Smoke in the sky!

This week: Smoke in the sky!; When you need a tool; Labelling up; Sunset Postscript;

Today is Midsummer’s Day, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and it is hot.

I was up before 05:00 and outside irrigating whilst it was still cool. As the sun came over the hill called Hum to the east, I caught it’s first magical golden light as it lit the hillside behind my home.

On the longest day, the official sunrise is 05:15 and sunset is 20:38, fifteen hours and twenty two minutes of daylight. Actually at least an hour more because of the dawn glow which begins lighting the sky before 04:00 and the evening dusk, lasting well beyond 21:00.

Contrast that with the 21st December when sunrise is at 07:23 and sunset is at 16:22, however the sun is only over the hill at 08:45 and disappears again by 12:50.

Day length is a measly 8 hours and 58 minutes with little twilight at either end of the day.

This week has been hot again, all week. The sun is almost vertically above Dol, in a limpid blue sky, beating down with relentless heat.

Everything underfoot is scorched brown and tinder dry, with just a few of the most hardy, deep rooted weeds surviving.

I think I have lost the battle to save my second Apricot tree. It has not looked happy for some time and although I have been giving litres of water every morning, this week, the unusually small leaves have started to go brown.

What I am unable to fathom is the cause. At the base, there are several suckers which are sprouting from below ground, so under the graft union it is still very much alive.

When I scraped the bark with my finger nail, the cambium is still green underneath, but it is clearly very sick.

The Apricot next to it did this last year and by this spring was dead. When I cut the tree down, there is no sign of disease in the cross section of the trunk.

I don’t think I can save it.

On a brighter note, the first brood of Swallows have fledged this week. Two fledglings have been perching around my home all week, preening and learning their flying skills.

All too soon they will disappear on their long migration to South Africa.

Smoke in the sky!

Today is Midsummer’s Day, the longest day of the year in the north and it is hot.

There has been a Föhn wind blowing all night from the mainland. Föhn’s are hot, dry, gusty winds.

After watering I was in the orchard cutting back some Brambles.

This year, they seem to be thriving. Seeds, no doubt dropped by birds, have germinated and are growing everywhere.

It is a constant battle to cut them down. I don’t use herbicides so just keep cutting weeds back to soil level. Eventually they will die…

Shortly after 07:30 I thought I could smell smoke and looked up. The hill to the south of my home was hazy and looking around there was smoke everywhere.

Immediately stopped work and came back up to the house.

The smoke was blowing from some distance though, which was a relief. One of my biggest worries is a forest fire.

The Maquis/forest around Dol is unmanaged. There are owners but they are absentees and no one wants to take responsibility for the advancing forest.

Most of the trees are self sown and there is dense, tinder dry, impenetrable undergrowth everywhere.

Climbing up the him above my Dol house, the island of Brač was hidden by a dense wall of smoke, driven by the strong wind.

I have had my fire kit ready for a few weeks. The hose lines fully charged, boots and my Nomex overalls and gloves.

Looking on-line, I could see two of Croatia’s Canadair CL-415 water bombers had left their base at Zadar and were passing Split. A few minutes later they started attacking the fire which was around the villages of Marušići and Pisak on the mainland near to Omiš.

This is 35 km to the north east of Dol. Clearly it was a huge fire.

By late morning the Vatrogasci had the fires under control and photographs were starting to appear online.

Houses on the outskirts of the two villages have been incinerated and a number of vehicles have been burnt out.

The police and the Navy were rescuing tourists from the beaches and both villages were evacuated.

Fire has been present in the Mediterranean biome since before the dawn of civilisation. However what has changed in the very recent past, is that land is no long managed.

All the way up the hill behind my home there are terraces. Once they were for Olives, Lavender and Rosemary. If you fight your way through the underbrush there are still an odd Olive tree.

Because there has been no maintenance for 50+ years, Alepo and Black pine have moved in and the once fertile terraces have reverted to the wild.

