The heat is on

This week: Listening to bird song; Doors and gates; Effecting repairs;

Our summer weather has really arrived.

The daily temperature maximum is now around 33°C and inside the house the temperature seldom drops below 25°C, even at night.

I wish there was a way to capture all this free solar energy and keep it, to release it in our winter!

The best time to work is between 05:30 and 9 in the morning. After 9, it is just too hot, so I retreat inside to do work.

The summer flowering plants look magnificant, however the weeds, specifically the grasses are all still growing and I have been around this week snipping the seed heads off.

Every morning I am irrigating, even so, some of my citrus are starting to show signs of stress. Citrus leaves fold and curl when they are short of water.

I think the soil in my citrus orchard is not very deep, probably only a metre above bedrock, so there is little moisture and being on Limestone, even when the roots penetrate downwards, because the bedrock is free draining, they cannot find maoisture in the rocks below.

Back at the end of April I planted the Horseradish root which I found for sale in the supermarket.

Six weeks on, it is growing well and the spear shaped leaves are growing taller every day. The root which I planted outside never looked this healthy!

The Banana pups which I separated from the parent in late March are also growing well in their pots.

So I am happy that I now understand the process of separating and potting Bananas…

So between watering and weeding, and picking the last of the early summer plums, the weeks has been fairly normal for summer!

Listening to bird song

Mornings are the part of the day I like best.

Just after sunrise, when there are no human sounds, there is just the noise of the natural world. I can sit on my patio, bathed in early morning sunshine and disappear into the world of birdsong.

So was it last Sunday morning. The Hoopoe’s are back around my home although they are here a little later than in previous years.

These are summer migrants, a striking bird, the size of a Woodpecker when you see them, with a plume of feathers on their heads.

Their call sounds like their name. There are times when two or three have been calling but none have been close enough for me to see or record.

They only call when they are perching and have an unusual head down pose as they call.

Most birds call with their head up and neck extended.

They are ground foragers, probing bare ground for insects and invertebrates with their long beaks. They nest in holes in trees, gaps in old walls and buildings, and even nesting boxes, using a ready made cavity rather than constructing something of their own.

I have occasionally seen one in my orchards, however they are more usually heard than seen.

Doors and gates

Several jobs came up this week. The first was when I was putting up the insect screen doors.

I vaguely recalled that when I took them down last year, one of the screens was going to need replacing.

I started by trying to see if I could repair the plastic mesh but quickly realised that was not going to be possible.

The old mesh has probably been in place for nine years. Almost everything made of plastic degrades under the very hight ultra-violet light we have here in summer.

As I pulled the old material off, it had become so brittle that it broke up in my fingers.

I already had a roll of new material ready, so it was just a matter of cutting some off the roll and fixing it to the wooden frame.

This was and is still a temporary door, because like so many things, I am waiting for permission for my extension, before I can get a proper conservatory structure.

So repairing is necessary, because the door does a job and whilst not pretty, it is functional and efficient.

I changed the direction of the material because cutting a lengthwise piece off the roll would result in quite a bit of spare material left over.

My experience is that I have several pieces left over from other projects, which in reality I will probably never use for anything because they are too small.

Fixing across the door meant that there was an overlapping joint in the middle. I used an adhesive to close the gap and hung the door onto the frame.

I also noticed a problem with my entrance gates. As the weather has changed from a mild and damp spring, to the baking heat of summer, the wooden gates have dried out.

At the same time, some of the outer boards have begun to lift away from the backing supports.

That suggests that the wood is untreated, however that is far from the truth.

The wooden frames and the diagonal covering have been properly painted to protect the wood from the elements when I built them.

However because the basic wood is a softwood, even after painting it absorbs atmospheric moisture, then in the summer, heat it evaporates again.

This makes the wood expand and contract, which then affects the latch. I think because I used steel pins to hold the boards down, some have probably rusted away as well, leading to the boards lifting.

Effecting repairs

I used a clamp to bring the worst board back into allignment and then fixed it in place with a Coach Bolt.

When I looked at the gates, they are no longer square. The left gate is closer to the right gate at the top of the central joint, than it is at the bottom.

I can’t immediately work out why, but that was the problem. After removing and adjusting the fittings, I screwed the Suffolk latch plate back on and got everything working agin.

The blue marks below the black shows how much I had to alter the keeper plate by, to get the latch to work again. The black is where I painted rust-proofer straight onto the fittings.

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Looking back, it was March 2016 when I built the gates, so they have been in place for a little over 9 years.

It is never a question of whether there is maintenance work to be done, rather how many jobs are outstanding at any one time! NCG