The Glidd of Glood Blog

Patient in drug bill shock

When I started this sporadic blog, people said I should do so because I was always ranting about things and they thought, I suppose, that this would be a better place for me to do it so that they wouldn’t have to listen to my criticisms. I don’t think there have been that many rants here, but then I always thought the accusations of my supposed ranting somewhat exaggerated.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any at all though, so here is one.

Last week, I had a very run of the mill operation on my left knee. Just a cartilage clean-up, a bit of keyhole surgery that the surgeon has performed well over a thousand times in his career. As far as I can tell, it seems to have gone swimmingly.

Before leaving hospital, I was given a prescription for a cocktail of drugs that I am to take for a week or so to ensure that everything heals up properly. These are:

• a painkiller, that I’m not taking because there is no real pain to speak of
• an analgesic that is supposed to reduce swelling
• a drug to combat the nefarious effects on my stomach of the analgesic
• an anticoagulant that ensures that I won’t develop a thrombosis in my leg as a result of the operation

I imagined that this little lot would amount to about CHF 50, say £30. Imagine my delight when I was presented with a bill for CHF 340 - that’s £240.

The breakdown of the bill is interesting:

• 2 boxes of Dafalgan painkillers, which I haven’t even opened, are a miserable CHF 3 a box: CHF 6
• 10 tablets of a generic Ponstan replacement, made by Sandoz all the same, are also CHF 6
• A tub of 50 Omezol gastric-secretion inhibitors are CHF 27 – most of which will get returned to the pharmacy
• 30 tablets of Xarelto anticoagulants (of which I actually only need to take 15) are a whopping CHF 300. That’s £208! £7 a tiny tablet.

I am wondering whether I couldn’t have just taken aspirin to replace the Xarelto. Having no knowledge of, or interest in, drugs, I imagine the answer is no, but I’ll ask my surgeon next week nonetheless.

I shall be intrigued to know just what is in the Xarelto wonder-drug, which as far as I can see, is only supposed to make my blood thinner, rather than cure cancer or AIDS. Right at the moment, until I am the wiser, this is looking like a typical pharma stitch-up. 200 quid is still a sizeable amount of cash and you can buy any amount of interesting things with it. Ending up with a small white cardboard box, half the contents of which are of no use to me, is just faintly irritating.

Naturally, I’m not really going to end up paying for much of this; my insurance company is. But this is beside the point. I have to cough up CHF 360 a month, every month, for my compulsory health insurance premiums. The insurance company is a private company that of course seeks to make a profit, and in the current economic zeitgeist, an increasing profit, every year. So you can be certain that whatever it is shelling out to the pharma companies in exchange for overpriced drugs is being passed on to us, the insured. At the end of the day, the multibillion £ or franc profits of the pharma companies are being generated by us, the ageing population.

I appreciate the old adage that pharma requires huge amounts of time and investment in blind alleys that produce nothing, in return for every single successful drug that produces a profit. And I’m not against companies making money. Maybe I am being unfair to Bayer, the makers of Xarelto. After all, last year they only turned over €36.5bn and produced a miserable €2.5bn of profit, 6.8%. Hardly enough to set the stock market alight.

But still, 200 quid for a couple of pills? Thank God I only need to have thin blood for two weeks.

 

 

More door

So here we are, end of January and the door is not yet completed. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but then I had to miss a few weeks’ lessons (knee problems). Still, progress there is and here are a few photos documenting it.

Since last update, the door has been sculpted around the edge to fit in the door frame (well, I hope it’s going to fit in the frame – that’s what all the measuring was for). I wish I could tell you how we did that, but honestly, I can’t remember exactly which machine we used. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the multi-tool bench because wandering around with the door would be something I’d remember. It weighs a ton.

Then we knocked up the central panel out of another couple of pieces of oak. Not too taxing. This has been cut to the right size. After which, it was time to turn our attention to the mouldings. You can think of these as picture frames if you like, and they go around the window and around the central panel on both sides of the door. This is where the door gets all decorative. The moulding for the central panel actually drops partly inside the lower hole, as you can see on the photos of the section. In this way there is a transition from the outer thickness of the door to the thinner panel in the middle of it. You have a certain amount of latitude as to how these mouldings are going to look, but you are constrained by the knives you have available for the multi-tool spindle shaper device. This is known in French as “la toupie” or “top”. It is essentially a spinning high-speed knife. You present your length of wood to it, and the form of the knives scoops out the shape to leave you with a moulding. You can vary the shape by raising or lowering the rotating knives and by deciding how deep you want them to cut.

