Water

Well, we no longer have a shortage of water, that’s for sure. There’s been a month’s rainfall in the last few days, and we managed to collect much of it in our new 1000 litre container, which is good, because I’m convinced a landslide would have taken the cabin right down the hill if we hadn’t.

Water containerElmo bought it on ebay and I took the trailer to Huddersfield to pick it up. The timing was excellent because I got it here during the last of the dry weather.

helping the container down the hillAs there was just me, I had to do a bit of creative thinking to get the thing down the wall. Luckily, it wasn’t all that heavy and a controlled drop went as planned.

the water container at the bottom of the dropIt looks more like an accident, but actually it went exactly as planned.

water container in placeI then managed to roll it like a giant die into place and put it up on some bricks. Having not made any plans about getting the water to it from the downspouts, I had to improvise using what I had around the place.

improvised downspoutIt looks a bit of a contraption, but it got the water to the container, which was about 3/4 full when I left.

more clay on the wallsWith nothing to do outdoors without getting soaked, I spent two days working on the clay topcoat. I had some remedial work to do because I’d been unaware that the best way to get a decent finish was to use something hard and plastic when it was just going dry, so I had to wet down and re-work a lot of it, with… acceptable results. However, the stuff I’ve done new is pretty good, not dead smooth, but wibbly and organic, as I’d pictured. I ended up using bits of plastic bottle that I’d cut up to make smoothing tools, with decent results. I will get my plastic trowel out and try to get a really flat finish on a bit of it just to see whether I can, but I’m pretty happy with this. And, that’s the last thing I needed to do before moving the majority of the kitchen into place. So I await the drying of it somewhat impatiently!

Simon up a treeIn other news, we’ve made a start on cutting down the big willow tree that’s in the way of our driveway. Simon brought his climbing harness and tied himself to the tree and to Elmo via several safety points and climed about sawing big branches off. It was exciting to watch, and will provide us with a fair amount of firewood for next year or the year after, depending on how long we season it.

Simon up a tree againWe got quite a lot of the more difficult stuff down and I am hoping that Bob will bring his climbing gear and help take down the rest.

plum blossomsThe new plum tree has got one little branch to show for the spring’s work, and half a dozen blossoms. There are quite a few other buds, and the cherry trees are looking very vigorous, so I’m hopeful that in a year and a half I’ll be eating plum jam and cherry pie, albeit probably in miniature.

SunsetNot long now til the trees are in leaf and we’ll say goodbye for another year to beautiful sunsets like this.

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