There was no mistake this morning ...

... about the weather. I awoke quite early to the sound of what was without question a driving rainstorm. And when I went out a little later we had had about 4.5mm of rainfall through the night.

That may not sound like a lot and over a surface area of 6.5 square metres (the verandah) where about 155mm of rainfall would make 1000 litres, then the 30 litres of rain from today is pretty small beer.

But off just one side of the barn roof, which has a footprint of about 16m x 3.5m, or 56 square metres, then almost ten times that is quite a lot.

You'll see the impromptu drainage system that I've rigged up (don't worry that it is neither straight nor square - this is just a temporary lash-up) and if you look closely at the 203-litre water butt, you'll see that it's overflowing. And quite right too!

So much so in fact that I'm going to change some of the drainage around on the house so that the drainage on the lean-to (all 8 square metres of it plus the part of the house roof that falls onto there) will drain into the water butts at the verandah.

Terry has found me some puzzolane and I've also thought of yet another amelioration to the water supply and so I reckon that next week I'll have a good go at this.

Lieneke woke me up this morning. She needed to talk to Terry and so I gave her all of his contact details. It involves The Folding Stuff so it's pretty important. And after computing for a while I did a couple of odd jobs. I now have a beacket for holding the ramps onto the towing dolly and I've also done something with the guttering on the far side of the barn.

I've also made an improvement to the solar shower. I've erected a metal framework and put a black IKEA storage box onto the top, with an old caravan window on top.

There's a gravity drop with a tank in line and the old shower head and connection from my apartment at Expo. I've an idea about filling it too but that calls for yet more engineering and seeing as it was 19:15 when I knocked off (and I still fitted in a solar shower from the old system) I called it a day instead.

But I'm intrigued to see how this new siting of the solar water will fit in with the temperature readings that I have been keeping. It'll attract the sun much earlier in the day for a start, that's for sure.

And in other news, my brassica have now been attacked by the Cabbage White Butterfly and four times a day I'm engaged with stripping the caterpillars off the plants before they strip the plants. So far it's a draw but it's hard work.

And in other other news, it seems that I was rather careless when potting up some seeds. I now have a huge tomato plant growing in the middle of the greenhouse.