The weather changed throught the night ...

... and I woke up to a grey and miserable overcast day, and that's how it remained. The third guy came to see me about solar panels at 11:00 and he was gone by 11:05, interrupting my woodcutting. I need to do as much as I can of that because I want the space at the back of the barn, where I'm storing the treetrunks, for other things. Getting it out of the way by cutting it up seems like a good idea to me and I'm planning to do half an hour each day.

Once my hour was up I went to look for something in the barn and I can't remember what it was now, but I didn't find it. I ended up doing some kind of tidying up (after a fashion) and repairing the lights up there so that I can see what I'm doing, and I found the 400-watt halogen heater that I brought back from Brussels. The oil heater isn't heating as much as I had hoped and it's not keeping its heat as long as it ought to either, and so I've decided to go with the halogen one for now. 100 watts less, but of course halogen is much more efficient than most other forms of electric heating and I recall getting quite warm with that. I'll be intrigued to see what it can do in a glorious alpine day. I also found a pair of steel toecapped work shoes that I had forgotten all about. They've been rescued and put to good use. It's nice to have decent footwear.

This afternoon I went about and inspected the trees overhanging the next stage of the garden development - the space to where I'll be moving the compost bins. There were a couple of them that looked rather dodgy and so they came down, and I also cut up the tree that had fallen down in the gale last summer and flattened my spuds and onions, and moved it out of the way. I DO like this new saw.

To finish off, I started to weed one of the vegetable plots andf I'm making a pile of stuff for burning, right where the greenhouse is going to be. For four reasons too. Firstly, it's a clear space there, secondly it'll get rid of all the rubbish that's accumulating, thirdly that it'll burn the weeds that are growing there, and fourthly that it will fertilise the soil.

But I won't be burning anything tomorrow, and I won't be working in the garden either. We're having a torrential rainstorm right now outside and I'll be intrigued to see how the new roof is coping with it all.