wood shed II

If things hadn't been so busy on the science and geography front this August, I would have blobbed on along the domestic front where Young Bolivar and I have been building a wood-shed out of wood. A couple of weeks ago I was acting all parsimonious when Bolivar cut the builder's line !! rather than untying it. But he's really redeemed himself on the off-cuts.  The design has been to sink six telephone poles into a rectangular grid to form a [ shape: open along one long side. Because the whole site is on a 10% slope and because the closed side is 50cm below the open side to pitch the roof, every pole is a different length. It was hard enough to get our eccentric local pole-supplier to deliver aNNy poles, so it was going to be a bridge far too far to ask him to cut them all to different lengths. So I asked for six 14ft = 4.25m telephone poles and they finally arrived, when I was briefly off site, about 8 months !! after I'd ordered them. 4 of them arrived cut (roughly) to size and the other two had just been fecked in on top of the pile on the bed of his truck. These two were more than 30ft = 9m long and The Beloved and Bolivar were subjected to the poor mouth about whether we'd give him €10 extra for each off-cut as he made a huge meal about cutting one of them. To stop his gab and get him off site so that life could continue, he was paid off immediately. The off-cut was nearly 2.4m long so it will serve as a gate-post in due course. We juggled and sorted the 5 cut-to-length spars and put the longest one at front-and-bottom and the shortest catty-corner opposite.

The four corners allowed us to establish the horizontal line, so that regardless of the rough ground the 6x3 wall plate at the top of the structure was level. It is scarcely credible when you see the "floor" hanging 75cm above the ground at the downhill end [R see the red ticks on a downhill and an uphill pole]. When we finally got round to cutting the long pole to size, we found that we were left with an extra 14ft pole in the off-cut for the extra €10 [win!!]. As the original contract was €110 for 6 = €18+ each, this was double win. We braced each pole with stout pegs in the ground and a hypotenuse made out of any available sufficiently long lumber screwed at each end. The poles all taper because they are milled from the living tree, so we agreed to make the outside edge vertical. But two of the poles had a noticeable bow and we'd had to fudge that. Bear in mind that we were, at the same time, ensuring that the base of each pole was still forming part of a rectangle . . . the diagonals have to be equal, folks . . . but the diagonal has to be taken from the inside edge which, because of the taper, is not vertical.  It's not as easy as building with Lego.

I thought we then had a tedious and teetering leveling job on the top of two ladders to ensure that the wall plate was level but Bolivar was smart enough and confident enough of his measurements to take the level at a convenient 'floor' and measure the vertical heights from this.  Next, we cut 5cm notches at the top of the poles with hand-saw and chisel, drilled a half-inch = 12mm hole through the 6x3 = 150x75mm wall-plate and the pole. We had a 13cm spade-bit for the drill but we needed to borrow an extender because the total depth was about twice the length of the bit. In a workshop with a drill-press you could do this by drilling precisely from each side to meet in the middle but not at the top of a ladder with one hand for your work and one hand for yourself. We had bought a lot of half-inch threaded steel bar, robust washers and nuts [L for a finished joint between two horizontals and a vertical]. For safety, we tied off the standing end of each horizontal beam while working on the other. The wall-plate on the back wall is 50cm below that in front.  The wall-plate on the short edges is horizontal with the lower side so another notch has to be cut in the front poles 50cm below the front wall-plate.

This is 'obvious to all thinking people' but we saved a bit on the 45^o braces installed between vertical poles and horizontal wall-plate to stop the whole thing shearing into a pile of sticks if you lean a ladder against it. 6 poles needed 2 braces, one on each side and I thought 4ft = 1200mm would be big enough and a convenient divisor for the 4800mm stock length of 6x2s [see top imagining in diagram above]. But that would require 8 cuts and leave a lot of triangular off-cuts. No sane person would do that with 45^o angles, they'd rather employ the lower idea and make 5 this-way-that-way cuts. But IF that person is thinking on their feet, and they make the braces slightly less than 1200mm but still robust enough for function, THEN you can get 5 braces out of each timber and have an off-cut long enough to be useful. With all the savings on the 6x2 front we were able to install an extra braced 6x2 horizontal between the two central poles that hadn't been on the original inventory. Win!! and now we have a nice strong central timber for when we butcher a hawg.

The base of the wall is braced by a skirt of 6x2s = 150x50mm which we stepped down in the middle [see L] to go a small way towards accommodating the fall of the land and make it easier to bolt each structural member to the middle pole. You might think this a bit daft because the poles are braced, indeed hopefully immovable, by the ground but they are robust because they will later serve as the bottom of the wall. Between the wall-plate and the skirt, we had been advised that 4x2s would be sufficiently strong to take nails supporting the vertical planks of the wall. Three runs of these 4x2s at 60cm centres were reckoned to be enough. Rather than bolting these to the poles they were fixed with massive 100mm screws, two at each end. These timbers were lumber-yard stock 4.8m = 16ft long and 'pressure-treated'. As our consultant chippy moaned, pressure-treating is pretty much nonsense because in the rush to get stuff from Swedish forest to Irish hardware yard, you can't tie up capital letting the timber dry out for months. So the pressure vessel is trying to squeeze the anti-fungal preservative liquid into a timber that is already full of liquid so it doesn't penetrate very far. Some of the timbers were noticeably heavier than others.

Although the shed is meant to be 8ft by 24ft to take advantage of the standard 8ft = 2.4m and 16ft = 4.8m dimensions used in the timber world, our shed, like Topsy, had grown a tad because the telephone poles were fatter than our original 2x2 surveyors stakes a year ago. So I needed and ordered 12 lengths of 4x2, three for each between-poles section. Like an eejit, I neglected to order a few extra on the free-delivery truck. But I'd been told that, if I travelled further than the nearest creamery and was prepared to pay a small premium, I could get better quality, more reliable timber from Declan Byrne in Graigcullen, just across the River Barrow from The Institute - 40km from home. Young Bolivar redeemed himself with cutting the builders line by scarfing together two off-cuts of 2x4 to make a single strut a little longer than 8ft [R above for diagram of a scarf joint].

So we had 2 full-length 4x2s left on the ground when we'd installed all the horizontals - win!!. You wouldn't want to have too many of these joints in your structure but you can tolerate a couple if the length isn't too great and these weaker timbers are braced by unbroken timbers on either side. Because we were learning our trade on the hoof as we went along, we found we were measuring, cutting and installing as few as 25 timbers in a working day. But at the end of each day's work we could see progress towards the final structure. Bizarrely, while the unadorned vertical poles looked impossibly tall, especially those at the bottom of the hill; when the horizontals went up then the building [it was now recognisably a building], looked kind of squat: see [L]. We're getting ahead of ourselves with this piucture because the roof-timbers are shown and I haven't told you how we fared on that part of the project. But I think you've had enough excitement for today.

Ingles, not so much

Things move on . . . and so do folks. Last weekend, Young Bolivar, jack-of-all-trades except grammarian, shifted his duff to the Republic of Cork. Actually, I shifted it in the Little Red Yaris. We had our final road trip on Saturday morning. Since early April the business model has been that we will get him up to speed with his English and he will make himself useful round the farrrm.

The latter half of this devil's bargain has been been fulfilled in spades. The evidence of his tidy mind, attention to detail and skilled hands is at every turn. Field stone walls round the base of the wood-shed; the wood-shed!; a field stone gate-pillar; a clapper-bridge across a drain and steps up the ditch; a field without thistles; doors on the polytunnel; boxes for bees, bats and birds; shelves in the tool shed and a system for keeping it tidier.

The learning English? Well, not so good. If you're over the age of 14, learning a new language is hard. I learned Dutch only by total immersion at work in a zoo in Rotterdam.  All my work-mates m'n makkers, although they left school at 16 because they loved animals, were fluent in English and either French or German or both. I made a pact with those who worked most closely with me - bedankt Yvonne! - to only speak Nederlands on the job. There are therefore a lot of technical terms - bak, dekruit, schoonmaken, water verversen - that I've only used in Dutch and seem clumsy when translated into English. I'm sure Dutch has verb tenses and I may have used them, even used them correctly, but I never bothered with nederlandse grammatica. I've mentioned before how, on an earlier sojourn in Gelderland, I'd bought a Dutch translation of The Hobbit and a dictionary: that helped.

