a New Zealand evergreen which will eventually be a two meter tall shrub.

Something else which have been in flower all winter are the Salvias. This is the Lialac flowered Salvia leucantha, the Mexican Bush Sage.

And in another corner the Violets have come into flower this week.

Bring more wood!

I spent all of Monday fixing wooden rails to the Polytunnel for attaching the side screen material.

In winter this material will be heavy, clear polythene sheeting and in summer I will change it to shade netting.

I have been thinking about how to attach the sheeting, to make it easily demountable.

In the end I decided that a second wooden bar on the outside, attached with Coach Bolts and wing nuts and sandwiching the sheeting would be the best way.

I have ordered the Coach Bolts so in the interim I decided to use 60mm screws.

First thing on Tuesday I was down at Volat and came home with another six lengths of 4 meter long wooden roofing lats.

I already had the polythene sheeting and it took the rest of the day to get the sheet into place.

What did surprise me though, was that even though the ends of the Polytunnel were still unglazed, the thermometer recorded an immediate increase in temperature.

I am using shaped wooden wedge to trap the polythene sheet inside the “H” strip on the last piece of polycarbonate sheeting. This is then held in place by the first length of roofing lat.

Manoeuvring a 9 by 4 meter length of polythene sheeting was at times not the easiest of tasks.

However I found that if I used my office paper stapler, I could hold the sheeting in place while I tensioned and fastened everything.

At the end of the day, I was happy that what I thought was going to be a very difficult job actually went quite well.

I didn’t get as far as putting stones on the bottom of the sheet, but apart from that, this part of the project is finished.

Siding and doors

I looked at the amount of work (I thought) was required to finish the ends of the Polytunnel and believed that I could have everything finished in a day.

So I started at 8.15 on Wednesday morning, all fired up and spent the whole day working on just the east end.

Did I finish? Well, er, no, not exactly. That is, I still had the door to finish.

It was after 16:30 when I stopped because the light was failing.

The problem was that there was a lot of marking, cutting, fitting of the polycarbonate sheeting and then cutting little more.

One again there were problems with the plastic “H” strip, which has caused me so many problems with this project.

Several times while I was sliding a panel into place it popped out of the holding strip and I had to start all over again.

There is something seriously wrong with the design of the system, when it causes so much stress for the person fixing the polycarbonate panels.

Starting again at 8am on Thursday and bypassing lunch, I fixed the last screws in the door at 17:15. With a clear sky, it is the first time this year that I have been able to work past 5pm and be able to see.

So what I planned on doing in one day has taken two full days. The good news is that the project is now finished.

Some times though I feel completely inadequate!

I came across this time lapse video of a DiYer building a log cabin in Alaska. There are no gaps anywhere…

Just a pure fabrication

Once again I have had to be inventive when securing the small panels at the top of the end walls of the polytunnel.

There is a thick, curved wire hoop frame at both ends, however I needed a means of securely fixing the top of the curved panels so they are not dislodged in wind.

I bought some coils of steel fixing tape, which I cut into 12 cm lengths, then pre formed one end.

The tape easily slides between the roofing sheets and the wire hoops. Then I bent the tape to fit the steel hoops and drilled the top panel to take M5 bolts.

The last job was fixing a nut and securing the tape. The result does not look particularly elegant, but the panels are unlikely to move very far.

On Friday I picked my first crop from the Polytunnel and made lunch.

These are Fava / Broad Bean tips, which were sautéed in olive oil with onions, garlic and a little Soy sauce. Then I sprinkled some grated Parmesan on top.

There is nothing like the taste of fresh vegetables, an hour after being picked!

I will have wait a few weeks for the beans and some Ful Medames Ar: فول مدمس.

Sow x weeks before the last frost

It has been several years since we had a real, proper frost here in Dol.

Frost is water vapour that has cooled and turned to ice on a surface that has cooled past the dew point.

Unsurprisingly, the dew point is the temperature where water vapour in the atmosphere turns back to a liquid, and moisens all surfaces.

Weather forecasts often show the dew point temperature, which because of the cold north wind this weeek, has hovered around 0ºc.

There are different kinds of frost, but the one which horticulturists hate is an Air Frost.

This is when cold air is not confined to a layer just above the ground’s surface, but extends upwards and will kill blossom on trees.

Because of the influence that the Adriatic Sea has on the island, our effective last frost date is the 14th February, an easy date to remember.

However for the past couple of years, there have been less than six nights each winter when the outside air temperature recorded on my weather station has been below zero celsius, and then often it has been just -0.5ºC, so less than one degree.

This week I brought out my seed’s tin and have started to think about what I will plant in my heated propagator, to go into the polytunnel.

We are now in early spring…

The sun is now markedly higher in the sky, above the tree line to the south of my home.

However with lots of rainy days, the sun hasn’t really started warming the ground yet. Even so, the plants think spring has arrived.

It has been several years since we had a real, proper frost here in Dol but there still three weeks to go before February 14th, and that is a statistical date not one set in concrete.

On one warm afternoon this week I went for a walk along my regular route where I am surveying the flora and fauna throughout the seasons.

The only wild flowers which were visible were Daisies, whose white petals shone like beacons against the green background.

I did see a lot of moss and lichen growing, the product of the past very wet two months.

Going a little further I was surprised to see a number of Almond trees in full blossom. This is still January and even for here, the blossom is way too early.

On my walk I saw a a number of Red Admiral butterflies. The fly here all year round and judging by the slightly frayed wings, this fella is one of last summer’s brood.

Polytunnel postscript

When I started building my polytunnel last autumn, I never dreamt it would take almost four months to complete.

All the rain didn’t help with progress and there have been other projects too.

I now need some time to understand how the polytunnel will function.

On Friday, the first full day in operation, the afternoon temperature inside was almost 23ºC, which made it very pleasant to work on clearing up the construction debris.

In a shady corner I have installed a digital thermometer which is connected to my weather station, however the soil moisture probe will not transmit data back to the base station.

I need to order another thermometer for the orchard outside because there is some 70 meters distance between the main sensors in the citrus orchard and the polytunnel.

I don’t understand why it has got so cold at night, and whether the orchard outside is also cold.

Because the stone wall is very damp I suspect it is not absorbing and then releasing stored solar warmth. The inside temperature both rises and falls quickly.

I did a few of the finishing touches, for example making some wooden door handles.

The felines have already given the construction their “thumbs up” and I follow he sage advice to “let sleeping cats lie”, even when they are in the beans… NCG