The moles that I mentioned in a previous post made a proper mess of my garden. Like a proper turn-your-ankle-on-the-unevenness mess. I considered hiring a roller from Hodgsons to try and fix it but they only had the ones that you have to pull by hand.
Screw that
So I bought one.
It’s about a metre wide and weighs about 80kg when full of water and fastens perfectly onto the back of Old Faithful.
It’s made a difference – not to the extent that the garden can be used as a putting green but it’s definitely better. However, we’ve not had a really good downpour since I bought it [ you’re all welcome ] so I reckon next time it properly lashes it down and ground is properly soaked I’ll be out there driving around the garden with an umbrella.
It’s that time of year again when life focuses on preparing the garden and the associated outdoor furniture for the coming Summer.
Just look at the difference!
There are few things in life more satisfying than attacking an algae covered piece of furniture with Karcher’s finest jet washer.
Then came time to jet wash the patio. It’s quite a big patio and it was pretty badly covered in algae so it took a while. The other problem is that the jet washer is so powerful it started ripping up all the grouting so I’m going to have to do something about that 🙁
I don’t think I’ll jet wash the patio again though – I’ll use my funky Ryobi battery powered knapsack sprayer which is an absolutely beautiful piece of kit. If you’ve ever had to use a knapsack sprayer with the pumpy handle thing then you’ll know what a pain it is. Battery powered knapsack sprayers are the future kids. Hmmmm, went off on a bit of a tangent there – anyway – into my knapsack sprayer I’ll put some “wet and forget” and spray the patio every 3 months which should keep the algae at bay. We’ll see.
Aside from making completely new fence panels it also seems I’m quite the dab hand at taking old knackered fence panels and bringing them back to life
I had to use my planer to take 20+ years worth of weathering off the fence panel. Then replace one of the back support thingys with some new 2×1 and finally give the whole thing a coating of fence paint – all of which was accomplished with the help of a fine bottle of Burgundy that can be seen in the background. Better thing…Burgundy…Workshop…Agog to Learn
At some point last year me and Uncle Chris were messing about with my tractor adjusting the steering and we spotted that the drive belt had lots of cracks in it and was pretty badly perished in places. It was still working but a worst case scenario is that it would snap whilst mowing the front garden and then I’d have to push it miles to get it back to my workshop…and this tractor is pretty bloody heavy.
So we took it apart
I did a bit of research to find out which belt size I needed and popped down to a local belts and bearings workshop type place and bought one for £20 rather than the £45 that most mower sites were after. Then Winter arrived and it got cold. I hunkered down for the Winter hibernating in a nice warm house rather than rolling around on the frozen concrete floor of my workshop.
Winter came to an end and the weather suddenly picked up in February and it was positively Spring like. I gave Uncle Chris a call, he happened to be free so he came over and we set to it.
I’ve never had my tractor in quite so many pieces so it was a relief to have Chris with me. The drive belt is quite a bugger to replace as you have to take so many bits and pieces off the chassis and engine to release it. Release it we did however, eventually.
Putting the new one on was a piece of cake and we just went backwards through everything we had previously done and it was back together in no time. Fired up the engine and tried to drive it….nothing. I then realised I’d disengaged the clutch when we were moving it around the workshop. Re-engaged the clutch and it started moving, but very, very slowly.
That belt should not be hanging beneath the pulley like that
After a bit of looking and a bit of thinking we decided we’d gone the wrong way around a pulley. Moved the belt across to the other side, tensioned it up again and all was marvelous. The tractor was flying along – I’d be mowing again in no time. Uncle Chris had to leave at this point and I was pretty tired so we knocked off for the day and I’d finish putting it back together again a few days later.
A few days later came and Oli and I went down to the workshop to finish off putting it together. It was only a few minutes before we realised the path the belt was taking was wrong. It would rub against the grass chute when the cutting deck was lifted which would damage both the grass chute and the belt. So I put the belt back to its original position and tried to make it as tense as possible but nothing I did was working.