For Portuguese, I had formal one-to-one lessons courtesy of the Portuguese Government, who unaccountably paid for an delightful young woman to occupy an office in my English University and spread Portuguese language and culture. I never opened a book on Dutch grammar, but was compelled to struggle through Portuguese verb endings for the subjunctive,  conditional and imperfect tenses. But I also had an hour a week for many weeks talking Portuguese with a woman who was easy on the eye and not too brutal in her corrections. Later, I enrolled in a Portuguese Conversation evening class which helped cement some of the lingo with other lusitanophiles.  Even when I was In The Field in Portugal, the Atlantic Islands and Cabo Verde, it wasn't really total immersion. I was either walking up the coast, largely solitary, or gathering genetic data with at least one other anglophone. Nevertheless, I was the go-to-guy in our party when haggling with taxi-drivers or asking for directions. And I could comfortably read the newspapers in Portuguese.

Young Bolivar was far too old to learn a foreign language by total immersion and too orderly in his mind to be willing tp make mistakes. He didn't really have the aptitude to have formal lessons either. It's all very well being orderly in a carpentry workshop, but it requires work to apply rules and relationships to words. I found, learning German for a year in school, that writing down and learning off lists and lists of German vocabulary was a skeleton on which I could hang the grammar. But I was good in school with the old rote learning - that's why I'm still pretty good at Pub Quizzes. YB never really enjoyed school except things like art and technical drawing. I printed out pages of pictures of tools and materials with English labels, but that didn't seem to hook him. Hanging out in the middle of nowhere with a elderly couple whose eSpanish was even worse than his Ingles, was not the optimum way to get fluent. Even stacking shelves in Lidl will require an exponential increase in his language skills: the fellow workers are likely to be Poles or Nigerians who have not a word of Spanish and no interest in South American politics. And the manager is almost certain to be a monoglot who will expect his/her instructions to be acted on correctly and quickly.

One big difference between learning a foreign language in the 70s and 80s rather that in the 10s is that immersion used to be easier because that''s all there was. Now we have social media youtube and skype available in your native language. If you're lonely and isolated, it requires supreme self-discipline to switch off the snapchat and engage in the alien but physically present environment in which you find yourself. In my 9 weeks in Wageningen NL in the Summer of 1975, I think I made two phone calls home. YB spend several hours a day watching, listening and speaking Spanish which cannot have help drive the learned English deeper into his brain.

I've no doubt YB will make some employer very happy and he'll have a social life living in the centre of one of the hoppingest small cities in Europe. Thanks for everything and best of luck in the future!

Shear stress

I only use titles like Shear Stress to suck in engineers under false pretenses. Make them step away from their construction sites and get down and dirty [Q. What's brown and sounds like a bell? A. Dunnnng!] in a different way. Last year, on the 10th of July, we were much later that we'd like to be shearing our ewes. [R Shearing the rams by Tom Roberts 1890]. See also Ramming the Shears by Michael Leunig?  This year, the 10th of July came and went and we still hadn't seen Paddy the Clip; although we knew we were on his list. The only thing that makes farming viable as a way of making a living is if YouTheFarmer do pretty much everything yourself. If you have to employ 'hands' to do the ploughing, mowing, shearing, muck-spreading, milking and doctoring, then you'd go bloke. Contrariwise, if you can do these things and have the appropriate equipment, you can do them when it suits you.  If the weather is fine and dry, everyone wants to cut grass for hay or silage; the contractors are mad busy for all the daylight hours and into the night.  If you have, as we have, a handkerchief-sized farmlet, then you're going to be last on the contractors list and you'll probably miss the rain-free window in the weather, the dreaded ragwort Senecio vulgaris will be up in your meadows and the thistles Cirsium arvense will go to seed with abandon. The sky won't fall, but the farm will be a mess.

Yesterday we were off-site.  I was up in Dublin listening to Reports From The Frontier by a couple of bright young scientists in TCD. The Beloved went off in the opposite direction to look after Pat the Salt, her aged father. Young Bolivar was holding the fort and shaking sticks at the sky  to prevent the rain falling until Friday lunchtime because we'd been promised a shearing session on Friday morning. Mid-afternoon, I was on a noisy street in Dublin when I got a call from home to say that Paddy the Clip would be coming at 7pm and would I be coming too? I caught the next available bus to Enniscorthy, where'd I'd left my car that morning.  I had, I though, plenty of time . . . to buy some eggs, a bit of fish-for-friday and a bottle of plonk to wet the fleeces. Half way through this process, I got another call to report that Paddy was incommming in 10 minutes and where was I?

This year we have 24 ewes - up from 19 last year; which tells you how successful we were at the lambing in 2015; that and the freezer full of ram-lamb which we are slowly working through. Worse than having the shearer come early was the fact that a little drizzle had started: a wet fleece is ungood for quality: the moisture encourages bacterial and fungal destruction and may even lead to spontaneous combustion.  Anyway, I arrived about 10 minutes after the shearer and was able to throw on my work clothes and help unload the shearing floor from the trailer. We decided to do the shearing up in the polytunnel where it was a) not raining and b) less fly-blown c) nearer to an active electrical socket.  And it was done.  It took a couple of hours at about 5 minutes a sheep.  This is not record breaking but I don't think that I notably slowed up the process.  My task is to first catch your sheep, then up-end her and deliver her, sitting, to Paddy.  He then, without apparent effort, removes the fleece.  A much diminished animal is then allowed to rejoin her pals.

I only finished down on the floor once and that was more of a stumble than losing a wrestling match. But subduing sheep is a young man's task, I'm not as bouncy as I was, and Young Bolivar had a go. He is up for anything: carpentry, block-laying, stone-masonry, graphic-design and now sheep-dragging. Some sheep are harder to handle than others: this is partly glinting yellow-eyed malevolence but mainly due to weight. Some of the sheep you can almost lift with one hand and others are the size of a small pony. The fleece is proportional to surface area. Despite being late to shear we only had 2 sheep with fly-strike . . . same as last year.  If we kept proper records we'd know if they were the same animals and could off-load those sheep as trouble.  Then again, I'd rather 'off' the yellow-eyed monsters. Strike is caused by the blowfly [probably Lucilla sericata, Ir. = carrchuil] and a period of warm humid weather makes it more likely. The later you shear, the more likely that at least one such weather event will occur. Dagging, which I did last year, helps clean up the read-end and so reduces the likelihood. I still smell of sheep this morning but I'm happy we're done for 2016; not least because it rained all night and the fleeces would be sopping if we'd left the sheep out in the field unshorn.

The price of wool in Ireland is now €1.00/kg down from €1.45 last year.  Damn those Chinese for not wanting to make more blankets!

20 giga 35 euro

Back in the day, this is more than 10 years ago, we talked to the Interweb down a copper telephone wire, paying by the minute.  It was weird because the telephone company's spin-off Tinet [telecom internet] had two payment bands: Working day 8am-8pm vs evenings-and-weekends. So I'd get up early [no change there] to get my work and e-mails done before the 8am change-over. It was a major glitch when an enterprising relly would send me and The Beloved a picture. Something modest like 1Mb in size would slow everything down like a trudge through molasses, 8 or 10 minutes might pass and I'd miss the 8am cut-off and have to pay double rate.  In defense of people like us in the Interweb Third World I had a bit of a campaign to get people who had free and properly resourced connectivity - all my pals in business or college - to go easy on the attachments. I was strong on corporate nonsense attachments like a long disclaimer in Irish and English inviting the recipient of this e-mail to poke out  his/her eyes with a sharp stick if s/he was not the intended recipient. But that was only a couple of kilobytes of redundant trash-talk, it was the corporate logo(s) that really galled. Some of these might be a wholly inappropriate 1Mb in size and a couple of times, I sent back a far smaller but equally legible jpg reduced in size by the wonderful Irfanview [Prev].

