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Vegetable time!

It finally rained properly last night so maybe our vegetables and fruit trees will survive after all! The first three photos are from the lower veg garden, managed by Sunni and Marko

Sunni and Marko’s super organised and productive veg garden is now producing all our salad greens fresh to the table!
Tomato plants in the lower vegetable garden!
The lower veg garden.

The following five photos are from the upper vegetable garden in the future orchard area as managed by yours truly!

My garlic plants seem to being doing well.
My little onion jungle. No matter how often I weed between the onions those little weeds keep coming back up!
These are cherry tomato plants in one of my “veg graves”.
Two of the sweet potato plants I have planted in one of my “veg graves”!
These prickly damn things are really easy to grow! I don’t have to lift a finger these just pop up all over the place! The only good thing about them is that they are pretty easy to pull out.

and on another note….

Its not everyday that Matchka, Ena and our “wanna be” other dog all fit so neatly in the frame.
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Books shelves are done, or are they?

Its been rather sunny outside of late, with no rain. So every other night I water the veg patch and the fruit trees and bushes.  During the day I’ve been staying in doing “book” related things!

Matchka came stalking up the garden from the lower field this morning whilst I was having my brekfast in the gazebo. She gave me her customary headbut and then plonked herself down to survey her fieldmouse hunting grounds, only looking round when asked to say “cheese”!
The lacquer now dry, the shelves are pushed in to position and ready to be filled. I have no intention of putting them in a “proper” order. I think physical size and maybe vague “topics” will be the order for now. I just hope thats enough shelf space!
This is almost as satisfying as the sorting and storage of all my cassette tapes!
Whilst unpacking the boxes of books that have remained shut since March 2018 I found this piece of packaging around a particular valuable book. It is one of my oldest shirts, threadbare, worn to bits and full of sweet memories of great times spent at Damned gigs 30 or so years ago! One day my t-shirt collection will be photographed and put up for sale unless the vegan tourism business here at Barabrith takes off with a bang!
Wow all the books that have sat downstairs in the corner of the dining room fitted quite neatly on the shelves. Yipee I was expecting to have to make another “island” shelf.
The elation of finishing my book shelves and getting all the books from downstairs to fit on them died a sudden cruel death when I turned round and remembered that there are two banana boxes and at least one more box of books on the other side of the room waiting to be unpacked! Damn! Drat! and double drat!
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Blossom, shelves and cake.

A crown of apple blossom for “treeman” Jon!! …………….Damn Hippy!
The tape project comes to its end almost. All the K7’s are in order and the boxes labelled but now it seems they don’t fit in the space they did before so I might have to make another shelf for a few tape boxes!
Once again we are likely to win the Inter – Balkan Dandelion Growers Award for Best Newcomer in the category of Leaving Ones Lawns Alone and Seeing What Happens!
After procrastination the like of which would make Sanja look decisive I finally decided to have at least some of my books in my room rather than all downstairs in the pool/dining room! So I started making some shelves. These are for big books! I chose this form of shelf so I can move them around the room if necessary. They fit nicely under the window sill too!
This the the second “dragable” bookshelf for my library space under construction!
The second long bookshelf all but completed (I forgot to put in a support triangle and they need a lacquer adding) I started on the fun shelving. Creating shelves in and around the existing wooden beams of my room is kind of fun for a passionate DIY shelf builder who has known for a long time that the best way to cope with loneliness and a lack of sex is to build a shelf or two!
This was last nights Marko and Sunni cake creation. A rather succulent – we started it whilst it twas still warm – dark choc and forest fruits cake. Very light and fluffy it was and now its settled in to a good brownie texture which is what it was meant to be! But it won’t last long!
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Snow way!!

I noticed a chill late last night and heard a bit of wind rattling the tiles but I didn’t expect …….

This mornings surprise was a thin layer of snow covering the vegetable garden and everything else. And it was still coming down!!
A sprinkling of snow flakes!
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In and out

 

It got so hot yesterday that I came back inside and carried on with my tapes. Then went back out in the evening and did my first grass scything of the year!

One of the young trees in the future orchard has gorgeous white blossom.
My tapes! Some of these are dated inside as 1980! The year I got my first piece of hifi, a JVC KDW5 twin cassette deck. I couldn’t afford an amplifier so I bought a pair of headphones with a long cable and listened to my tapes up loud but in a quiet room! That tape deck was the best I have ever seen. I still have it but it needs some repair work that I can’t afford that yet. Anyway after a few years of recording new records and then selling them on (because I couldnt afford to keep them and buy more) and then a few years on the fringes of the bootleg live tape business I ended up with a lot of cassettes! Now at last they are all in order and I’m playing them more than I have for many years.
These are some of the finished tape boxes all labelled up and ready to stack. The final stages of a long standing dream coming true!

 

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Sunsets are back!

Here are a bunch of photos from the last two days, with comments.