I eventually concluded that I had the wrong belt. I double checked the writing on the new belt and it was exactly what I asked for. I disassembled the tractor again to get the belt off [ much quicker second time around ] and compared the new belt to the old one. Exactly the same size! I was perplexed at this point. I consulted online mower forums and made a post about my predicament. I’d done everything right. So I just got more and more confused.
Eventually I went back to the belts and bearings supplier and had a long chat with the fellow there. He was a bit bemused too but suggested I try a belt that is 1 inch smaller. He happened to have one in stock so off I popped with it and fitted it pretty quickly since I was now *very* familiar with the process. It was like night and day! The tension was perfect, the routing avoided the grass chute. It was a thing of beauty.
I called the chap at the belt shop and ordered a Kevlar wrapped belt of the same size and then went along and paid for the two belts. The belt that he loaned me is still on the tractor and the Kevlar belt is waiting until I next tear down the tractor and then I’ll do a replacement.
I’m still struggling to understand why everything on the internet [ possible echo chamber going on ] is telling me one size, and in reality I had to buy one an inch shorter. Ho hum. It’s fixed now and I’m happy again.
We’ve always been somewhat plagued with moles. They overran the front garden for quite a long time but I think I got them all. Quite recently the back garden has been absolutely wrecked by them. I think it’s because houses are being built all around us and they’re all being disturbed and driven to my garden. I was getting quite depressed about – they really were popping up everywhere and I was having no luck catching them.
I bought some new mole traps and watched a couple of YouTube videos and one was quite a different approach from what I’d previously tried. So I thought I’d give it a go
First time!
On my very first try of the new technique I bagged one.
I then cleared all the molehills aand waited with baited breath to see if anymore appeared. They did. Traps went down again and I bagged two more. No more mole hills have appeared since so I think I’m mole free – for now.
In case you’re wondering about the new technique…simply clear the mole hill, find out where the hole comes to the surface and determine the direction of the run, peel the turf back and get your duffus trap in there. Check back 12 hrs later.
There are secateurs for your little bits of light chopping and pruning.
Then come the loppers for stuff that’s a bit meatier. Maybe branches that are 20mm or 30mm at the most.
After that my option used to be a chainsaw which is often a bit overkill for some of the stuff that I’d cut with it. But now I have a new option! The Ryobi reciprocating saw. Oh yes.
The first job for the saw was chopping through an ivy stem that was attacking one of my tress. Like a hot knife through butter! Yusssssss
I recently visited Jason down in Leicestershire. When I arrived he was busy shredding some garden clippings and adding them to his compost pile. His compost pile was fantastic. Rotting down nicely producing a rich earthy home made compost supplemented by liquid from his wormery. Him and Su really are the modern day Tom and Barbara. I got jealous.
When I got home I asked my neighbours if I could borrow their shredder to see how it would cope with the garden waste that I usually just set fire to.
My neighbours, being the lovely people that they are, naturally agreed. I’d borrowed this shredder in the past but me being me had forgotten just how big it is. Jason’s shredder is a little mains powered shredder. This one is a petrol engined four stroke beast of a shredder.
This thing mulched its way through hawthorn branches, ivy, brambles – absolutely everything that I threw at it. Produced a beautiful pile of mulch that I added to my compost heap which is now looking better. Absolutely nowhere near the standard of Tom and Barbara’s but I’m now thinking of a little mulcher for Xmas.
You may remember I built a workshop. Took me a while, I think it gave me a hernia, but I built it. When I finished I had some bricks left over which I fully intend to make use of in a future project, but haven’t done yet. Anyway, Paul and I took the bricks and stacked them into two piles at the edge of the garden near the workshop. The upshot of this is I couldn’t get my mower down the side. The brambles moved in, the hawthorn branches grew out, ground ivy started having a bit of a go at my beautiful workshop. It would all have to go.
This is another of those jobs that I procrastinated about for a while but one fine weather day I decided to crack on. In my tried and tested method of breaking a big job into small jobs and adding it to my todo list I ended up with a todo item that said:
move 50 bricks into workshop
So I did. Then added the same task again until I’d moved all of them. Armed with a pair of loppers, a pair of secateurs, a strimmer and a hedge cutter I went in for the kill. Took a surprisingly short amount of time to sort out, maybe an hour and a half. Finally a few runs down the side with Old Faithful [ yellow mower ] it was a thing of beauty.
