Getting things done

With some better weather, the last week has been about getting things done - and even managing to get a couple of items ticked off our long to-do list. (What is it with to-do lists: if you don't make one, you are plagued by having all the things you need to do going round and round in your head. But if you decide to write it all down, to give your head a rest, the list itself becomes the tormentor and a constant reminder that you that haven't yet done all the jobs you need to do! I'm not sure what the answer is!)

But anyway, ticks are good, and the first big job we managed to tick off the list was the completion of "mushroom land". After I had gone over the terraces with the blade attachment on the strimmer, to get all the gnarly roots and bits of bramble cut nice and close to the ground, we moved the stack of logs that had been cut a few weeks previously to a nice shady spot and started the process of filling them with mushroom spores.

Stuart had bought a pack of 1200 plugs of shiitake mushroom spawn. The dowels are made from birchwood with a spiral groove (apparently the mycelium grows in circles so a spiral groove performs better than a straight groove) and look a little bit like a cigarette butt - but with a pretty spiral and less of an unpleasant smell. While Stuart started drilling holes into the chestnut logs, I started knocking the spore-impregnated dowels into the holes. It was a pretty straightforward job, but ended up being quite time consuming as there's no short cut.

With all the logs 'plugged', we now leave the stack of logs to do its stuff (we hope) - we are spraying them with water each day to try and keep the logs nice and damp, and if all goes according to plan we should be able to harvest mushrooms within 12 months, and continue to do so (with 3 harvests a year) for a couple of years. Keep your fingers crossed!

The next job we completed was the securing of the perimeter fence of the chicken enclosure - namely the addition of an electric line halfway up the fence in the hopes that Mr/Mrs Fox would catch it on his/her way up should he/she try to climb the fence again. With the line added and tested (and the netting on the top of the enclosure now properly attached to the fence all around, hopefully creating a sealed enclosure), we are now ready to restock with chickens...  for the third time (third time lucky?).

The next major 'win' was finishing off the tractor/tool park, or at least its main structure and roof. With the roof on, the tractor will now be sheltered from the worst of the rain. And we are immensely pleased with and somewhat proud of the fact that we haven't had to buy any timber for the construction - all posts have been felled from our own land and stripped by hand.

We will still need to sort out the floor (build up the bottom back wall then back fill with some rubble, but the major construction part of the project is complete. Tick!

Another mini-tick (sadly not a case of an entire job being ticked off the "big" list, but a smaller part of the job being ticked off a sub-list [yes, we have sub-lists]) was the anything-but-mini task of moving a pile of gravel that had been delivered from Frateschi, the builders' merchant, on Friday afternoon. The gravel had been deposited at the bottom of the steps at the back of the house and its intended destination was our patio area. Unfortunately we are not yet at a stage where we can complete the floor underneath our pergola, but this gravel was intended to tidy up the rest of the patio area.

We didn't do the job alone though! After having mentioned to our friends David & Sarah the many, many things we needed to get done this weekend (a last-minute guest booking for the apartment materialised on Saturday, with the guests' arrival scheduled for Monday - which threw a bit of a curve ball in terms of our weekend's to-do list), they generously took pity on us and offered a couple of hours of their time (and sweat and muscle power) to help move the pile of gravel. With their help we got the gravel distributed in the right places and before long it was all looking a huge amount tidier.

So neat!

With the gravel-moving process vastly speeded up thanks to many hands making light(er) work, Stuart and I were able to move on to spend the rest of the day doing other jobs: Stuart mowed the lawns and chipped the entire pile of olive prunings (or rather he fed them into the chipper, which did the chipping) and spread them around various parts of the garden as mulch on the beds, and I spent a couple of hours attempting to resurrect the veg beds in the orto before starting to clean the apartment.

After having had so many problems with pests (mainly the dastardly voles) last year, the veg beds sadly saw something of a decline in care and attention from about mid-summer onwards (there are only so many times you can go to the orto to pick some veg only to find that the voles have got there before you, and there's only so much care and attention you can lavish on what plants remain when you know that it's the voles that will be the likely beneficiaries of your hard work), and that, coupled with the long, wet winter, meant that they had pretty much been left to go wild. While we haven't sown any seeds this year, we are still hoping to buy plug plants and grow enough veg to keep us fed through the summer (and hoping that this year will not see such a boom in the vole population), so the beds needed tidying both in readiness for planting up and to improve the view from the guest garden. The task was a daunting one though, and one that we have been putting off for several weeks for fear of being overcome by the task at hand.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I was pleased that, after having dedicated a couple of hours to it after work during the week and a few hours over the course of the weekend, I'd managed to wrestle the orto into something that looks vaguely like it's meant for growing veg, and almost even looks as if we know what we are doing.

I even found a handful of treasures in amongst the weeds: some healthy clumps of coriander, a single carrot, a few cos lettuces and some tiny red lettuces. Nature really is quite the gardener!

One bed down.

Three beds down (clump of coriander at the far end).

This gives some idea of just how overgrown the beds have been over winter. I'm a bit loathed to touch this one yet though, as it will soon be a meadow full of cornflowers!

Lettuce.

Carrot.

Red lettuces.

Getting there - it almost looks like we know what we're doing!

Frustratingly the weather turned at the end of the weekend, and we are facing a week of much cooler and much more unsettled weather, which will put the brakes on any more progress. Nevertheless, we are pleased with our week's efforts.

(This blog post covers the week 23-29 April 2018.)