Last night our first beauty of a sunset this year came on strong behind the red apple tree.
The sunset silhouettes one of our young apple trees branches.
I’ve been feeling guilty about not having made anymore nesting boxes for the local birds since I blocked up many of the holes in to the attic of the wooden house.
So I made two nesting boxes drying in the sun.
A bird box on the ground in the sunset.
The original bird nesting box on the right is finally joined by a second on the western face of the wooden house.
This third bird box is on the big apple tree.
Digging another odd veg bed.
One of the self propogated plum tree saplings that I moved to somewhere more useful.
This is a future potato circle in progress.
I filled the circular trench with old twigs and branches covered with dried grasses. Hopefully when left till next year and with a layer of this years grass cuttings on top this will make a fertile spot or rather circle!
My ride to the Krnjak post office is a little hillier than the ride to my usual office. It is situtated in the local government building and so I tend to see some other humans – somethhing that doesn’t happen much up our road – hence the mask!
This is one of the views from the road coming back from Krnjak.
Last nights super moon battles it out with “our” street light for luminescent supremacy.
Yesterday I emptied one of the compost bins in to a bunch of plastic bags.
If you fear I might be short of grub in these strange days well here is tonights meal. On the left is the rest of yesterdays lentil shepherds pie, squashed flat and grilled with some home made mozarella on top. On the right is broccoli flavoured with lemon fried with Serbian fake bacon. Finished off with a chunk of Sunni’s delicious walnut, chocolate and lemon cake. I’m eating well
Today I finally started phase two of sorting out my cassette tapes. When finished they will all be in order and each box will be labelled.

 

 

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Pictures and a few words

I’ve been an atheist for 40 years or more now but I’m seriously thinking of asking the spirits to make sure Boris, Bolsarno, Orban, Erdogan (damn this is could be a long list!) Assad, Putin and Trump all die horribly courtesy of the Corona Virus. Boris getting sick has been the only good news from the media for a long time.
Vanja’s raspberry survived the snow to fight another year! This plant originally came from the allotment that Marta and I did in Chingford. I transplanted some to Vanja’s little garden in Shepherds Bush and then after it exploded there I brought a couple of seedlings out here. They have not “exploded” here, maybe they miss Ms Penca’s little green fingers or maybe our soil is not quite so rich as Roxy’s dog toilet was! Fingers crossed this will be the year that they settle in and take off!
Two years ago (or was it one?) I planted a couple of little oaks, very little. They don’t like being moved much but this one still lives and I hope it will one day look me in the eye.
The bed of courgettes or hopefully will be courgettes! Still looking good the soil is so nice and light that pulling weeds out is relatively easy.
A little plum comes out of the ground quite easily, but will it survive? Who cares I was “gardening” regardless of future sucess or not!
This is another little plum tree that has grown all by itself but in a totally unsuitable position so I rehoused it to a space in what I hope will one day be an orchard!
The upright shoot on the centtre right is another little plum that was growing all by itself below one of the old plum trees. It’s now on our Eastern border fence and hopefully will grow into a tree there embellishing the boring border that also needs de-barbed-wiring!
I rarely buy new clothes. I haven’t for a many years. When I came out of a Killing Joke gig at the old Astoria in London and was confornted by a load of dodgy t-shirt sellers with these slightly misprinted rejects in piles on the pavement I couldn’t resist shelling out 8 quid! Ironic -maybe?- that I almost died in this top when Marta and I were attacked by a macho psycho motorist. I was repeatedly punched in the face whilst unconscious on the ground. It was a bit tough on Marta watching my bloodied limp body being beaten. Onlookers said they thought I was dead. That was back in 2008 and like the no good hoarder I am I kept the top even though it was blood stained and cut open across the chest and own both arms because I had a plan! I could say that the curent virus crisis has given me the extra time to do such projects but I’d be lying. Half the point of moving to this dead end road in a dead end country was to give myself time to do these kind of things and so I am, at last sewing up my favourite punk rock hoodie and embellishing it with big red stitches. In this picture I have just got to the point of finishing using the sewing machine to attach the top to a long sleeve tshirt so making a two layed extra warm top ready for next winter.
Back to my sewing. Now I’m adding the chunky stitches that are ornamental rather than functional. Hopefully the sewing machine stiching will keep the thing together. But this embroidary thread is a bugger to pull through two layers of cloth.
The trick to tough sewing other than doing some serious martial arts type traing to strengthen my fingers grip is to employ a pair of pliers with some tyre inner tube attached so they don’t ruin the needle. Simples!
One arm and one side done I’m feeling quite please with the result so far. Give me a kind of Frankenstein look, which is NOTHING like I usually look, ok!
I have recently been spreading the evil English cultural tentacles in to the Serbian capital Belgrade and one lovely womans flat in particular. Now the familiar tones of Radio 4 presenters and the aroma of Lady Grey tea mix in a heady Angloaroma with the cat litter and her smelly socks! However having got the poor dear hooked on the better things one can drink with soya milk she has quickly run out of supplies and you can’t buy that stuff over there! Prince Charming – thats me!- wrapped up a box of Twinnings teabags and headed for the post office defying the Covid19 threat and police check points in order to get the precious parcel to my precious punkette. But alas the Serb government has closed the borders so tightly that even the humble postie can’t pass through. What will, Sanja do?