To get our mouldings, we had to choose a likely piece of wood to cut the initial blanks from. We are having to husband the wood quite closely. Compared to the amount you buy initially, it is amazing how quickly it disappears when you try to make something out of it. A large quantity of it ends up as sawdust. In fact, our wood husbandry has been so important that we had to get two mouldings out of the thickness of each piece of wood. It would have been convenient to cut the thicknesses into two with the circular saw, but the width of the cut is 6mm which was considered wood we could ill-afford to lose, so Jean-David cut the blanks with the band-saw. I’d have done it myself, but I was advised that if I strayed from the line by a millimetre, I’d be shot. Using the band-saw is a slightly zen-like experience at the best of times, ensuring that you don’t deviate from the line, but I didn’t want to waste my valuable wood by making a hash of it.

Once we had the blanks, we had to cut them to the rough shape with the circular saw, then they went three times through the spindle-shaper, and were worked on once with the “défonceuse” which is hand-wielded power tool like an electric drill. The finished mouldings are then carefully measured and the ends cut at 45° to make the final frame.

So now the next job is to make the mouldings for the bigger hole on the outside and to construct the window frame to carry the mirror window on the inside. As an aside, I am pretty chuffed with the decorative effect of the wood grain. There are some real flames going up the sides of the door. Very high quality oak can be a little homogenous and uninteresting; this is not a problem I have here.

The door is edged to that it will fit flush in the doorframe

Two halves of central panel are glued together

This scrofulous-looking piece of oak is what the lower mouldings are made from

One of the mouldings prior to being cut at 45°

The finished mouldings are mounted to see if they fit. Which they do, perfectly.

Door update

Well, it looks like a door now, doesn’t it?

So what do we have here? We have the four main planks all glued together and the three cross pieces have been made. Doing the mortises and the tenons was all quite time consuming – lots of measuring, precise cutting, rounding the ends of the tenons with a file etc. What you see here are the pieces fitted together, but they haven’t been glued yet. And the perimeter of the door needs to have a 2cms groove cut around it so that it will fit flush in the door frame (my English lets me down here – don’t know the correct carpentry term for it).

Next jobs: make the groove, glue the door together, create the board that will fill in the lower hole in the door out of three pieces of thinner oak, create all the decorative mouldings, make the bit at the bottom that keeps the rain away from the inside of the house. Still plenty more to do then. And let me remind you that making doors doesn’t even count as cabinet-making; it is simple joinery. Cabinet-makers sniff at making doors.

Now that’s what I call a coat of arms

Woo-hoo! Look what I found! I got the wrought ironwork for the door back from the painters a couple of days ago. The orc-factory was even worse than the last couple of visits; the air heavy with chemical smells. So heavy, indeed, that it was almost unbreathable. I was only there for ten minutes, but how you can work there for eight hours a day I have no idea. No one seems to wear a mask, so they don’t appear overly bothered about what hideous lung diseases might be visited upon them in the future. Still, they had done a good job on the ironwork and it is now all glossy and black.

I had had the coat of arms taped over to protect it from the sand blasting as I thought I’d clean it by hand myself, seeing as some of it is beaten copper. I also didn’t want the black paint taken off it. Well, imagine my delight and surprise when I found that the “black paint” wasn’t black paint, it was just tarnish and dirt that was covering up brass. Two hours of cleaning on Christmas Day has produced what you see above. What I started with is below. I’ve always seen the door looking like this and have never cleaned it, so you can reckon that it has gone at least 10 years without a clean. I suspect though, that it has never been cleaned at all, in which case it is probably more like 30 years as that is probably when the door dates from. Hardly surprising then that it took two hours of fearsome rubbing with the magic “white stone” powder.

My new door should be finished hopefully at the end of January (can only work on it on Saturdays now) so in the meantime, I have reinstalled the ironwork on the old naff door. At least there is now somewhere to hang the Christmas wreath.

Front door - smoke and mirrors

I was advised to contact an old man you lives in the next-door village and who is an expert on wrought ironwork. Pierre Emch seems to be well over 80 and spends his days messing about in a forge making things. He looked at the photos of my wrought ironwork but told me that his forte was more the making of things rather than the paint stripping and repainting process. He advised me to visit a car body shop in Lausanne where the owner was a wrought ironwork painting genius, apparently. So I toddled off there and hung around for about 15 minutes while the proprietor finished fitting some snow wheels to a small family saloon.

We got down to business and I explained the work I required. Monsieur Ryffel told me that he would send the ironwork away to be sand-blasted and have undercoat applied and then he would finish the painting job. He estimated that the total cost would be about CHF 600 which seems like a fortune for refurbishing a smallish piece of wrought ironwork. But he told me that if I liked, I could contact the sand-blasting company Aisa in Crissier myself which would reduce some of the effort he would have to go to and consequently, the expense. This sounded like wise advice, so I scooted off to Crissier.

