Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Remember the other day ...

... when I told you about all of the trees in the garden bursting into life in that couple of hours? Anyway, I thought that you might like a photo of the blooming things.

It was taken out of the little window at the top of the stairs in the attic - a favourite point of view of mine for the garden. Just compare it with any of the other photos taken from the same spot just recently and you will see the difference.

Another thing that you might notice in the photo is the change in colour of the soil. There's a reason for that - it was positively precipitating down outside - the first time for 13 days that we have had any kind of precipitation. Just as well too, because I was getting pretty low with the old water, but the 8mm of rain that we had - that filled up the water butts considerably.

Mind you, at one stage it was touch and go. A huge pile of accumulated dust and dirt lust have been washed straight down the pipe and it blocked the filter. No water was getting through to the puzzolane filter, and the water was backing up in the system. I had to disconnect the pipe - emptying about 30 litres of water all over me, clean the filter and then reassemble it. It did the trick and allowed the water to circulate through the filters and into the water butts.

So apart from that, what else did I do? Well, emptied the composting toilet, such is the highlight of the exciting life that I live around here. And have I described the composting toilet? Basically, it's a stainless steel 20-litre casserole with lid. I pad it out with shredded cardboard packaging and then line it with a biodegradable bin liner. At the bottom of the bin liner I put a pile of shredded telephone directory pages (nice and absorbant). You take off the lid, do what you need to do (the casserole is in a nice wooden housing that I built, cover it with a ladleful of mixed sawdust and wood ash, and then put the lid back on. When it's full, the contents are emptied into the compost heap and we start all over again.

As well as that, I tidied up in here. With being so busy over the last few weeks I hadn't tidied up at all and the place was looking totally depressing. I'm useless at tidying up, so it's always quite an effort, but now at least it looks a little more civilised. And I found a few important things that I had mislaid so at the end of the day it's always worthwhile tidying up.

But I wish that I knew the secret of how to be tidy.

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