10th June 2012
A woodpecker(?) in the path near the cabin door
I usually write this Blog on a Sunday, when I feel least guilty about “not doing anything” on the farm, but of course Milly’s birthday bash delayed that indulgence until Monday. After an early morning bowl of oats porridge, I set out for a short “look and think” walk to the house. The plan was just to absorb the situation and then let it digest slowly in my subconscious while I wrote the blog, but pretty soon I had donned gumboots and gloves, loaded wheelbarrow and implements onto the pickup and was shovelling away at the uneven result of the earthmoving.
As ever, the first few heaves of the shovel were uncomfortable, almost painful, but soon I was relishing the physical exertion. Most days I’m certainly getting more than the recommended exercise to cause twenty minutes of increased heart-rate, none of which makes any of Richard Branson’s gym franchises any richer. The first task was to load as much of the topsoil as possible onto the pickup to add to the piles destined for the compost bins. I left the first load in the pickup at the bin and went back to the site, where I used the wheelbarrow to convey a few dozen loads of sand to the road through the property. The road channels a lot of water down the slope and has become badly eroded, so I laid two angled ridges across it to channel the water into a depression where I hope to build a small holding pond.
While taking a tea-break at the cabin, I pondered a more efficient way to level the site. A common method is to drag a length of railway line behind a tractor, but I had neither. I do have a slightly split turned gum-pole from Christopher’s yard clearing, so I drilled two holes through that and threaded some ski-rope through them. Using the pickup would be a little excessive, so I dragged it to the site and inspanned myself as a poor substitute for a donkey. While it obviously doesn’t remove a great deal of earth, it at least makes the site plane, so that I can see where to set to work with rake and shovel to remove high areas. It is also easier to see the direction of a plane slope than it is to judge a disturbed surface. One result of that exercise was that I realised that my real mistake during the earthmoving last week was to have some soil put back at the kitchen-end of the house. Oh well… more savings on my non-existent VirginActive subscription!
Occasional flurries of thick mist had become growing overcast in the East at about lunch time, so I packed up and returned to the cabin to make a three-day-stew. It’s called three-day-stew because you put whatever you have in a pot, cook it, then have it as your major meal for the next three days…
While the stew simmered I made several CDs of Milly’s birthday photos to give to her, and since I was now at the computer, I started on the tedious business of Quantity Surveying the house plans. Once I’ve determined the volume of concrete in the foundations, floor slabs, the area of walls and so on, I can set about finding out how much money I don’t have to build the various stages of the house!
When the sea of figures banged my eyeballs together too often, I switched to experimenting with a new method of authoring the pages for our audition web-sites. When the on-line audition project started out the sites were small enough to make changes to character names fairly easily. A recent UK/US TV series however has so many characters and has had so many script changes that the time has come to implement a more efficient system. It isn’t HTML rocket science, but I just haven’t had the time to do it before now. It was very satisfying to have the on-line test work the first time. Having earned my keep, I could finally start on the blog about mid-afternoon.
On Tuesday I had just unloaded the topsoil from the pickup and was having a tea-break when Sandy phoned to ask a favour. She had to go to Hermanus, so couldn’t take Milly to Caledon for the weekly grocery shopping for Klub Tessalonika. I usually also fill up with petrol, so was waiting for the lower fuel price on Wednesday, but since I didn’t absolutely have to re-fuel this week I was quite happy to go a day earlier. Milly also had to get back to begin preparing the food, which would ensure that I didn’t just “dwaal” around town as I usually tend to. I did indulge us in a quick cup of coffee at Cafe Letta’s though!
I was keen to get more earth moved before the rain arrived. The soil was still loose, which made it easier to work, either with shovel and rake, or with my human-donkey and gumpole grader. The heavy rain predicted for this week would settle the sand, compacting it and making it more difficult to level. I set to work as soon as I returned from town, but soon had to dash to the cabin to don my wonderful Australian Driza-Bone full length oilskin riding coat. Driza-Bones cost even more than earthmoving, so there is no way I could possibly afford to buy one, but this was a present years ago from an Australian film student I had mentored through her graduation film. To paraphrase my favourite line from Crocodile Dundee: “That’s not a raincoat! THIS is a Raincoat!” I don’t have the optional hood for it, so I improvised with a cut-off SPAR shopping bag and a peaked cap. The result was that I looked something like the hero of a Spaghetti-Western who had fallen on hard times, but at least I could continue working through the increasingly heavy wind-driven rain for the next few days.
