Treehugger empire

So here’s the Very Smallholding. it may look as if I’m doing nothing but I’ve at least managed to get some of the weeding done*, with some help from my parents who came to visit and brought a nice stainless steel fork as a late Christmas present. If that wasn’t a hint to get moving I don’t know what is.

Last year I planted almost everything at once and ended up with a million leuttices**, half a tonne of courgettes and enough cannonball sized kohl rabi to reenact the battle of Waterloo.

Most of this, unfortunately, ended up in the compost bin: we only have so many neighbours who need seven courgettes a week.

The plan this year is to make smaller batches and plant each week. I’ve started to plant seeds in my usual home-made paper pots, but I’ll also be planting more seeds directly into the garden. Smaller things and salads will mostly stay on the balcony in the earthboxes I made a couple of years ago.

Thanks to The Boys and their friends running up and down the hill last summer, it looks like I won’t need to clear a way through the brambles as much this year, although some steps will be needed. Getting to the bottom of the garden is easy enough, if muddy.

Getting up again causes problems.

The monster tree at the bottom of the garden.  The general opinion is that this is a pear tree. Unless it is apple.

I’m still working out a way to get this up and out of the garden  so I can dry it properly and use it for something other than firewood.

*Pre-weeding view here.
**Still can’t spell ‘Lettices’.

Pig club

Our college is partnered with a carpentry college in The Congo, and one of the commitments is to give every student who graduates a box of brand new, good quality tools. To get finance this we make wooden stuff and sell it. The Congolese students get tools and a good trade for life, we get experience making interesting stuff. Everybody wins.

Apparently cutting boards in the shape of pigs are a big seller.

I’m part of the team at the exhibition this weekend. My job is to cut accurate dovetails all day while answering questions intelligently. What can possibly go wrong?

Uphill both ways.

Last week the train service to college threw a wobbly because a signal failed. Trains generally manage to arrive within five minutes of when they say they will arrive, but when things go wrong the whole thing seems to fall apart. From experience you just have to wait in hope until a train may or possibly may not come along, so I got back on the bus home, retrieved my bike and cycled to college instead.

It worked okay. The last hill on the way home was pretty tough, and I can’t say I felt like doing much in the evening. Probably not a commuting strategy for every day then.

I would probably be less tired if I had a bag that would clip onto the luggage rack instead of my backpack. I could also carry the backpack on the Xtracycle of course, but that would mean leaving the Xtracycle in an open bike rack all day.

Cycling all the way from home to college is considered seriously strange by most people of course, but people at college are used to my subversively hippy tendencies.

How to damage wood.

The first part of the cabinet I’m supposed to be building* is solid wood joined by good old-fashioned dovetails: seventeen per corner and four corners. In theory this means we get lots of practice cutting accurately.

We also get plenty of time sharpening and polishing chisels.

Finishing off one of the side pieces. Every join has to be connected several times, then taken apart again and the wood carefully chiselled out to make the fit better, without  taking so much off that there is a gap between the sections. Of course, if you don’t take enough off then there is a loud noise announcing that the wood has split again, and it is time to get the glue out.

Notice set square carefully placed in shot to give the impression I use it.

This is culmination of about four days cutting and chiseling, the moment where all the sides have to be glued and clamped together in the hope they fit straight. Each join is unique by this stage so they have to be fitted in the correct order, and we have to make sure the sides are square.

The glue makes the wood expand slightly as well, so the joins are tighter than before, and it begins to set within eight minutes of being applied so everything has to be glued and straight within that time.

*Eventually I should have one of these. In theory.

One week later

This is the same view as last week. Being able to see the road ahead is quite exciting.

The weather does this quick change every year and it still takes me by surprise. I’m not complaining though.

In case you think I’m showing off, it’s still freezing in the mornings.

Repeat performance

The bakfiets in for repair again. Notice new repair method with bike vertical instead of on its side. This saved twenty minutes of digging the chain out from behind the front cog.

Having repaired the puncture on the rear wheel a couple of weeks back, and -surprisingly- got the wheel back on the Bakfiets again, I discovered the bearings were loose. In theory this meant taking the wheel off again last weekend and carrying same to my local bike shop where they could do some technical jiggerypokery with their astonishingly expensive cone spanners until the bike worked again.

This should have been the end of the matter, but when I rebuilt the wheel this time I forgot to tighten an essential but normally inaccessible bolt, so after another trip to the bike shop to find why bits of the brake assembly were rattling against the wheel, I had to repeat the operation to sort this out.

My incapability with complicated mechanical things is another reason I hopefully won’t ever own a car.

Seasonal

Apparently spring is coming, heralded by longer days, more sunshine (or indeed, any sunshine), snowdrops, birds singing, green buds on trees, that sort of thing.

Infortunately nobody told our local weather department so they delivered snow and blizzards today. Naturally this all hit the ground after I’d cycled to the bus stop: the road home is directly ahead.

Materials

The example piece for the end of year project alongside a trolley full of pear wood for our own version. Soon after the cut wood became four piles like this:

Notice labels written in my now infamous mix of English and German. Working in my second language can be tricky but it does mean none of my materials get mixed up with anyone elses’s.

Best Laid plans

The plan this weekend was to get another load of digging completed so that the garden would look more like a carefully tended vegetable garden and less like a patch of wilderness or the set for a low budget horror movie.

Naturally it snowed heavily on Friday night.

The garden is pretty well inaccessible when it snows, and even if I could get there, I wasn’t about to spend half an hour raking snow back to find where to dig, so we rescheduled the day and worked on the Bakfiets instead.

The Bakfiets is a low maintenance machine but when something goes wrong it is a pain to get at the bit that needs work, in this case the back tyre, which has been flat as a pancake for weeks.

We do have a stand at the bike shop, but this is built for regular mountain bikes, not thirty kilos of wood and steel, so this is the best was I’ve found to get the wheels off the ground. The side of the box is resting on a cardboard cushion.

Fortunately the hub is fairly well designed. There are a lot of fiddly bits to disconnect but most can be unclipped which saves me rebuilding all the brake and gear connections.

Most of the repair went quite well: We found a large hole in the inner tube, but nothing in the tyre that could have made it. I replaced the whole inner tube with one that has a sensible presta valve rather than the silly Dunlop valve that came with the bike. The main problem was that the chain decided to fall off the front cog, so when it came to putting things back together I first had to take the chain guard to bits and retrieve it.

Oh, and the discovery that the axle bearings have worked lose. Of course, I noticed this after putting everything back together, which means I’ll now have to do it all again in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, back at the garden…

I finally made it to the garden this weekend, this being the first weekend of the year that the road wasn’t a giant snowdrift or a waterfall. Some of the fauna grew well despite the conditions.

Unfortunately it was mostly fauna I don’t want. One of the more vivid green bits is supposed to be a vegetable bed.

I made a start on tidying up and moving the bean poles to a different bed and put the beginnings of a kill mulch on one of the most overgrown bed, so it at least looks like we’re doing something now. I tried taking a picture but it was at the twilight hour when trolls are abroad, so it didn’t come out very well.

I’ve still got a lot to do before I can plant anything, and I’ve still got a ten metre high tree lying on its side in the bottom of the garden waiting to be removed.

Speaking of planting, do any gardeners have ideas for red bean varieties that like waterlogged clay soil?