Where we live, you can't get further form a bus-stop and still be in the province of Leinster and when the telecoms company upgraded to line to our friends-and-neighbours the other side of the village we had hopes of 'broadband' . . . but no the line went to the village and ne plus ultra. Eventually we signed up with one of several companies offering wireless broadband and got a bundle that allowed us 30Gb a month.  That was 30,000 bloatologos, and so quite adequate for our needs and we trundled along in this mode for several years. Then Dau.I bundled her kit into a handkerchief, tied it to a stick and left home. On her own, Dau.II sat on the sofa working her way through all the boxed-sets of House-Scrubs, Desperate Numb3rs, Masterchef, and The Wire which she could hunt down.  Having run out of DVDs she moved onto youtube until one day she Broke the Internet. She had exceeded the 30Giga limit a few days before and we'd been clocking up costs at 5c/Mb until the telecom company had enough money and stopped service: I think it cost !€70! to watch a déja vu loop of Gordon Ramsey shouting "This chicken is RAW".  We sucked up the hit, upped the monthly limit to 60giga and carried on until she, in her turn, left home. We could at that stage have returned the limit to 30GB and saved €10/mo but inertia and competitive pricing and fear of another €70 bill left it at 60Gb.

In April were acquired Young Bolivar YB as a new member of the household from Venezuela. Last week, I came down in the morning to launch a Blob and found that we'd been cut off.  As before, the ISP had allowed us to run up a King's Ransom in a couple of days of normal usage at the millionaire's rate. With some difficulty, about 3 elapsed hours and sundry other inconvenience, I managed to load €20 onto the account and schedule a couple of days of Blobs. That €20 was vaporized by the next day: partly because of me checking my emails, partly from Bolivar checking his, but also because without explicitly asking, my operating system decided to upgrade Adobe Acrobat so that I could read PDFs 'better'. Even reading the email is a significant load on a byte-by-byte line: to receive and read a single line email [140 bytes, say], for your convenience Gmail loads maybe a Mb of 'extra functionality' to make email reading 'more convenient'. Each of these megabytes is being paid for by the planet! More than 10% of the world's electricity is consumed by the servers [prev] of the Interweb: Google, Friendface, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Titterer, foursquare etc. etc.

For a stop-gap measure, until our next billing date, we've lashed out €35 to pre-pay for 20 Gb of idle youtube gawping and skyping.  There is a feeling that the Internet is free; it is not. YB now knows, for example, that our bandwidth is not illimitado. Back in the days of 25 years ago, I accessed the internet with an acoustic coupler. It was so S L O W that I'd think really hard what I wanted to do: that focus and consideration was surely a Good Thing.

Pieces of string too small to keep

One of our neighbours has a woodshed to hold the fuel for their wood-burning stove. Their name isn't Jones, but we had to keep up with them, so we are building a similar pole-barn on the farrrrm, that may hold wood but may also be used for my gymnastic sofa sitting. One of the design features is that the exterior wall is made of hit-and-miss vertical 6x1 planks [view-from-above cross-section shown in blue] nailed to more substantial 6x2 horizontals [beige]:

This nifty arrangement a) saves on timber b) keeps the rain out c) lets the wind whistle through. The astute among the readership will have noted that, because there are two rows of gappy 6x1s, it doesn't save on timber but parameters b) and c) hold true.

The other eponymous feature is that the main structural uprights are recycled telephone poles.  This nifty arrangement a) recycles b) has no high carbon footprint concrete in the footings c) looks rustic. As the foundations are six 90cm-deep holes in the ground and as the poles are tapered it poses a physically demanding exercise in 3-dimensional geometry to get something with right-angles at each of the eight corners of the box. On our mountainy site, an additional complication is that everything is on a 10% slope.  If the barn is 24 feet [7.3m] long, and it is, then there is a fall in ground 'level' of about 2.4ft = 73cm between the top poles and the bottom. After we had our 4 corner poles up & vertical [on two tapering edges each], we put a borrowed laser level on a yellow bar stool [R in centre] in the middle and marked that height all round on the poles. We were then ready to put in the two middle poles so that they were a) vertical b) in line with their neighbours and c) halfway between them. To get them in line we snapped a length of blue baker-twine between a pair of end posts and pushed and pulled and levered the middle pole into position. When we needed to move the line to centre the other pole, Young Bolivar couldn't undo his knot and so cut the line.  Huge drama from self!

I come from a family that never cut string because it is impossible to restore string to its original length after it is cut. When my mother has a parcel to send, she will find a piece of string of suitable length to tie the thing up. The surplus after the last effective knot will not be cut off; it will rather be used up in non-functional but vaguely decorative half-hitches. Part of the ritual of receiving the parcel is to reverse the process, undoing each knot in turn, and putting the string away in a safe place. Young Bolivar, holding a useless 50cm length of blue string, looked at me like I had two heads; but then he doesn't have the benefit of a drawer full of string and ribbons.

This reminded me of a story about Stephen J Gould [multibloboprev] when he got to be director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.  As Director, he got the Director's office and got the previous incumbent's clutter as well. Bureaus and chests of drawers and filing cabinets and display cases. Gould was particularly tickled to find a small drawer marked 'pieces of of string too small to keep'. That's how I remember the story which is probably apocryphal because Googling the phrase yields a large number of parables, many of them explicitly christian in sentiment.

Nothing like a rissole

Last year I was maundering on about camels, which allowed me to give hats off to Wm Shagsper with Hamlet teasing poor Polonius for his obsequious agreement "very like a whale" etc. with whatever His Prince suggested. Since I discovered the Wexford Rissole, I've been chuntering on about their virtues to anyone who would listen. By the Mass, I even induced Young Bolivar to try one as we spilled out of The Sky & The Ground after Science Café a couple of months ago. It was more complicated than you might think because there are two sorts of rissole - battered and breaded - which each have their staunch supporters. The [Polish] woman behind the counter asked what we fancied and explained, not really helpfully, than most people preferred them battered but she leaned toward bread-crumbs  . . . or the other way round. It would be unchivalrous, she being young and pretty, to reject her preference but perhaps foolish to reject the majority opinion. So we ordered one of each.  And very nice too: hot, tasty and not requiring a disposable fork.

Since she moved down to the Republic of Cork 3 years ago, Dau.II has been talking up the Cork potato pie as the local equivalent to the Wexford Rissole. When her sister was visiting in July, they ordered two of these crudités and received two objects the size of a baby's head. That would have been okay, except that they had an order of chips as well. Even Dau.II's bloke struggled, and he can capably trencher through a 800g sliced loaf if given a toaster, 200g of butter and half an hour.

I was down in Cork last weekend, launching Young Bolivar into a hostile world. I took the chance to hang out with Dau.II for 30 hours before the work goes mental at The Institute. On Sunday forenoon we piled into the Little Red Yaris and drove out to Kinsale for a walk. Cork has, over the last 50 years, developed as the foodie centre of Ireland and Kinsale is the Capital.  Of course the Real Capital is the English Market in Cork City Centre but that is almost too concentrated. The smells of coffee and cheese and salami and olives sends a rush of blood to the head. Kinsale [R] has more restaurants with more stars than any other town in Ireland. The planning office puts no limits on the use of paint and sometimes the clash of colour is exciting but unfortunate. After wandering around for a while and meeting folks - Dau.II's bloke and his brother seemed to know every busker and artist in town - we called for lunch and washed up in Dino's Family Chip Shop on the quayside.