 

 

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Images from The last 48 hours

The easterly view this morning, 24th March 2020.
The veg patch has been whitewashed. Let’s hope all those little shots survive todays chilly awakening!
Well maybe I won’t be doing any gardening today after all!
A couple of days ago I tried out the reclining deck chair type thing that my Dad chucked out …. in my direction! Maybe not today!
Those of us living in almost permanent self isolation sometimes resort to desperate measures.
I took two little clementines to bed with me last night. Well the may have been tangerines but I didn’t ask their names. I lost one for a time and then when she popped up alongside me I discovered a surprising sticker attached to her and thought… photo and what does that mean?
Ever since I rescued one of my fave hoodies from the hospital floor I have intended to try and resurrect it. This top was cut off me by a nurse when I was unconscious and badly beaten way back in the days of Marta. Now, finally, with excess time on my hands I have started the project to make it wearable once more. Progress reports will follow.
A selfie from last night whilst using my fancy electric toothbrush (thanx Vanja!)
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Isolation is a relative term.

My favourite line as a couple of close friends have pointed out to explain why I moved out to this backward bureaucratic Balkan zone is that when I look out of my bedroom window I can see no other buildings. That is a significant difference to the view from my  19th floor Hackney flat.

Sunni prepare the ground in the vegetable garden for seedlings yet to grow. She spent several hours out there today hoeing and weeding.

Today Sunni and I where out working in the garden but rarely came within 10 meters of each other.

These mega scissors came from the Kaufland superstore in Karlovac but have proved remarkably effective in tackling the branches that I cut down from the large pear tree. Here I am taking off the twigs and cutting the small branches in to wood stove size pieces.

Sunni and Marko have been industriously working on the lower vegetable garden and at the moment it looks seriously organised. I have started planting seeds in some of my vegetable bays or “graves” as Stonky calls them. The first full bay has garlic, onions and carrots. A second smaller bay has courgettes planted along the top of its ridge.

My first full veg bay stuffed with carrot seeds, onions and garlic. The garlic has already started to sprout.
These fancy carrot seeds come in easy to plant paper tissue strips. Shame then that both packets said 4 pieces inside and both only had 3!!!

Yesterday we threw caution or Covid-19 to the wind and went in to Karlovac to see if my court case was would go ahead. No such luck all courts are closed. We did a little shopping hoping to buy some seedlings from the food market but we proved a little too early for them. From there we went to the Dacia car dealer garage to see if they could stop our breaks making a funny noise. The young guy there I spoke to when I took the car in a few weeks ago with the same issue (when of course the breaks failed to make the slightest hint of any unwanted sound) came straight up to me and shook my hand before I had time to think ‘elbow bump”!!  Oh well. An hour and 680 kuna (80 quid) later our front breaks shoes had all been replaced and the grating noise was gone. To celebrate we took the car to the car wash next to the garage.

This DIY 25 hour car wash on the edge of Karlovac has space for just three cars at a time. Some have space for 10 or more!

Croatians are as car mad as anyone else but when it comes to car cleaning there is a significant difference tween the UK and the Balkans. In London and I presume most UK cities going to get your car cleaned is in part about the spurious joy of driving through a car wash whilst feeling superior to the underpaid precarious car wash workers poisoning themselves with cleaning chemicals as they rub away at your muddy wheel caps. In Croatia and other Balkan countries I have only seen DIY car washes, where for a few quid you get a powerful water jet that has soap added and then clean water and a there’s a vacuum option for the insides too.

DIY punk with big water pistol fights the dust, grime and dead bugs that decorate our car.

Anyway I let Marko play with big water pistol whilst Sunni went back to her latest book and pretty soon the car was a gleaming white again.. hooraay!

The car roof is not left out.

And before I sign off an apology for being a bit slack with the blog of late. No I’m not down with Corona virus. I’ve been spending a lot of time of late at my computers doing layout and maths i relation to a new Active Publishing print run. I’ve also been seriously distracted by my new love Sanja in Belgrade, Serbia. She is now stuck there under a curfew and with the Schengen border closed for the foreseeable we are using FaceTime to keep in contact, a lot. The rest of you, reliant on my blog will just have to wait, ok?

This the the homemade mushroom, potato and spinach burek that Sanja in Belgrade made for me. Not at all greasy like the bakery bought ones and with that all important special ingredient… love! Ha ha 🙂
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Snow

After having told everyone that we’ve had practically no snow this year and its really quite warm… it snowed! Not a lot but enough for a few pictures.

Snow water drips off the garage roof.
The snow slips quickly off the solar panels as the sun comes out!
The water barrel in the snow