Building a Hazel Bender Polytunnel

I have a small greenhouse, where things grow well, quick and early, so I decided to make a polytunnel. Inspired somewhat by the Frugal Queen.

I have enough hazel poles growing, so I decided to use that, rather than the iron hoops they provide, so as to save £200, to be able to adapt to the slope of my land, and because I can.

Here's how it is done:

First, cut some poles (above). Shave the bark off with a vegetable peeler:

Next, stick them in the ground, bend them over and lash them together with baling twine (I have made up a song about baling twine). Don't worry if it is a bit wobbly, it gains rigidity from the covering.

Split a felled tree trunk into 4 (I used sycamore because it was already down. It took about 2 minutes to split it. (Don't even bother to think about splitting cherry - that takes more like 2 days).

Use an adze to trim the wood. This takes a very long time but it is deeply satisfying. This makes to door frames (see above).

Ignore any rabbits that offer to help. They are unreliable.

Et voila. Robert, as the French say, is votre oncle.

That's my younger son Laurence in the doorway.

Everyone asks me what I'm going to grow in it. I don't know. Things that like warmth I suppose. Melons. Tomatoes.

See Frugal in Cornwall to read more of this kind of stuff.

Making charcoal; indirect biscuit tin method.

One of the things I am doing out in the real world is charcoal making.

I began with trying to do it by the "direct" method, in a 40-gallon oil drum, filled with sticks, fired up, air excluded. I had about 4 tries, all pretty unsuccessful. Even starting the fire was problematic, but a fire lighter eventually sorted that out. But it was difficult to get the right balance between either charred brown wood or too much burned to ash.

Then I read about the biscuit tin method. Beautiful.

This is the biscuit tin on the fire. Note the flames coming out of the stab holes. Sometimes there is a safisfying "whoomp" as the gas explodes gently.

Here's what you do:

• Get a biscuit tin.
• Eat all the biscuits.
• Stab holes in top. 
• Put sticks in tin.
• Put tin on domestic wood fire when you go to bed.
• In morning, open tin, put charcoal on a pestle and mortar and pound it to dust.
• Put charcoal dust on garden and dig in.

Next morning. Finished product.

The idea is to make Terra Preta, the highly fertile charcoal rich soil found in South America and elsewhere.

I'm putting the charcoal onto one patch, and will compare productivity of that patch with another, non-charcoal patch.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Apart from the hoped-for fertility advantage, the carbon just stays there in the soil for hundreds of years, out of the atmosphere.

Another advantage is that it adds value to the sticks that cover my land.

Townies say we live "out in the sticks". This is true.
We have a lot of sticks out here.
I smile to myself when I see bags of "firelighter" sticks for sale £4 a net in the garages.
I do not have bonfires, don't agree with them, waste of resources, polluting, and creates CO2.
So I have loads of stick piles, and many sticks escape from the piles and lie around in the grass.
So I round them up and pop them in the biscuit tins.

It all fits together beautifully, out in the real world.

Normal Service Resumed

I've finally made it back to blogging. I more or less stopped in the New Year, with the habit broken by the festivities.

I have been active on Twitter over the NHS Bill, but the main thing is that I've been doing stuff and making things in  Meatspace - another word for the real world, the environment, people, society. Everything. The stars, trees, water. Chlorophyll.

I've been doing stuff.

I have constructed:

• a bench seat in the woods.
• A pair of gates to my veg patch
• A hazel bender polytunnel
• Cut lots of wood
• Found a viable way of making charcoal (indirect method) using a biscuit tin

All of this has kept me away from my computer, which is OK because I am happier to be doing stuff. full-on blogging is not good for the soul - or the mind. On the other hand, I feel guilty that I am not contributing my infinitesimal drop of political thought to the ocean of political debate - particularly in the matter of what to do about Syria. 

But now I have confessed up to what has been happening, and perhaps after I have done a few blogs on my work, I hope to be able to take up blogging regularly again, but with a better virtual/real life balance.

Hope springs eternal.

More hedge-laying fun

The day began with getting lost on my way to the hedge laying site near Nempnett Thrubwell. I am good at getting lost, and I confidently expect somebody to identify the getting lost gene, just as they have just found the optimism/pessimism gene set. The weather was lost too, unable to decide between being drizzle, rain or just damp. I cycled harder to keep warm, up hill and down hill, brakes on because of muddy narrow lanes that could contain a lorry around the next corner.

After going round in two very large and muddy circles, I was beginning to have problems with optimism, but reasoned that hardship is part of life, and without it we would all end up being like a wunch of bankers.

My journey was livened by place names like Row of Ashes Land. Merry Hill Farm, Lye Hole, Merry Hill Farm (again), Whistley Wood, Pagan's Hill, Paradise Farm, Pixey Hall, and Awkward Hill. Not to mention Nempnett Thrubwell itself, where I finally arrived. I explained my lateness to Stuart, one of my teachers, a gentle and kind man, and he said "Once you're in Nempnett, you knows you're lost".

I picked up where I had left off 3 weeks ago (absent from class due to locum sessions in a South Bristol medical centre). I reckon I had a knobbly bit, because the teachers clustered round appraising the situation like Bobby Fischer appraising a gnarly chess situation. The game is to get the hedge stock proof, with no space for a sheep to creep under. You would think great fluffy animals like sheep would not even consider trying to get through a hedge. You would be wrong.

I will post pictures when my computer and my camera have discovered how to communicate.

One of the things is to make it all neat and tidy. Townies do not realise how much goes into making the countryside all neat and tidy. You have to cut the spleaches low down, so the white inner wood doesnt show. All the stakes should be cut to the same height.

And you should be able to shave your chin with your axe. So I'm off out to sharpen my tools, and get busy on the hedge outside the kitchen.

Gordon: cracks showing

Back home again, I return to my hobby of smiting wood.

We green woodworkers prefer to make out own tools where possible. I have 3 mallets, one a great Neanderthal style clunking fist called Gordon, one a lightweight called Dave, and an odd medium sized chap that I called Brian, for no particular reason at the time, but which I now realise relates to Brian Paddick the LibDem candidate for London. Who shared the fate of Ken and Sian, of being beaten by Boris.

Brian is a worthy mallet, being of a new design in that the fibres of the smiting face go in at 45 degrees, thus avoiding splittages. The handle is made of a natural branch, so there is strength at the heart of the mallet.

Gordon is breaking up. There are bits missing, and he is developing a great split.

I know this is of no significance whatsoever, except in some obscure journalistic sense.