We all ordered the kind of stuff you can buy in a chipper: chips, chips with cheese, fish, fish-cakes, and lurid coloured drinks. I took a battered sausage and a battered potato pie. The battered sausage was entirely what you would expect: pre-cooked, heated up in piping hot oil and 'robust' of flavour. But 'tis a long way from a rissole that the Cork potato pie was r'ared. What it appeared to be was a small fist of mashed potato lightly seasoned with salt and pepper and covered in chipper's batter like my sausage. A rissole has substance because it is recycling any old crud that is found around and behind and under the fryers at the end of the night. Now I have to confess that, while I still have my own teeth, I don't believe in mashed potato, even if merely a vehicle for butter and cream. It's not a food for infants who are following baby-led weaning [and all kids should be onto that]: they prefer a chunk they can pick up and gum at. Mashed potato too often has the consistency of the baby-rice you can pour from a packet and mix with water. There are plenty of fine authentic Irish recipes incorporating mashed spuds: colcannon, champ and boxty for example, all good. My Great Uncle Walter, fabulously wealthy from coal being discovered under his family estate in Northumberland, lived out his declining years in Budleigh Salterton on the South Devon coast, where the average age is about 65. We were certainly the only children on the beach when we used to visit him and our eccentric Aunt Lily who may have been married to him. ANNyway, Uncle Walter subsisted on Complan and whiskey. He probably ached for mashed potato as something to chew on for a change.

Shed suite et fin

A month+ ago, I posted a bit of philosophy about thrift - not the iconic copper tolerant pink flower Armeria maritima of the Waterford coast but the concept outlined by Victorian political economist Samuel Smiles [blobbotrib for his Self-Help (1859) previously] in his eponymous book, which you can get for free if you are kindle-enabled. There I mentioned the start of a building project on the farrrm which drew a surprising amount of positive feedback from both my readers: "give us more shed" they cried, "enough with the isles, women and song, already" they implied. Well I've spend much of August a) building the shed and b) writing about it: one - two - thr - for - fiv - six. Those fans of sheds are chewing their beards now, having had quite enough shed for 2016. I think this is the last of the series, because I think we're finished and I think Young Bolivar is setting off into the wild wide world in a few days and I know I'll be back at paid work from 1st September. The shed is up but it appears [R] to be hanging from the roof like a curtain - which is a sense it is: preventing the rain falling on the interior and reducing the gales to 'ventilation'.

The roof is level, the gap between the bottom of the wall and the good earth is 150mm at the top and between 650mm and 750mm [it's rough] at the bottom. I can lay blocks, I have laid blocks but I don't do it well, so I asked Young Bolivar to fill in the up-side gap with concrete blocks [see L] to minimise the ingress of water from the yard above; that's where the flood will come from, if it comes at all. While scrabbling the dirt away to put in a gravel foundation we discovered a black plastic Wavin pipe that we'd installed when we were excavating the site a year ago. It fits an existing upstream pipe and we ran it off and away through and under the shed-site using a 3m length of Wavin and then extending it with yellow plastic perforated drainage pipe which snakes down and out under the lower wall. You block existing pipes, even if they appear dry, at you peril. We had to cut a block [see inset R in picture L] to accommodate the black pipe.

In the middle we've found 4 nice curb-stones each 200mm high and put a mid-step of that height to minimise the amount of back-fill necessary to have a level floor. Having two level floors saves us having to find and 3 or 4 tonnes to fill a 200 x 2400 x 3600mm space - win! [L step with hard-hat for scale and to prove that we did have PPE on site]. The middle stone is perforated by two holes which originally had a couple of rusty iron bolt-heads. That might help anchoring a dividing wall.

For the lower wall [L with trusty and much-used iron barn for scale], we could have used blocks as well but went instead with existing rocks that were available for free on and about the site. I think it looks more 'in keeping' and vernacular architecture although it's not possible to see the work from the front gate. The back fill under the floor and behind this retaining wall enabled us to bury a lot of gnarly and round stones that were useless for building. I filled and emptied or venerable perforated steel builders wheel-barrow many times for the fill.
Finally we top dressed the floor with 804 aka 2-down limestone gravel which will pack down into a solid dry surface that we can start to store logs on. Dilemma: do we want to stack the wood on pallets to keep them drier and better ventilated OR do we want to stack directly on the floor to minimise rat runs. Compromise: last night I put down a very old egg-carton & veneer interior door and started stacking wood on that.

permethrin

<warning>If you're going to have a fit of the vapours reading about 

sex, lice or the clap you shd stop reading after the first paragraph</warning>

The latest addition to the humanstock on our farrrrm is young Bolivar, a very handy chap from Venezuela who is wwoofing for a few weeks to improve his Inglés.  WWOOFing?  Working Weekends On Organic Farms - not necessarily organic or weekend; usually farms and mostly working. The Darwinday Storm of 2014 did damage to our trusty polytunnel; notably whacking the doors off their hinges. It has taken us until now to think about repairing them. The sheep also needed new troughs for the muesli that we supply during the months when there is no grass growing. The last pair of troughs, purchased 4-5 years ago have been out in the wet too long, too often and are 'delicate'. If you've ever watched sheep in a feeding frenzy, you'll know that 'delicate' carpentry is not fit for purpose anywhere near them. ANNYway, over a few days, reusing as much wood as possible, Bolivar has made 4 light-weight door frames from 3x2 timbers with beautiful mitred corners and elegant cross-bracing. He has also built two 2.4m troughs that would withstand a feeding frenzy of rhinos: either Ceratotherium simum or Diceros bicornis or indeed both.

The question arose about how to prevent the new wood rotting away and I found a tin of Ronseal Garden Gate and Fence Preservative in one of the sheds. That could be slapped on the doors without worry but, if it was designed to kill fungi and insects, might it not also do damage to the sheep as they licked the last crumbs of meal from the cracks? The interweb to the rescue!  Accirduing to the label, RGGFP is a mixture of Permethrin and Propiconazole.  The latter is a triazole based system anti-fungal agent which inhibits an essential enzyme in fungal metabolism, so it is aka demethylase inhibitor or DMI. [-ase for enzyme] So that deals with fungi, although it also has some inhibitory effect on the feeding of some beetles.

Permethrin OTOH [structure L] is the boy for the arthropods, and will kill not only insects but ticks and mites, which are more closely related to spiders.  We decided to operate on the precautionary principal and only paint the outside and underside of the troughs and give two generous coats of the stuff for all the exposed surfaces of the door. We've met ticks before, both as the carriers of a fabulous range of human diseases and sucking moose Alces alces dry in Canada.

But I knew close to nothing about mites, their distant relative. A couple of days after reading the ingredients off the tin of wood-preservative, I was reading, with some urgency about mites. In particular I was reading about the itch mite Sarcoptes scabiei [L, not to scale!! it's only 0.5mm across: I've numbered the legs to show its fundamental spideriness], the cause of a distressing non-fatal infestation called scabies. Scabies spreads through prisons, refugee camps and homeless shelters because the sheets (if any) and the blankets (if lucky) don't get washed enough and get shared out of necessity. The mite is quite delicate and cannot survive for more than a tuthree days absent from a warm human body to feed off. Leaving the blankets on the floor for a few days is sufficient to kill the mites but you can also speed things up with a good hot wash in the bathtub or, if you have one, a washing machine. You can't give your child a scalding wash in the bathtub without killing it along with the mites . . . so the treatment of choice is Permethrin.  If you slather a sufficiently concentrated solution of Permethrin on the the child's body before bed, all the mites should be dead in the morning; do it again in a week's time to be sure to be sure. It's a peculiar demarcation that mites are found only on the body, in contrast to lice Pediculus capitis which only inhabit the head.  And don't even think about crabs Pthyrus pubis, they live down there.

You'd have to be quite unlucky if you caught scabies by, say, picking up the blankets to wash them. It requires prolonged skin to skin contact for direct transmission without using blankets as a vector. The itching results because the mites actually burrow through the top layer of skin like moles in a pasture. Or indeed like the Guinea Worm Dracunculus medinensis. So I suppose it takes time to leave one person's epidermis and migrate to another's. Prolonged skin-to-skin contact is symptomatic of sex, so many epidemiologists count scabies among the STIs. scabies is both easier to spell and easier to treat than, say, gonorrhoea.

Clean bedding, cleaned child and you're back to the status quo ante. Except that you're not quite as you were before: your immune system has been primed to act against the mites and the next time you are presented with t'buggers, you'll be itching the next day; whereas it took 4-5 days from first infection before the dreadful, infuriating itch manifested itself.  So it's another example of our immune system being the primary cause of the discomfort rather than the pathogen itself.  but relax, I am certain sure that you can't catch scabies from reading about it.

