Ready, Steady, Plant (next week)
This week: Dealing with damp; Photo’s everywhere; Ready, Steady, Plant (next week);
At long last, the daytime temperatures are beginning to cool slightly.
Today (Saturday) it has “only” been 30°C, compared to the 36°C of a week ago.
The temperatures this summer have been brutal. Then this week I saw a report from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reporting that the summer of 2024 has been the hottest on record globally and for Europe.
“The global-average temperature for the past 12 months (September 2023 – August 2024) is the highest on record for any 12-month period, at 0.76°C above the 1991–2020 average and 1.64°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average. These values are identical to those recorded for the previous two 12-month periods, ending in June and July 2024”.
“The average temperature for European land for August 2024 was 1.57°C above the 1991-2020 average for August, making the month the second warmest August on record for Europe after August 2022, which was 1.73°C above average”.
“European temperatures were most above average over southern and eastern Europe, but below average over north western parts of Ireland and the United Kingdom, Iceland, the west coast of Portugal, and southern Norway”.
There are huge concerns for the Mediterranean region because the climate is altering faster than anywhere else in Europe, with for example the annual sea level rise each year being measured in millimetres.
In the past, sea level rise was measured over decades, now it can be seen in a single year.
We had some much needed rain early on Friday morning. A passing thunderstorm deposited 36 mm. Earlier in the week I had had the irrigation in in the citrus orchard for an extended period because once again, leaves of the oranges and lemons were indicating the trees were under severe stress.
After the rain they looked like this.
Even the Prickly Pear Cactus have swelled up in a day.
The small citrus orchard is some 700 square metres, so 36 litres per metre is 25,000 litres. I shouldn’t need to irrigate again this season.
I also noticed that my Pomegranate are ripening, and once again our Edible Doormice are feasting on the fruits inside.
With fewer sunny hours, I decided to remove one of the covers from the solar water heater tubes, so I was up on the roof to remove it for the winter.
What did disturb me was that I saw around some of the tubes that there is some serious corrosion of the outer shell of the tank.
There is an inner pressure vessel, which then has an outer cover of mild steel and it is this which is corroding.
Having been up on the roof since September 2015, I did not expect such a short life span. The corrosion was not noticeable when I was up servicing the tubes in February.
Clearly I am going to have to contact the makers to see what I need to do… Just another job to add to the list then!
Dealing with damp
One of the things in the Konoba I have been thinking about, is how to attach some book shelves to the walls.
I have been pondering over how to accomplish this for some time, because the bare stone is uneven and because of the fire damage, the stones easily fracture.
This makes fitting anything difficult because where you need to drill is usually predetermined, so there is no choice about where holes need to go.
Then I remembered that I had a free standing oak book case in the furniture store. When I went in, I was somewhat surprised that I had damp mould on a number of things.
This is in yet another Konoba, with two walls completely under ground and a third partially under ground. The inside was gutted and refurbished when I first moved in and I put Euro pallets on the floor to make sure furniture and boxes were not in contact with the ground.
Over the last winter I had a dehumidifier running in there too. Even so, it seems as though some cardboard boxes have absorbed moisture.
In one of the buildings I purchased last year, I have a lot of dry space, although it is taken up with the previous owners furniture and belongings.
I brought boxes and anything which seemed damp out from the Konoba into the courtyard to dry in the sun and then began to dismantle old furniture to make a new, dry storage area.
On the one hand I feel sad that I am dismantling this old furniture, to burn in the wood stove. On the other hand, there is no market for 50 year old second hand furniture. So it is dismantle and burn or send to land fill!
Most of the grey mould came off with a stiff brush and then with some polish, the shelves were as good as new.
Clearly I need to add this Konoba to my list of winter work, to stop the rising damp!
Where old buildings, without foundations and damp-proof courses, are being brought up to modern standards, there are still going to be issues which will have to be dealt with…
Photo’s everywhere
Earlier this week I was looking for a couple of clean boxes to transfer things into from boxes which were slightly damp.
I keep cardboard so I can lay it in the orchards to supress weeds, so I was a little surprised to find a box that was still full.
Inside are several lever arch files which are full photographic negatives. I really thought I had found all my photographs!
I noticed in amongst the files that there was a box of Agfa slides. So pulling it out, I was curious about what was inside.
I’ve never really liked Agfa film and have always used Kodak, so I knew they weren’t my photographs.
There was a whole set of glass mounted negatives with just a small number of card mounted slides.
Earlier in the year I purchased Vuscan software, to help automate the process of scanning slides, negatives and prints.
I have tried the software a couple of times, but it has a difficult learning curve, because of the number of options.
Sometimes it is easier if scanning software is mostly automatic. However to properly archive these old photographs, the scan needs to be done just once and at very high resolution.
I did a couple of scans but they were not automatic and the results were poor because of the state of the slides.
As close as I can work out, they were taken in 1962, however the glass mounts were a little grubby.
I used a jewellers screwdriver to open the slide holder and remove the negative. Next I put the separate negatives in a frame ready for scanning.
The actual scanning still did not go to plan. The software recognised the individual frames, but still would only do one scan at a time.
Each slide is being scanned six times, twice for each colour, returning a file of 45Mb.
So I need contact the software people to see where I am going wrong.
Ready, Steady, plant (next week)
I do like home grown vegetables, straight from the garden or polytunnel and this is the time of year to plant some winter varieties.
In one of my small terraces I purchased last year, I cleared weeds in the spring and planted onions.
They were planted too late and the heat and lack of rain means they haven’t grown. But being onions sets, they may come back this autumn.
This area would make an ideal small kitchen garden, however after the rain, I could see than clumps of grass were beginning to grow again. The area is 95 square metres, but fully half is dominated by three old Almond trees and a windbreak of wild Pistachion bushes.
After the thunderstorm early on Friday, I thought I would try and dig out the grass before it gets a hold again.
This plot has probably not had a crop of any kind for 40 or more years.
Even after 36 mm – 36 lt/m² of rain just a day ago, when I was digging, the soil was still very dry once you were a spit deep.
After a little over an hour I was drenched in perspiration, such that I gave up at 11 o’clock. it was just too hot to continue.
My plans for digging and planting all in one go have altered a little.
I think I probably need to run my mini rotavator over the area, cutback some of the Almond and wild Pistachio then plant the seeds I have.
This week I was reading about soaking bean seeds in water for 24 hours before planting.
The seeds have a very hard outer shell and according to several websites, you can jump-start germination by soaking in luke warm water.
Ideally I should try a control, planting some pre-soaked beans, with some just straight from the packet, but I think I’ll leave that for another year.
At the moment, I would just like to get some seeds in the ground, while it is still warm and before the next thunderstorms roll in next week… NCG