So now whenever I mow the garden I can have a quick nip down the side of the workshop and keep all those weeds at bay. Fantastic
I had a heavy bag of sand left over from some building work, I think it was probably for the brickwork for the workshop. Anyway, it had been sitting on my beautiful gravel driveway outside my garage for long enough and I decided to drag it down to behind my workshop. I dragged it, it didn’t move. I put my back into it – not an inch. I got the boy wonder out and the two of us managed to drag it over the gravel driveway with much effort. It was going to be tough to drag it all the way down the garden. Oli suggested the yellow tractor but I pooh-poohed it thinking the tractor didn’t have the pulling power. We gave it a go anyway.
We had to pump up the tyres on the tractor before we could accomplish the feat above.
That yellow tractor has never let me down – it nearly chopped my foot off but that was a long time ago and much water under the bridge since then.
Oli and I took the two mowers out for a bit of a spin and I thought it would be a great chance to test out my phone holding tripod grippy leg thing with bluetooth remote. Worked a treat
Oli’s mower may look a bit battered but it’s definitely faster than the red one. Must be the weight reduction exercise I went through when I crashed it into a tree whilst drunk and the front fell off.
Many years ago I pre-ordered a Tesla Model 3 when they were first announced. I didn’t go through with the purchase in the end and now that I finally have one I massively regret that decision. Best car I’ve ever had.
So this post is serving three purposes really.
Purpose 1 : Yes, we finally have a model 3. Long Range AWD
Purpose 2 : You can see the oil patch left behind by the Porsche that I was going to keep but ended up trading it in to get rid of the oil leak problem.
Purpose 3 : You can see what my “driveway” was like yesterday. Today it looks like this…
Hopefully tomorrow it will look a lot better and next week it should be done. Due to a possible “breakdown in communications” between me and the builders they dug up a bit too much of my garden which I’m a little sad about. It’s my fault, I should have got off my arse, bought a tin of that spray paint to mark out the ground and drawn a line exactly where I wanted it. It’ll be fine. I’ll work something out.
Anybody that knows me even slightly will know that I like a good fire. Nearly burned my parents’ house down when I was about 6 but that’s a whole different story. You may also remember I accidentally burned down my woodstore too, but that was in a previous post
Turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong. I was out with Mr Simkiss a while ago and he mentioned that he’d been having a near constant fire in a 55 gallon drum. I had a 55 gallon drum sitting about doing nothing so I put some air holes in the bottom, filled it with wood and a little petrol and off we went.
So now I can reseed that bit of ground next to my oil drum and I only have to worry about a small bit of ground getting wrecked when I have a fire. Genius. Should have done it years ago…I’d still have a wood store.
We had new paving laid at the back and it seemed like quite a good idea at the time to have quite a light Indian stone. Turns out it properly shows up dirty dog footprints, dirty boot marks, everything really. We put some “Wet and Forget” on it last year and it took away all the green algae that grows on there but after a cold wet winter it definitely needed a jet wash, which we did the other day, and another dose of “Wet and Forget” that I’ll get around to soon.
Don’t pay too much attention to the black stuff, that’s just crap that’s been washed down by the jet washer…but just look at the colour difference between the washed stone and the unwashed!
Had my first real life Zelda BoTW or ToTK if you prefer, moment. In an otherwise barren and boggy wood I found a single flower. Kinda made me wanna grab it and see what happened next, but I didn’t, because I’m not yet quite that bonkers.
The front of our house where we park the cars has always been prone to a little dampness since it’s the lowest point of our little enclave of houses. This Winter has been spectacularly bad since it feels like it’s rained non stop. This has been our reality for a few weeks.
