Visit to Vonitsa

16 October 2019

We have been recommended to an eye doctor in Vonitsa, about an hour away, for our regular check-ups and eye tests, so we made an outing of it, and went to explore the castle.

Exotic critters

16 Oct 2019

It must be the season for weird and wonderful praying mantids.

  Can you see it among the twigs?

 Much easier to spot, on the wall of the house.

And this is our goji berry harvest (and a strawberry).  Better than last year's total of two berries.  More are coming each day.

Saving our Soil

15 - 17 October 2019

Having cleared the ground as much as possible, we turned to the area that we want to make into a pond.  The next task was to clear away the old wooden edging boards and shovel up any usable top soil.

 Actually, the first task was to do what Dave calls my 'invisible mending' on this pair of boots, to stop the sole flopping open and tripping me up.

 This is the area for the pond, four beds still remaining.  Dave got hold of the camera, and for once, captured some pics of me at work, clearing the rotten edging strips away.

 

It is so hot and humid - much more so than is usual at this time of year - we were taking turns doing a job, then sitting out in the shade with water and a towel.

 

 One of the beds being stripped of its topsoil.  The ground is still so hard and dry it had to be broken up with a mattock before we could shovel it.

 We decided to place the ready-to-use raised bed frame up in the moringa beds, where there should be no disruption with heavy machinery (fingers crossed), and barrowed up the topsoil to fill it.  Some of the beds are so overgrown with spreading weeds and couch grass that the soil can't be retrieved, but we filled this bed, and then I built another one quickly from decking offcuts and we filled that too.

 We have put the new beds on top of the small berms in the moringa beds, on the grounds that if we try growing some winter veg, we can then remove the beds and spread the soil out on the berms below after harvest.  Dave has christened this the 'Hodge Method'.

Preparing the ground

11 September 2019


Having returned from our two-week tour of Egypt, we slept for a couple of days, and then threw ourselves into preparing the garden for some 'hard landscaping'.  This essentially means we get a digger in to do a bit of reconstruction, ideally without trashing any of our trees or existing infrastructure.

We have decided to put a large wildlife pond in the space where we have serially failed to grow very much - the six beds at the bottom of the hill.  It is the flattest area we have, and six beds of one metre by four gives  us around four by eight metres, including spaces between beds. 

So Dave started by strimming all the long grass, so we could see what we were doing.

 This shows the edge of the beds that have never done very well, now sadly overgrown.  There is also an unused raised bed, that I made to get some decent wood used up and out of the house before the floor went in.  

 Tackling some very overgrown areas.

 While I disentangled all the growth in the mobile chicken netting, and rolled it away neatly for another time.

 While we were away, Rowan and Paris stayed in the house to look after it for us, and Rowan got on with more of the terrace, putting in these lovely steps to the south.

 This is the area I cut and cleared.  It is the bank below the house, and was full of building rubble, branches, irrigation pipes and very overgrown.  The flourishing plant at the top left of the photo is my prized comfrey, which grows wild in the UK but needs to be positioned on top of our grey water outlet to survive our summer.

Further along the bank to the right, behind the mixer, there is a lot of lime overflow from cleaning out the mixer.  This will have to be dug out.

Egypt

9 October 2011

26 September to 9 October 2019, we had a 12-day tour of Egypt, from the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza to Aswan and Abu Simbel, then Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, Abydos, Dendera, and back to Cairo.  A fabulous trip, partly with a group and partly tailor-made extra tours just for us.  We scrambled inside pyramids, and through a tiny doorway into a crypt; ascended in a hot air balloon, and spent the night on the Nile in a felucca; we travelled on the sleeper train with all its idiosyncracies, and stayed in five-star hotels with wonderful staff.  It was a very wonderful experience.  We travelled with Encounters Travel and would recommend them to anyone.  But this is not what this blog is about, so this is merely a placeholder, to explain the missing weeks.