Watching the behaviour of the water during the downpour, it came apparent that my best source of water is probably going to be the road winding through the middle of the property and around the Southern boundary. It is badly sited for a road, in a slight depression, but by filling the eroded areas with gravel and stones I can direct the run-off into storage ponds. The “loop” (watercourse) which supplies the two existing dams is completely choked on the next property. Further uphill, it has in any case been blocked and re-directed by an adjoining farmer. I’m told that the department of Water Affairs has opened a case against the offender, but that will probably take years to resolve. While researching the background to Boggy Pond I had already engaged with my immediate neighbours about sharing the watercourse, but it is beginning to look as though common sense and good neighbourliness is not enough. Although I’m cleaning the rubble out of the two existing dams, I’m loath to do much more. I had planned to enlarge “Boggy Pond”, but since water has been declared a “National Resource”, the web of restrictive and punitive legislation around water usage has become an incredibly complex minefield.
One way to deal with the problem may be to form a Local Water Use Association with my neighbours, especially since our side of the village is not included in a project to restore the traditional “leiwater” system. For two hundred years water from a spring on the mountain was led through the village in furrows and each market-gardener was allocated a number of hours per week to drain the furrow into their crops. In the Sixties a reticulation system was connected to that same spring and the water was piped into the houses. Wonderful! Progress! Upliftment? Not quite – water was now charged for, with the result that the villagers could no longer afford to grow crops for their own use, let alone as a cash crop. Unsurprisingly, many of the older folk ascribe the economic and social degeneration of the settlement at least partly to the arrival of piped water. Food for thought for armchair do-gooders…
With the rain predicted to continue to the week-end, I knocked-off before dusk on Wednesday to take a shower. Alert The Media! The point is that one’s life is directly and immediately affected by the weather when “living Green”. My solar water heater is wonderful when the sun shines. It normally keeps water piping hot overnight, but with the arrival of overcast days and ever colder nights the obvious theoretical limitations of the system have become a reality. Morning showers are out – the water is still hot enough, but only just. I have no need to open the cold tap, which means that there is a limited amount of water available at a suitable temperature. On a philosophical level, I suppose I appreciated my hot shower a little more on Wednesday because I knew that if the rain persisted I would not have hot water until the next completely sunny day. On a practical level, it challenges me with the need to devise an alternative source of hot water – and that isn’t Electricity.
On Thursday morning I removed my lights and the Internet cabling from the ceiling joists to make way for the last ceiling board I have stored in the ruin. It has survived two months at the mercy of passing pot-smokers who shelter in the house, but the rain blows in the open window and leaks through the roof. I’d installed the previous one fairly easily single-handed, and planned the same approach. Once temporary supports were nailed to the walls and improvised toggles nailed to the joists at just the right distance, I dashed to the house in the first lull in the rain to cut the board to size. A bright blue gap in the overcast then gave me just enough time to wrestle the two-and-a-half metre board across Home Field without upstaging the Wright Brothers before the rain poured down again. Getting this board up was not as easy as the first; it had clearly absorbed some of the damp atmosphere and had become slightly heavier and very floppy, with the result that it slipped off one of the chocks and came crashing down, tearing a small section. My second attempt succeeded, although I’ll have to install a patch or two before I get around to painting the ceiling. There is still a 50cm gap in the middle to cover, but I should lose a little less heat through the ceiling – when I have any heat to lose!
Generating heat for the cabin is the next technical project, apart from more physical work levelling the building site and cleaning the dam. I’ve bought fifty metres of black plastic garden irrigation pipe, some of which I shall install in the compost bin closest to the cabin. By leading that to an insulated storage barrel and then to a similar element inside, perhaps under the writing desk, I should be able to take the edge off the cold at least.
The road from the school to the gate of "Boggy Pond" during a break in the rain