End of the first week of January and as I was walking out of the veggie plot I could hear a loud buzzing sound. Took me a while to locate it, but eventually I found this.
I’ve no idea what she can have been doing out so early. Hopefully she’ll survive until Spring, but we’ve probably still got the coldest parts of the year to come.
I’ve not even got it finished yet (yeah, I know), but some of last year’s peppers are still looking healthy despite multiple frosts, which is certainly not the case in the polytunnel and even the ones in the greenhouses are looking a bit marginal. So I’m really quite pleased with this.
The path to one of our external doors is decking which is now starting to degrade quite badly so I have decided to replace it with paving slabs. And by chance I was offered these reclaimed ones for very little money at all. There should be plenty to do the path and a few left over for other purposes. I’ll still need to buy other materials, but this has saved me quite a bit.
It’s a Spider Farmer SF2000 Evo grow light. Hopefully it will help get my peppers off to a better start this year. We shall see.
As well as looking at this one I also considered similar products by Mars Hydro and Viparspectra, but they all seemed much of a muchness and I got a fairly good deal on this one in Black November. The proof of the pudding however is in the eating of the peppers that the plants produce.
Because if you’re going to sell it, you need to know that it’s at least 5% acetic acid.
Titration is the way forward and whilst it used to be possible to use a wine titration kit (which is actually intended for testing tartaric acid content, I believe) they don’t seem to be available any more. The only one I managed to find for sale had actually been discontinued.
So I put together this kit to allow us to do our own. It contains:
Oh, and a set of instructions that I found on Andrew Lea’s rather excellent UK cider website.
I posted recently about my attempts to grow new potatoes for Christmas. Well, sadly, due to my inattention, that didn’t quite go to plan. I failed to move the plants into the greenhouse before the first frost, which killed the plants.
So I lifted all the potatoes anyhow. I don’t feel that they did too badly. We just had them a month early.
I love Peppadew peppers and for a few years now I’ve been trying to produce my own. It’s not possible to buy their seeds, but the common belief on the interwebs is that they’re actually Malawi Piquante peppers which are quite a tough variety to grow as they seem to need a very long season. Several times I’ve got them to the point of producing unripe fruit only to have the plants killed off by the first Winter frost.
The weather this year seems to have worked in my favour however. I did still have quite a few unripe peppers that I decided I’d use anyhow, but I also had some ripe ones.
I’ve pickled them in a sweet pickle using cider vinegar, honey, garlic, ginger and a few fenugreek seeds. If anything, they taste even better than the originals.
We didn’t get many butternut squashes this year. Probably in part because I didn’t do much watering of the vegetable plot. Which is ironic in the light of the previous posting. If I had watered the plot we might not have “wasted” quite so much water.
Anyhow, whilst clearing up some of the plants that were “done”, I found this under the leaves.
There’s a good few meals in that, I reckon 😀
Our water supplier read the meter at the start of last September which prompted a letter to me just before they sent the bill saying, “Errr, your bill is going to be quite big. Do you have a leak?”. “Quite big” indeed. The thick end of £7,000 for six months’ supply to a house with five (occasionally six) adults living in it, plus a dozen chickens outside!
So then the “fun” started. The supplier estimated that we were losing somewhere in the region of twenty-nine cubic metres of water per day! Given the meter readings used, the leak must have been happening since July at the very latest and even in one of the driest Summers ever, I’d seen absolutely no sign of a leak. In fact absolutely all the grass in our garden and the surrounding area was yellow and crunchy.
A minor complication for us is that when the house was put on mains water (until the mid-1980s I believe it only had a well) there was no easily accessible water main. So the water supply comes from the main in a nearby road to the meter which is about twenty metres inside the grounds of the local cricket club. From the meter it winds through the cricket club grounds, across a field and into my veggie plot down to the house. A total of about 300 metres. And no-one knows quite where most of it is. How do you go about finding a leak in that lot?!
At first I thought it might be here, where I assume the pipe crosses the field, but by this time we’d had some heavy rain, so perhaps not.
Fortunately our insurers helped out and their contractor eventually decided the leak was on our property, under the steps up to the veggie plot. After some to-ing and fro-ing, just before Christmas digging commenced to try to find it.
And eventually we did.
It was actually necessary to undermine the concrete drive a little to get to it, but at least we didn’t have to have the drive itself cut into pieces.
The repair was fairly straightforward and had to be done quickly to get the water supply back on.
After which the job could be done properly, backfilling with some sand before the spoil after checking that the meter was no longer spinning like a dervish!
Now I’ve taken some readings to get an idea of our current water consumption, the supplier wants further proof before dealing with our claim for a leakage allowance because they’re even lower than before the leak became obvious. I suspect based on the damage to the pipe that the leak may have been happening at a low level for much longer than we realised.
We’ve had this somewhat post-modern light fitting in the stair well of the barn conversion for a while and my wife had been nagging me to replace it with something more to her liking.
The only problem was getting to it.
I tried a fair size scaffold, but it really didn’t feel stable to me.
In the end I cut the cable in the loft and attached a long length of flex that almost reached the floor. I also taped the flex to a similar length of metal chain and dropped the pair through the hole in the ceiling. I could then fit the new light fitting whilst standing on the floor, return to the loft and lift the entire thing up to the ceiling using the chain. Once up to the ceiling I just had to clamp the chain in position. And here it is.
Fortunately there’s only the one fitting, so there’s no chance of doing an “Only Fools And Horses” whilst dropping the fitting to clean or allow bulbs to be changed.
