Monday is Maintenance day
This week: Monday is Maintenance day; Measure five times but cut once; A success to report; Some early Ho, Ho, Hoe;

The year is passing with frightening speed.
In eight weeks it will be Christmas and in nine, it will be the start of 2025! I just do not know where time goes…
This weekend the clocks change in Europe, moving back one hour. Where I am, we are within a minute or two of solar time, so at mid-day throughout the winter, the sun is at its zenith.
However even before the clocks go back, the nights are drawing in and we currently have just over 10½ hours of daylight. By the time the winter solstice arrives, it will be just 9 hours of daylight.
We are well into our long autumn now. This week my Virginia Creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, has started to change colour.

I have two types, one which takes on the glorious scarlet hues as the autumn progresses, and a second type which goes yellow instead of red.

Both look magnificent at the moment, as I allow them to slowly cover my old buildings.
Parthenocissus clings to walls using non-invasive sticky pads at the end of tendrils. I also have ivy, which I don’t like because its aerial roots dig into small cracks and expand. Just what you do not want on old stone walls!
The weather remains warm and wet, so many things are still in flower.
A large Buddleja davidii, which I thought I had lost in the extreme heat this summer, has bounced back and is now absolutely covered in white flower cones.

When you look at the individual flowers which make up each cone, they have tiny, brilliant orange centres.
Even my cerise Buddleja looks good, although where I planted it, the soil is not very deep and it survives rather than thrives.

Buddleja are originally from Japan, but can now be found across much of the temperate world.
The local heat resistant equivalent is the Lantana camara . I have three, a pink flowered variety, an orange flowered specimen and an unusual one with golden yellow flowers.

They also have enjoyed the recent rains and the continuing warm sunshine.
The Bougainvilla continues to flower profusely, but as well as these perennials, I also have the autumn flowering annual called Morning Glory or Ipomea.

They are from the Convolvulus family, but unlike the wild Convolvulus in the orchards, the Ipomea is quite well behaved, doesn’t seed and spread very far, but produces these fantastic flowers in the morning.
By lunchtime they have closed.
Monday is Maintenance day
But then so is Tuesday and Wednesday too…
Katabatic winds are movements of air, down a slope under the force of gravity.
At school when air was described as a “fluid” I really didn’t understand. It was only much later when I started flying that I could really comprehend the concept of blocks of air, that thing we breathe and feel but cannot touch or see, flowing like water, actually were.
From now until next spring, almost every night there is the gentle movement of air from the high karst plateau of the island, down hill until it reaches the Stari Grad plain.
This is cold air and it adversely affects my wood stove chimney. The chimney has two 90° bends in it which don’t help, but even without, there is little “draw” to pull the smoke out.
So six years ago I invested in a chimney extractor fan, to create draft in the chimney so I didn’t get smoke inside the dining room every time I opened the wood stove door.

Since then It has worked flawlessly and has been maintenance free. However I noticed last winter that there was some vibration from the fan at run down.
On Monday I was up the ladder to remove the fan to clean off the accumulated wood-tar creosote.

I broke three 6mm bolts because they were rusted to their nuts. That was not a problem because my ratchet wrenches could easily overcome the strength of the bolt.
The problem was that I needed some M6 stainless steel nuts, bolts and washers. To get them I had to go to Grad Hvar to the builders merchant, the only one on the island with a good selection of stainless steel bolts.

Back at home, I used a wire brush to clean everything and lubricated the various moving parts. Then in the warm afternoon sunshine, I put everything back together and tested the fan.

It worked! Not that I had any doubt that it would.
The job was finally finished on Wednesday morning when I opened the access hatch on the flue and cleaned out the remaining baked creosote, around two litres of it. I’m now ready for the first lighting in November.

Measure five times but cut once
After a coating of mosquito repellent, it is safe to work outside in the yard. I fear there will come a time when our invasive species Tiger Mosquitoes, will be a year round problem!
I have had some thick Perspex sheeting for a while, which I want to use to make a cover for a display case.
When a friend called this week for coffee, I realised I needed to make the cover, so there is somewhere for coffee cups when I have visitors.
I set up my “B&D Workmate” in the courtyard, then put some wide timber on top, so the one square metre sheet of 5mm Perspex had somewhere to lie securely while I cut it.

After checking the measurements of the case, I marked the size of the top piece on the Perspex with a spirit marker and square edge. Each mark was checked and the cutting line was the width of the oscillating cutter blade.
Using a rigid blade on my oscillating cutter, I decided I would set up a wooden fence to guide the blade, held in place with clamps. This way, the finished clear pieces would be completely square.
I tried several speed setting for the cutter blade, but found that the slowest was the best. At higher speeds, the blade was getting hot and melting the Perspex rather than cutting it.
With all the pieces cut, everything was put away. I have some finishing to do on the cut pieces, cleaning and rounding sharp edges then I need to get some adhesive.
When I went to get my Gorilla epoxy glue, it has completely hardened over the summer. So I need to get a new tube when I am in town next week.
But if I didn’t leave something for next week, I would have nothing to do…. Or would I?!
A success to report
Three weeks ago I reported on having planted seeds from the figs I bought in the Green Market in Split.

The stallholder told me they were called Ferro Roche. I can’t find a variety with that name and I suspect it is a registered trade mark anyway.
It may be a Black Zadar, a variety from the coast of Croatia. Or perhaps a Black Mission, a variety from the Mediterranean that Spanish Missionaries took with them to the “New World” in the 16th Century.
Whatever, I soaked some seeds in warm water for 24 hours, then sprinkled them on top of potting soil in a mini greenhouse.
With a thin covering of soil on top, they have spent their days basking in the sun, gently moisened with rain water, and nights in the kitchen.
This week I thought I saw a couple of green shoots.

When I looked closely today, I could see a lot of shoots, some with the leaves still emerging from the beige seeds. I think I may have planted a few too many…
So it looks as though I will have a lot of fig seedlings to pot up very soon. I chalk this up as a success!
Some early Ho, Ho, Hoe
With the daily temperatures remaining above the average and warm sunshine combined with rain earlier in the month, the weeds are having a field day!

A lot of strimming is going on around my home and I really should get my strimmer out too. However there are places when I can’t get into with the strimmer.
My small vegetable plot where the Broad Beans are growing is one. This week I took my Dutch Hoe to the problem.

I removed all the annual weeds which have sprung up where I dug the ground in September.
Around the beans, potatoes and onion sets, I got as close as I could with the hoe blade, however there are still a lot of weeds growing close to the vegetables which I will have to remove by hand.

In the polytunnel, I have the same problem so after finishing the vegetable plot, I attacked the new growth there too.
Fighting weeds is a continuous battle here…. NCG