However, in the past few days the builders that are planning to build on the “swamp” that is behind the far trees in the above photo have found a blocked land drain. They unblocked the land drain and hooked it into their drainage system and for the first time in possibly two years we’re all seeing the water levels fall in the “swamp”. The ducks are moving out and my car parking spot has now dried up. My back garden no longer squelches underfoot and all seems good. Admittedly we’ve had a few days of dry-ish weather but I’m still quietly optimistic that removing several hundred thousands of litres from the field next to us will solve our problems. Fingers crossed.
As an aside – rumour has it that my elderly neighbour blocked the land drains deliberately a few years ago for some unknown reason. The same guy that promised he wouldn’t sell the land to the builders until after his death. He’s still alive but the builders moved in a year ago so hey-ho.
On the same day that I finished my plumbing [ see previous post ] the ground workers turned up to dig up the bamboo. This bamboo was given to us by our neighbour about 15 years ago. “That’ll make a great replacement for the spots where the hawthorn has died” we thought. Turns out it was a spectacularly bad idea to plant it in our fence line. Spreads like a bastard. Grew under the path and started coming up in the garden. When I built my front shed I had a 1.5 tonne mini excavator that I thought I’d use to dig up the bamboo. It didn’t even come close. Didn’t budge it at all.
The builders turned up with a massive piece of machinery. Lifted up my path and got started. It took us a good while to find my electricity/water/data cables but once we did the digger driver was a proper pro and dug around them perfectly.
We ended up with two huge holes where the bamboo used to be. The next day the ground workers got busy with the dumper truck and brought over load after load of soil and filled in the holes again. I’m now waiting for some replacement hawthorn bushes to get planted and some grass seed to go down and all will be right with the world and I can stop worrying about invasive bamboo.
This is my first attempt at stringing onions. Em reckons it looks a bit rude but I have no idea what she means, looks nothing like a pair of breasts to me.
I’ve just been reading about alternative stringing methods so watch out for the second attempt…coming to a blog near you soon
I’ve just been out harvesting my onion crop. Out of the 40 or 50 seeds I planted I only got a yield of 15 onions which was a little disappointing, but the onions I did get are fantastic. The onion top-right in the picture is flipping enormous!! To prevent such disappointments next year I have just ordered 300 sets from marshalls so next years onion haul will be needing a wide-angled lens. Along with the onions I also ordered a pear tree, garlic, some Amelia strawberries [ well I had to really ] and various vegetable seeds.
A few weeks ago I transplanted a load of strawberry runners from my outdoor plants into used Chinese take-away tubs. I’ve got about 25 new plants above but I think a few of them wont take. Still, between the strawberry plants pictured above and the 12 Amelia variety I just bought I think the family Steele will be having a bumper harvest of strawberries next year. Which is fortunate since Amelia is pretty much addicted to them.
The pepper seedlings which my Dad gave me in March have matured well but I think they would have benefited from being in bigger pots, having the greenhouse at a higher temperature and not being grown in my home made compost. My home made compost was lacking a little and in future will be added to the raised beds along with my leaf mulch. I’ll stick to shop bought compost for seedlings until I get better at home composting…or get a wormery thingy 🙂
The one and only beef tomato that made it from the donations off Joan next door is ripening well. It will be a treasured part of a salad and the seeds will be saved for next years attempt when I’ll consider feeding the flipping things 🙁
So the conclusion to the 2008 growing season is definitely could do better. Still, it’s been a pretty shitty year for growing stuff but I have high hopes for 2009 now that I have taken out a subscription to "Grow Your Own".
P.S. Pictures of my homegrown sweetcorn still to come.
In a true Alan Titchmarsh meets Sarah Beeny stylee I spent the weekend giving my greenhouse a bit of a revamp. As can be seen from the "Before" picture the place was a bit of a health hazard with odd bits of paving making up the floor. Some might argue, and I am of course referring to my darling wife here, that this is what a proper greenhouse should look like…but not I.
The newly revamped greenhouse has a light smattering of plum slate chippings at 70 quid a tonne [ robbing bastards ] with a lovely geometric pattern of paving stones forming a centrepiece. This bijou little residence is now home to 70 germinating onion seeds, a bunch of pepper plants and some other stuff that I planted that I have since forgotten. So that’ll be a nice surprise in a few months.