The young people of the island move away as soon as they can, for well paid jobs elsewhere in Europe. The only employment here is in seasonal tourism and it is the dwindling number of older people who do subsistence farm. But this does not extend to maintaining these old terraces.

In the forests, a fire would keep the underbrush down and often controlled burns would be carried out. The thick bark of the native pine trees would protect them from the flames on the ground.

However once the underbruish becomes dense and up to shoulder height, if it catches fire, the heat and flames spread quickly and the pine trees catch fire too. This leaves blackened hillsides.

As climate breakdown warms the land still more, the fire season now extends into October. It is a problem which is not going to go away and every year that goes by, the underbrush grows thicker….

The smoke from this morning’s fire was visible from space, by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service satellite.

When you need a tool

I have some 2.5 metre sheets of MDF which I need to cut for a project.

MDF or Medium Density Fibreboard, and is an engineered wood product made from wood fibres, resin, and wax, formed under high pressure and temperature.

It is usually faced with a plastic composite. This makes it difficult to cut without chipping or damaging the surface.

There is a technique for cutting the material at home, however you need a circular saw blade with fine teeth and a lot of them.

I have a 140mm blade, but it is well past its “use by” date. The teeth are no longer sharp and I have a vague memory of trying to get a replacement in Split some time ago, but without success.

I also had the feeling that I had sourced a replacement, but wasn’t sure where it was in the workshop. I don’t have the machine to sharpen my own circular saw blades.

I’m more or less organised. More in that I have shelving racks which have clear IKEA storage boxes on them. Each one is for “storing” something.

Less, because over time as I have added storgae boxes, the labelling has not kept up. So some have labels and other do not.

I found the box of spare blades, but there was no spare fine tooth circular saw inside.

This led me on a two day search on various internet sites to try and find what I am looking for: a fine 100 tooth saw, with a diameter of 140 mm and a spindle size of 20 mm.

Considering I already have a saw blade of that specification, I did not expect it would be so difficult to find a replacement, or even something similar.

There are vast numbers of blades, of different makes, in different diameters, however there were just a tiny number of 140mm diameter.

Eventually after two days of internet searching, I found a 136 mm diameter with 50 fine teeth.

Looking at recommendations for MDF blades, the suggestion is 60 or 80 teeth. So it is as close as I can get. I found it on AliExpress and it will be delivered in the first week of July.

What I did find on a shelf, were my replacement bubbles for my Würth Spirit Levels.

Labelling up

As part of the “tidying up” in my workshop, I made a list of the new labels I wanted, there were 35 of them.

The next job was typing up the list into something printable.

I have done this before but although I searched all my backup files, I couldn’t find the format I created last time. I knew it was when I was in Abu Dhabi!

The problem with searching loads of backup files, is remembering the name of the file you are looking for…

I regularly index with a programme called “Where Is It”. This is an old cataloguing software programme which I bought years ago and is no longer supported.

The thing is that it still works well and will often find something in an unindexed search, when other software tools do not find what you are looking for.

My search worked and the programme very quickly found the label printing format. I had created it in February 2012, so thirteen years ago. Once I had the name, I could go straight to my file.

It was not too long a job to copy and past my typed list, into the printing format, for a trial print of the first page. I needed to make sure that the print and label size matched up. They did perfectly.

I printed off the three sheets of labels on Saturday afternoon. It will be a “Next week” job to stick the right label on the right storage box…

Sunset Postscript

Having photographed the sun coming over the hill this morning, it seemed only reasonable that I photograph the sun setting today as well – both ends of the summer solstice.

The only time I can readily watch the sun set into the Adriatic is the two weeks around the summer solstice. Without having to travel, for the rest of the year, the sun goes down behind a hill.

For the past several years, the Summer Solstice has been cloudy and so has prevented photography.

Today there was cloud over the Italian coast, so again I didn’t see the sun dip into the sea.

I have still never seen the “Green Flash” of sunset. But who knows… Maybe one of these years. NCG