Spice Burger

Sunday-eight-days, I was down with Pat the Salt on my reg'lar night cooking a scratch meal with the old man and not insisting that he eat his greens. I try to do my bit to clean up/out the fridge which is always a gallimaufry of pots and tubs filled with a variety of left-overs and over-catering. "Rotate your stock", I mutter as I create something edible&safe with the last sad slice of ham that is approaching its sell-by date.  I am not as ruthless for the bin as some of his other carers and do try to convert things into tasty calories rather than becoming a problem at the landfill.  The previous w/e The Boy had been over from England with his family.  He had been shopping and got unaccountably nostalgic for Spice-Burgers which is, and I quote, one of the most popular foods in the country. That is pushing it on two levels a) it's not food; it's a food product b) it's mainly popular among undiscriminating children and bone-poor students.  If it's so popular, how come Walsh's, the family firm that makes the things, went bankrupt in 2009?  The rump of the company was bought up/out by a Combine and Spice-Burgers are back on the menu across Ireland.  I can't imagine a French family having a few for dinner.

The Walsh family from Dublin have been making these things since 1950; and they are not dissimilar to Wexford rissoles, which at least have the virtue of being made fresh . . . from nameless ingredients found around and behind the fryers in chip-shops.  Spice Burgers OTOH, come in lurid plastic packaging [above R] with a sell-by date a couple of weeks after manufacture. Their contents are also nameless because it is a secret family recipe, which was the subject of a bitter row in 2009 between the company and the son of the founder. ANNyway, The Boy had bought a brace of these food-products and then bottled out of cooking and eating them - possibly because he's no longer a starving teenager and possibly because Real Food was on offer for the whole of his visit home.  So a week later, on the very cusp of the sell-by, I brought the Spice Burgers away home, and shared them, one each, with Bolivar who is visiting from Venezuela.  Viewing the little bread-crumbed patty on his plate, Bolivar asked "¿Que es?" and we were neither of us able to answer.  Although The Beloved boldly stated that they were meat,

That's only partially true because 'meat' is a long way down the table of contents:
Water, rusk (gluten), onion, beef (9%), beef fat, crumbs (gluten), soya protein, wheat flour, beef connective tissue, rapeseed oil, seasoning (salt, herbs, spice, more rusk (gluten), yeast extract, sodium sulphite, flavouring), potato starch, cornflour, modified starch, more salt.
Jaysus! another food product which has more water in it than anything else. How much more?  The maths says that, as beef is 9% and we will suppose that the fat, connective tissue, binder and flavourings total 8% then 83% is left.  Of that at least 10% must be onion and 11% must be rusk (gluten) so water in SBs cannot be more than 60% and might, with more rusk-and-onion be as little as 30% but cannot be less.  They are one of the most popular foods in the country because they were created by a butcher from Finglas who knew that if you lurry in salt, fat, flavourings; package it in a crispy crunchy coating and cook it so it's ready to eat then people will want to eat them.  Especially if you can adulterate stretch out the 'meat' with a lot of cheap filler so the price comes way down.  That man, Maurice Walsh, he was a true food engineer long before that became a job description.

This food ingredients critic felt a little "uneasy in the tum" about half an hour after consumption; which might have been hysteria and soon passed off.  Like Mr Eastcoastman's ice-cream, you have to wonder whether any of the mix get converted to useful protein or calories.

Topping off

There is a tradition in the building trade to celebrate the installation of the top-most structural timber with a small ceremony called Topping Off or Topping Out. Old timers in many N European regions will tie a small tree to the chimney stack to propitiate the displaced spirits of place. It is common for the householder to buy a crate of beer for the workers to encourage them to finish the rest of the contract. About half the cost of a new build is the water-proof structure. Fitting the shell out with electricity, plumbing, heating; plastering and painting the walls; putting the final bits of floor down; getting the interior ceilings up, plastered and painted takes the other half. Anyone who has suffered through a building project will remember a Snag List as long as your arm: this is the discrepancy between what the builder has signed off on and what the customer thinks s/he can live with: electric sockets slightly skew; a small drip from the toilet cistern; a really terrible bit of skirting board in the second bedroom; a widening gap between the wall and the window-frame.

For our topping out 19 years ago, we invited the wives and girl-friends of all the contractors to a party with their blokes so that the men could show-off their skills. We figured that if we were real nice to the ladies, that would add a push to get the work finished. As well as a sapling on the chimney we installed small gorse bushes Ulex europaeus in both toilets because a) they weren't plumbed in yet [tsk!] b) they were in gorgeous bright yellow flower c) they smell of coconut.

Our timber shed obviously needed a roof after all the vertical and horizontal structure was installed. We were advised by the chippy that a lattice of 2x4s = 50x100mm with bird's-mouth notches attached to the wall plate crossed by 2x3s = 50x75mm would be strong enough to carry 9 sheets of corrugated steel (and a foot of snow = 1 tonne). Needless to say every visitor to the site with a Y chromosome 'helpfully' told us that was far too much timber; that corrugated steel effectively supported itself; and that we had been gypped about the price paid. These same people were also happy to sound off about the orientation of the shed - why not build it facing East? with steel up-rights? with concrete footings? with the roof at the bottom? ANNyway we went with the chippy, whose parting shot was advising us to sandwich a layer of roofing felt between the 2x4s and the 2x3s "unless you prefer to be dripped on from above?". These structural timbers were meant to be on 3ft = 900mm centres but because of an inventory cock-up [oops] they finished up 1100mm apart - and still looked over-engineered to the know-alls. From the last shed we re-roofed 9 years ago, we had a bucket of 75mm roofing nails, and I dearly wanted to use them up toenailing the timbers together. But it was easier and stronger to use the same 5,0x100mm screws which we'd used to attach the horizontal wall timbers to the telephone poles.

One of our kinder neighbours is a recently retired roofer [R - at work] who offered us an hour of his golf-time on Saturday to get the first sheet of corrugated steel up "properly - once you have the first sheet up, the rest fall into place".  That first sheet brought home to us that the building is not quite square. If you put the sheet's long-edge against the end of the 2x3 supports and sighted along the short edge, you could see that there would be no overhang at the far end of the building. Accordingly we aligned the short edge and trimmed off the 2x3s so they looked correct. Having screwed in the first sheet, our resident roofer stayed up there and made Young Bolivar and me pass up the next sheets one-by-one while he tacked them in place with hex-head self-tapping roof-screws. Wup wup wup and up they went.  It took about an hour before he deemed the rest of the task to be within our competence and he sailed off to the golf driving-range. Just having the extra pair of hands was useful - those 12ft sheets of corrugated are not so much heavy as awkward and sharp at the corners. Roofer warned us not to leave the sheets partially secured! The next gale would happily peel them off the roof and leave them 2 fields away in a mangled heap. Young Bolivar spent another hour tiptoeing about the roof putting another 100 roof screws in; while I sank back exhausted and called for tea.

Wood-stacks

This above is moh2o's cord of firewood, three different species in a well-built self-supporting pile. Well, I've finished Lars Mytting's Norwegian Wood and I feel like a failure. I wrote in the New Year about reading an early paragraph and rushing out to split some wood. I have a dreadful feeling that I was waaay too late. What I have failed to grasp is the separation of two stages in the life of fire-wood: a) drying and b) storage. It is much better if your get the wood dried down quickly to <20% moisture in a process of evaporation before the wood succumbs to the necrosis of fungal infection. Even invisible fungi can block the water-filled tubes of the wood, so that water cannot easily escape.

One of the last things Tadek, our wooffing Pole, did during his second winter with us was thin out a dense dark stand of laurel Prunus laurocerasus, which was sharing the bottom of our yard with the 6 tree apple orchard. The apples were probably heirloom species but were almost useless to us because the fruit was +5m up in the air at the end of wispy twigs. There was nothing near against which to lean a ladder. The reason for this was that the laurel and apple trees had been fighting for the light. It was so dark in the orchard that no grass grew. Tadek went mad with the chain-saw and cut down a LOT of laurel and then cut it into lengths about 30 cm long, and then returned to Poland. I started to stack the small-enough logs into a pile at the edge of the orchard. The bigger pieces, which were easy to split, I split. Then my competent friend René came up and said my pile would be at nothing unless I raised it off the dirt floor. So I threw down what I'd started, found a number of beat-up pallets and, with the help of a 12 y.o. Dau.II, stacked them all up again so that they were clear of the worms. It filled out at 1m x 1m x 5m and I covered the top with election posters weighted down with the gnarly unsplittable lumps. I opened one end of the stack last winter and am working through the rest now.

