Roofs and Vegetables

Wednesday, 5th July, 2023

The scaffolding has been removed from the top part of the cottage and from the laundry block. The laundry room now has a beautifully rebuilt roof over it, removing all fear not just of imminent collapse of that whole section of the house but also of ingress by both bees and rain. This unscheduled exercise took attention away from the rebuilding of the cottage for a while, but now work can resume on the lean-to sections at either end. Most of the interior plastering has been done, so the next big milestone of the project will be the fitting of the windows, which have needed five coats of brown paint to fully cover the white primer that had been applied to their wooden frames at the manufacturing stage. I wanted the windows to blend into their surrounding woodland environment, hence the tree-trunk colour.

Rain has fallen at last in recent days after a long dry spell, and the veg patch has been thankful for it. I wasn’t going to bother with trying to grow vegetables this year, partly because the patch is on a building site and partly because it is destined to be ripped out and completely redesigned and deer-proofed, but in the end I couldn’t resist putting in a few plants. Keeping things simple, I am limiting them to a few tomatoes, peppers, beans, courgettes and potatoes. In the empty square between the courgettes I sprinkled some seeds from a few packets that were past their use-by dates. I am amused that tiny plants are coming up in two neat rows, but I have no idea what they are. The building-site barriers are proving to be a wonderful substitute for deer fencing.