Stacking the wood in situ was a good idea because it meant less barrowing the stuff about, but tucked in a corner of the orchard; up against the dry-stone wall; covered with plastic was not exactly encouraging of water loss. It would have been better to stack them more openly where the sun and especially the Summer wind could whistle through to carry away the moisture THEN after a significant weight loss move t'buggers somewhere dry and convenient to the stove.  It's been the same with all my other wood stacks around the farm: too dark; not enough air-circulation. And especially, I have failed mea culpa mea maxima culpa to strip off the bark from the unsplit logs to expose more water-loss area. The bark is, by design, waterproof - if it wasn't trees would weep bitter tears down their trunks.

Lars Mytting and his compatriots actively go out into wood-lots and cut down trees - huge debate about the optimum time for felling. Or they get firewood delivered by authorized dealers - who guarantee them as less than a maximum moisture content. They get to choose their species and to some extent the individual tree (nice and straight, please, minimal knots]. We on the other hand have been able to rely / subsist on what has fallen out of the ditches (usually rowan  / mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia) or come crashing down from the crown (ash - Fraxinus excelsior & Scot's pine Pinus sylvetsris). This bounty tends to become available during winter storms and I try to cut them up there, then. When the fields are dry in the summer is the time to load up the Yaris and bring them to the yard. Since we had Young Bolivar working with us, we've had a nice airy wood-shed with hit-and-miss walls and a well-high roof but I should nevertheless dry the wood first in the breeze.

You should check out "artistic woodstacks" on Google Images: despite firewood being essentially ephemeral, some people prefer to make something beautiful as well as functional. "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" Wm Morris.

Bird's mouth

Mastering the bird's-mouth joint is an essential part of the training for roofers and house-framers. Sensible roofs have a pitch so that rain, and worse snow, don't sit on top of the structure but get thrown off before they can accumulate and start to penetrate the space below. Walls have to be vertical because roofs are heavy and it's better if the force of their weight presses straight down rather causing shear-stress. Likewise the wall-plate (the timber at the top of the wall on which the roof sits) should be horizontal so that the load is evenly distributed. The bird's-mouth is the way traditional carpenters cut the rafters (principal roof timbers) so that they sit directly on the wall-plate with maximum contact between the two faces [R showing how much of the contact area on the rafter is allocated to the vertical and horizontal faces.]. The joint is beefed up with a couple of nails whanged in at an angle from opposite edges of the rafter . . . or use screws if you're flush with money and don't trust yourself with a hammer.

On our wood-shed we had a slightly different problem in that we had two (front and back) wall plates, one higher than the other, and the roof is on a 20% slope. So instead of cutting the bird's-mouth in the end of the rafter, two notches have to be cut out of the long edge of the rafter [see schematic L - our roof is considerably shallower so the notch is flatter and less symmetrical] with a good deal of precision. The horizontal cuts have to be exactly as far apart as the wall-plates and the angle of the notch has to such that it sits exactly upon and parallel to the top of  that timber. Furthermore these two angled cuts in the rafter have to go through the wood so that the notch looks the same from each side. This is way beyond what my hand-saw skills are able for. One of the most useful things I learned in university was to point my index finger along the blade of the saw and hold the handle with only three fingers and the thumb. I was told this by a genuine chippy when I was helping to make stage flats behind the scenes at the college dramatic society. I can cut through a small timber at right angles so that the sawn face is all-square but angles are a different, more taxing, matter.

If you're been with The Blob from the beginning, you'll know that I don't consider myself a good pair of hands partly because I lack a certain painstaking logic in following protocols and partly because I'm a bit clumsy. When it comes to Materials, I've had to force myself to make and do things which I don't feel the least bit confident about. Any 11 year old farm-boy can reverse his daddy's 4x4 and trailer round a corner and into the yard without thinking. I have to school my hands and it takes 3 or 4 attempts to achieve the car-parking objective. Back in the day, when photocopiers were simpler, you could make paper-saving back-to-back copies by copying one side and feeding the copy back into the machine upside-down and back-to-front to do the second side. There are only 4 possible permutations here, but it would often take me 5 or 6 attempts to achieve the paper-saving objective.

Young Bolivar is a bit different: happy to saw and drill and screw and weld, especially if it involves something noisy like a circular saw or a strimmer. Nevertheless, he made a mistake on one of the cuts on his first rafter [R, we didn't throw the timber away but turned it upside down and had another go at getting the two cuts correct]. Purists will tsk tsk note that the shorter cut, which should be at right angles with the diagonal is actually at right angles to the edge of the rafter. You can just see the head of a 100mm screw awash with the vertical face of the rafter.

The rafters in our wood-shed were meant to be 4x2s = 100mm x 50mm on 3ft = 900mm centres and because our poles were 24 ft apart, I added 9 4x2s to the inventory.  I had duh! neglected to allow for the roof's weather-protective over-hang which meant that the roof was at least 3ft longer than the floor below. So the spacing was nearer to 1100mm than 900mm. But we stuck with 9 rafters because the odd number meant that we had one rafter in the centre sitting on top of the middle poles  and that meant that the roof was symmetrical; which turned out to be A Good Thing. To Be Continued . . .

Call this a resort - blehhh

Sheep? Who'd have 'em? It's not rocket-science but it takes a certain amount of engagement, and presence, to manage sheep. The worst thing that can happen is that a) one of t'buggers dies b) we don't realise for a while. Since the foot&mouth epidemic of 2001, farrrmers can no longer leave dead sheep in a quite corner to be recycled by fox and crow. Every beast is now ear-tagged and the DeptAg wants to know the entire life history [incl death, disposal, or sale] of every tagged sheep. We got complacent, unmindful and careless in 2020 [must have been Covid!] and allowed one of our aged ewes to die . . . and get partly dismembered by "the cleaners". I ignored the flies, pretended I was CSI Midlands, and shovelled the bits into a heavy-duty plastic bag for delivery to The Fallen Animal Guy the other side of the mountain.

Since then I count the ewes [60 legs and 15 wet noses and I'm satisfied] several times a day. I've had to cut sheep-wire to free sheep-heads on numerous occasions - hint: cut a vertical strand rather than a horizontal one. And, face-it, it's easier to handle a whole dead sheep than her scattered parts. 

Pegleg trough (see shadow below)

We're in an awkward season now. The grass really hasn't started to grow, so we are having to rotate our stock flock through the various paddocks. We had a bin full of sheep muesli and, one chilly spring day in March The Gaffer decided that the sheep may as well eat it. Accordingly The Outdoor Man heaved a feed-trough from of a distant field and left it in the field with a bucketful of muesli. The sheep were delighted. A tuthree days later, also frezzzing, I cast thereto another bucket of feed. Much gambolling and unseemly shoving at the trough.

But shortly after that I found that the empty trough had been kicked to buggery [see top L]. The end piece out and one side hanging by a thread. All the sheep were looking at their hooves all innocent, or whistling nonchalantly at the far end of the field. What ever these professions of not me guv'nor it was easy to imagine them developing expectations from getting quality chow with added molasses and then abruptly not getting it: Call this a resort? - blehhh - take that <kick>; think it's easy being a sheep? <stomp> horizontal sleet, eh? fancy some?

But something had to be done, though, with the thoroughly broken-through trough ^*, even if that was choppitup for kindling. What I did in contrast was use the least rotten trapezoidal end piece as a template to cut two new ends from western red cedar off-cuts from the 2016 woodshed project and the 2023 planter-box project. Once these ends were installed, it was easy to cut 400mm off the rottenest part of each trough . . . making good for another couple of years use. No complaints that the troughs are now 15% shorter & 10% lighter for hefting about the property according to the exigencies of the muesli service.

Credit to Young Bolivar for making the original troughs that same 2016 Summer as he designed and built the cedar woodshed.
(*)Where I grew up, these 'appliances' were called troffs, hereabouts they sound more like trocks.

Trust in the wooden walls

IN 480 BCE, the Great King Xerxes I of Persia invaded Greece to swat the annoying flea which was nibbling at the distant edge of his empire. Xerxes mustered a huge army which was briefly checked by Leonidas and his 300 at Thermopylae and rolled remorselessly on towards Athens. The Athenians sent a delegation to Delphi for advice. The answer came back "Fly to the ends of the earth. All is ruin for fire and headlong god of war shall bring you low."  Harrumph, the Athenians didn't fancy that as a resolution to their problems and pointedly asked the Oracle to try again. The second answer was more enigmatic but held out a smidgeon of hope: "Though all else shall be taken, Zeus, the all seeing, grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail". Themistocles aka The Mouth, argued that they should abandon the city itself [bummer!] and trust in the fleet of triremes in which Athens had invested so heavily over recent years. And it was so: the naval Battle of Salamis was fought later that Summer and the Athenians gave the Persian fleet a decisive drubbing. With command of the sea, the Athenians and their allies were able to permanently outflank the Persians and make the King of Kings go back home.

But that's all history. We too have trusted in wooden walls - specifically western red cedar Thuja plicata planks making the face and structure of our new woodshed. I took measurements and made calculations and asked Jim Davis the sawyer for 130 6x1 = 150x25mm cedar planks each 8ft = 2.4m long. On the same trip to the metropolis of Graiguecullen, I ordered all the other matériel [screws, bolts, nuts, washers, stock timber in various - 6x3, 6x2 4x2, 3x2 - dimensions] from the hardware-store / lumber-yard down the road from Jim's saw-mill. All the stuff from the latter shop was delivered the next day. The cedar took more than two weeks, so we were champing at the bit when the little truck came up the lane. As we unloaded I noticed that some of the planks were longer than others. I mentioned this to Jim and he said airily that they couldn't get so many planks out of the one log, so (of course) they were slightly different lengths. He also mentioned that John, the cutter at the mill, had thrown in some extra lengths gratis - I suppose on a baker's dozen (=13) argument against any real or perceived shortfall in the contract.

It quickly transpired that I had under-counted the inventory, not least because I'd imagined that the telephone poles would be left exposed, while Young Bolivar assumed that they would be boxed in with this beautiful new cedar cladding, so that was 8 extra planks used. When I set down to measuring and sorting the planks, I discovered that the shortest set were a full 3000mm long rather than the 2400mm asked for. So all the planks had to be trimmed a certain extent.  I'd fondly and incorrectly imagined that everything would come cut to length and we could just whack everything up [hammers and 65mm sunk-head oval nails] as quickly as we'd put on the roof sheeting. I wanted to minimise waste and useless scraps of off-cut, so it was a dilemma about whether to use the 3000mm planks or the 3190mm planks or the 3300mm planks [See L remainders after the structure complete]. This dilemma was compounded by the fact that the shortest planks were gorgeous straight knot-free, unshook lengths of timber that would be better off as a table than as shed-siding.

Then I realised that the spacing between the horizontal studding was such that we could make up the 8ft = 2400mm as 1600mm + 800mm and have the joint braced by a stud. That meant that we could make 3 planks cover 4 spaces [see L for pictures].  We agreed that it would be temping fate, and ingress of water to put such a joint on the outer leaf of the wall but that alternate internal strakes could incorporate a joint. And it was so: insofar as you notice the joint at all at all, it looks fine - might even enhance the authenticity. In any case, we're hoping that the lower part of the all will be most often invisible behind piles of logs from our sustainable forest.

The up-shot is that, having nailed all the cedar up, including an extra 500mm fascia at the top of the open face [see L], we have 27 unused planks including 5 lengths of the super quality stuff for a table and more than 30 off-cuts at least 900mm long which shout 'chair'. We were conflicted about the design of the fascia: should it too be hit and miss like the vertical walls or solid because we have no requirement for air circulation Up There? We compromised with the plank-gap-plank to echo the walls and cut some of the driving rain from the West.  If that lets too much rain in, we'll have to think about stapling some draft-buster plastic woven netting behind the uprights. That's all the timber installed in our new wood shed; it looks and smells gorgeous.

Old Salt Route

Earlier in the week, I was visiting palomino Rene in St Mullins at the very start of the River Barrow Navigation. We've been there before. St Mullins is desperately romantic with a medieval motte-and-bailey on the village green, an holy well, a little medieval chapel and one of the earliest examples of hydro-power in Ireland. As we visited, the tide came in and the rocks in the broad reach of river threw off a hunting heron Ardea cinerea as the water covered them.  St Mullins is 30km from the sea but still tidal.  I expressed amazement about how the town of New Ross which is still 15 river-winding km from the sea grew to be a port at all at all. Why didn't ships just unload their cargoes at some convenient place on the coast and quickly turn around for more? Rene glanced at me pityingly and asked "And just how would people have transported those goods to their homes in the interior?" Red face, me and point taken.  On the way home from that visit, Young Bolivar and I were discussing how, even 100 years ago, labour was cheap but transport was expensive and that now the equation is neatly reversed. This has consequences on how things are built: 100, or even 50, years ago, houses hereabout were built as rubble-in-courses from the local granite rocks.  It takes time to patch together a 3-D jig-saw of random stone into a 500mm thick wall with two vertical faces. Nowadays, you can, for half nothing, get bales of "4 inch solid" concrete blocks delivered to your door and build walls faster, straighter and possibly stronger.

All that made me think about bulk transport in the days before motorways, so I was primed when a piece about the Stecknitzkanal popped up in Wikipedia. The canal was for a few hundred years an important part of the Alte Salzstraße which brought salt from the interior of Germany near Lüneburg to the great Hanseatic port of Lübeck on the Ostsee / Baltic coast. The trade in white gold served many aspects of food production but was vital for the preservation of herring Clupea harengus which in turn was vital for normal life in Catholic Europe when Fridays were deemed to be meat-free. Before the Stecknitzkanal was built to connect the North Sea, Hamburg and the Elbe with the Trave, Lübeck and the Baltic, the salt had to be carted over the intervening distance. Transport through the sandy heathlands was bad enough in High Summer but became frustratingly difficult when the road 'surface' dissolved into sludge in Winter.

In 1390 the merchants of Lübeck agreed to go halfsies with Erich IV Herzog von Saxe-Lauenburg to build a canal across the ridge between their two territories and make them both rich by taxing the traffic. The first shipment of salt - 30 barges containing 5-10 tonnes each - arrived in Lubeck in 1398. The trade peaked the following century at 30,000 tonnes/year but declined steadily thereafter.  And it wasn't only salt that used the canal: lots of bulk non-perishable cargo made the journey in the reverse direction: herring for starters, but also furs, timber and grain. Peat, coal, and bulk building materials like bricks, gravel and limestone were later added to the taxable traffic.

The length of the journey was considerably more than the crow-fly distance because the two navigable rivers didn't quite flow in the 'right' direction and were quite wiggly. Indeed, only 12 of the 97 km of the route were in a totally new channel.  The summit was only 17m above sea-level and a key element of the navigation was to install weirs to hold back the water into long horizontal reaches along which horses could tow the barges. These reaches were initially linked by 'flash-locks' incorporated into the weirs which were opened when a barge had to go through and closed as quickly as possible before all the stocked water rushed away down-stream.  This was fantastically inefficient and wasteful of water and was the cause of perennial dispute between bank-side millers who needed the water high to serve their mill-race. Eventually the flash-locks were replaced with single chamber locks which were technologically more sophisticated and much more conservative with the water. By the end of the 19thC, the 8m wide trench of the Stecknitzkanal had been replaced /upgraded to the mighty Elbe-Lübeck canal [R above] which is still used for commerce and leisure.

Eat yer algae - it's good for you.

At the beginning of the Summer, I was walking the beach with Dau.II and Young Bolivar at Kilfarrassy on the Waterford Coast when we met a mother and daughter from the Home Education Network. Dau.II was entirely recognisable although all grown up. We stopped and chatted about the best beaches along the coast and what to do there.  It seems that while I'm scavenging fish-boxes, buoys and old rope, more civilized, or hungrier, folks are scavenging sea weed and the other family had recently been on seaweed gathering workshop with Marie Power, director [-and-sole-employee?] of The Sea Gardener.  Seems that these seaweed-pushing workshops and talks and events have been going for nearly ten years.

Fast forw to last week when Marie Power re-surfaced in the Home Ed Network [aka, in this instance, chatting to my pal Russ] at the same time as Dau.I was visiting from England. Both my girls are in the catering trade but Dau.I is of the vegetarian persuasion and is currently a Dinner Lady in a primary school outside of Stroud. It's a bit complicated but the Woowah Veggie Café where she used to work got the contract to serve healthy food to the kids instead of p'ison like chips and pizza; and Dau.I got a job in the country. ANNyway, she cares about food and the politics or food and Marie was looking for people who'd be on the same wavelength.  Seaweed isn't meat after all.  It was arranged that they'd meet in a seafront café in Tramore and compare notes.

Apart from some talk and comparing-of-notes, Dau.I came away with an Almond & Orange Bar . . . with seaweed. The seaweed was honestly in smaller type because organic seaweed mix is only 6% of the ingredients by weight. Here's the whole Table of Contents:

• wholegrains (rolled oats, wholewheat flour, wheatgerm), free range eggs, grapejuice concentrate, milled organic seeds (flax, hemp, sunflower & pumpkin), butter, organic seaweed mix (6%) (sweet kelp, dilsk, sleabhcan), flaked almonds (6%), coconut, raisins, dark chocolate (unsweetened chocolate, sugar, cocoa, butter, soy lecithin, natural vanilla) orange juice, orange oil (2.2%). allergens in bold print.
  That's 20 ! ingredients, more or less, depending on how you count/bundle them.

Dang those bracketted ingredients! Is it even legal? If flax Linum usitatissimum, hemp Cannabis sativa, sunflower Helianthus annuus and pumpkin Cucurbita pepo were treated as separate ingredients, then butter would float to the top. And there is butter again as part of the dark chocolate; if the ingredient list means anything at all, surely they should be bundled together?  And note the Latin name for hemp and ask what is the difference between this product and the hash brownies of the flower-power 1960s.

The seaweeds (all Irish and organic) are

• sweet kelp Laminaria saccharina is the new kale as we found with Bren Smith and his vertical sea-farm in Long Island Sound.
• dilsk Palmaria palmata, aka dulse, dillisk, duileasc, red dulse, sea lettuce flakes, or creathnach
• sleabhcán - it's hard to discover the Latin/Linnean binomer for this is because  "sleabhcán latin" is a googlewhack. Heck, google doesn't even offer an image for sleabhcan. I think it's the same as laver Porphyra umbilicalis perhaps more familiar from the other side of the world as nori which come to the market as green sheets with which you wrap up sushi. The Welsh make bara lafwr = laver-bread with it. More info here including this memorable (and TMI!) quote somewhat resemble the byproduct of a seal’s hayfever upon the rocks. Any algologist is invited to share their expertise in the comments.

But the proof of the pudding almond & orange bar is in the eating and we shared the 45g bar among 6 people to see what they thought. I guess, in the back of many of the tasters minds was Bob's Famous Flapjacks a bar with only 5 ingredients - 6 if you include the optional pinch of cinnamon and costing about €2/kg. The A&O-bar verdict was "sort of like a tea-brack but drier" certainly not over-sweet and with some substance to it: chewy, like.  It's hard to know when you're meant to eat it though: is it a between-meals snack, a robust dessert or something you'd have with a cup of tea? You can buy these bars direct from The Sea Gardener at €10/4 bars. that's about 5c/g or a fabulous €55.50/kg. But the Supervalu in Tramore is selling the bars, as a local product, at €2 a pop, which is only €44/kg.  That's a LOT of health. I hope that enough are sold to keep Sea Kitchen on the road. For me empowerment and education are the real value of Sea Gardener - you can find simple edible food for free on the sea-shore that will diversify your diet and help your children engage with the food that they eat.

It's a Javi problem

Jakers! you'd think our eSpanish was better: we've had a lot of opportunity to practice it. Currently we have Bolivar, a wwoofer from Venezuela, staying with us for the Spring/Summer.  Two years ago it was O'Manch' a young chap from La Mancha who could prune vines and play the piano.  The first instar was Javier, from suburban Madrid, who spent nearly a year with us in the mid 1990s.  We haven't been exclusively espagnolophile: for a couple of Winters we hosted Tadek a self-sufficient strawberry farmer from NE Poland.

Mais revenons a nos Javis.  He was living with us to help with the children and the logistics of running the farm; in return he was clocking up social welfare credits back home in Spain which he could parlay into a year's unemployment benefit when he returned . . . and getting help with his English. Every Saturday morning when I returned from a working week in Dublin, he was hopping from one foot to the other to do blokey things with me rather than doing Lego with two small girls. One such day, early in our relationship, I suggested that he clear out the drain than runs beside the lane which bisects our property.  This task is important because a clogged drain will fail to carry water, which will spill out into the roadway and sweep it all to buggery.  I know: it's happened to us twice in the last 20 years.  Javi's response was an incredulous "But Bob, that is one hundred metres!" . . . of head-high brambles, small saplings, enormous rocks and invisible quantities of other problems. Not being one to ask something that I was unwilling to undertake myself, I replied "Okay, Javi, let's do it together. We'll start at the bottom and see how far we get.".

40 minutes later, we had not only cleared the drain with slash-hook and sprong, rake and secateurs, but we had piled the mountain of brash onto a large plastic sheet and dragged it down to the haggard for burning. Five minutes after that we were settling down to a nice, and well-deserved, cup of tea. Seemingly insurmountable problems that yield to solution if you start pecking away at them somewhere became known in our family as Javi Problems.  Not so difficult in the execution as anxiety makes them feel when you fail to grasp the nettle. We both learned something that day.

Javi's other problem was that he lacked any personal space, he had a bedroom but the girls were still quite likely to be roaring in the night and would occasionally wake him up, far too early, to finish last-night's Lego project. We had cleared out one of the ruined granite sheds to live in while the house itself was being stripped to its bare-bones and essential services / luxuries installed like running water; a front door that kept out mice; electrical sockets in all rooms; under-floor heating and windows that you could see through.  In order to live in the shed we had created a timber box inside the granite shell and dry-lined it with sheet-rock [walls and ceiling] and tongue&groove pine boards [floor]. That plan was roughly shaken when we were evicted from our home in Dublin before the house on the farrrm was finished. So the shed was filled with furniture and boxes & boxes & boxes of accumulated possessions. Javi knew we had all the necessities for comfortable life in the house - he was sharing them on a daily basis.  The material in the shed must, he reasoned, be surplus to requirements; not least because it had not been used for nearly two years.

One Friday at dinner, he tentatively raised the idea that IF we sorted through the clutter in the shed THEN he could shift his much smaller parcel of stuff and himself into the vacated space. We were willing, the next day was sunny and we sorted through 40 cu.m. of material before tea-time.  The nicer furniture was shifted to the local auction-room where it was converted into cash.  The much-loved but moth-eaten, wretched, touch-only-with-rubber-gloves sofa was put on top of a pile of empty card-board boxes and burned. We didn't know about carbon-footprint in those far-off simple days.  It was a wrench, but Javi's Socratic method worked "This sofa: are you ever going to sit on it again? You have a nice sofa from Habitat in your living room, which is too small to accommodate two sofas.  Can you imagine anyone buying such a sofa? [apart from us, by implication] Shall we just burn it?".  Javi won his own place, which was for years know as Casa Javi, now simply The Casa, because it has housed a number of other inhabitants.  But it lightened the load on our souls by the mammoth decluttering that he instigated.