There was no one in the unlit reception, which was at the top of a grim flight of stairs in an industrial building, so I went in search of someone I could talk to. I found the manager in a lean-to booth in a cavernous, dark and filthy workshop. Sand-blasting and painting industrial parts is not a glamorous pastime and this place looked like a subterranean orc factory from the Lord of the Rings, the sort of place that would quickly remove your will to live if you ever had to work there. There were loud crashes and the clanking of chains, black dust coated the floor making your footsteps gritty and the air was thick with the odour of noxious solvents. However, the manager told me that yes, they could strip and paint my ironwork in a couple of days for CHF 120 with no trouble at all, so a deal was done. Quite what the Lausanne body shop thought they were going to do for CHF 600 remains a mystery, but as I don’t intend going back there, one I am unlikely to elucidate.

So the next day, I unbolted the ironwork and returned to the orcs. The door now looks even grimmer, especially as I also unscrewed the handle surrounds for refurbishment at the same time.

I also visited the famous Miroiterie du Léman which is the go-to place for mirrors and all things glass. They are able to supply what I want which comes in one single tint in one single thickness – 6mm – so there weren’t any difficult decisions to make. I handed over another CHF 120 and in a week’s time, I will be the possessor of a piece of one-way mirror.

While I was out and about, I also bought the magic Livos products I will need to oil and weatherproof the finished door. They turn out to be Linus, an undercoat especially made for oak (fortuitous that, as there don’t seem to be any products specific for any other type of wood) and a weatherproofing wood varnish called Kaldet which will finish it off.

It’s all going swimmingly. All I need now is a little more time to actually make the door.

 

The front door - sawing the oak

The measurements have been made and the sizes of the different pieces of wood – or at least the major pieces – have been worked out. So we have commenced the sawing, which has proven to be a strangely physical process.

The current front door is 4cms thick, which seems to be a little on the thin side for a front door, so we have decided to make the new one 5cms thick. To this end the oak planks I have bought are 6cms thick. 1cm will be lost as they go through the plane. However, the jigsaw we normally use for cutting up the long lengths of raw planks can’t handle a thickness of 6cms, so there was only one thing for it – we’d have to cut all the lengths we required by hand with a saw. Shock horror!

There is something immensely fatiguing about sawing. Half-way through the plank and you feel that your arm is going to drop off. The muscles glow red-hot and your entire organism seems to be pressed into service just to keep your arm going up and down. If you did this for a living you’d have arms of steel and be absurdly fit. As I don’t, my arms soon felt as if they were made of mousse and I felt absurdly tired.

The thickness of the planks (there’s got to be a better word than plank. What’s a thick plank called?) was also a strain on the circular saw. There was no way we were going to start sawing the pieces of oak lengthwise. That would have meant cuts 2m long! The saw can just about deal with the job, but you can tell it isn’t happy. Oak is not pine. The saw will rip through pine with abandon, but oak is massively dense and heavy and the saw can tell the difference.

If you look at the photos of the front door, you will see that you need a length of wood to run the height of the door either side of the window and ironwork. This length is a foot wide.  What does this mean in terms of planks of oak? It means that if you were to get the length out of a plank in one piece, your plank would have to be a metre wide. This is because you can’t use the heart of a tree, so you would need a plank that was a foot wide on each side of the heart, plus the width of the sapwood under the bark which you can’t use either. There is no guarantee of course that your plank would come from the very middle of the tree, so you are looking at a tree that is over a metre thick in the middle. That is a pretty huge oak tree, probably hundreds of years old and not exactly common.

The solution, of course, is to use two 17cm thick lengths and glue them together, and this is what we shall be doing. Even this isn’t simple, as it still requires planks two feet wide which are fairly serious pieces of wood.

We have now cut the four lengths we require and they each weigh a ton. This oak is massively heavy. It is true that they are currently 6cms thick and will be shortly 5cms thick, but all the same, that is only a weight loss of 17%. The four glued together with the rest of the door is going to create a combined weight that doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s not going to be a one-man job installing this door and I have been taking pictures of the hinges to see what their chances are of standing up to the job. They look fairly solid things, fortunately. One thing is certain, any future burglars will not be coming in via the front door. Sadly, they were never likely to, as if you want to get into this house, you’d just smash a window and let yourself in. I know I probably shouldn’t be giving away this sort of information on the net, but frankly, even the most moronic burglar would work that out in about 10 seconds.

My front door looks rubbish

My front door is a sad thing.

The idea of it is pretty good. It has an unusual piece of wrought ironwork in the centre  which contains the coat of arms of the village. Every town and village in Switzerland has its own coat of arms, as do all the cantons, but you don’t often see them on the front doors of houses. Rather than an affectation, I like to think that the reason there is a coat of arms on my front door is that it used to be the post-office, not that customers ever went through the front door. They used to go through a side door that I had bricked up and turned into a window. Whatever.

Behind the iron coat of arms is a small hinged window. In practice, it is rarely (if ever) open, as in the summer I tend to leave the whole door open for the dog to wander in and out. And if it’s too cold for that, then the door and its window stay shut. But still, it is another nice and unusual feature.

I quite like the seashell design wrought iron handle too. It looks suitably in keeping with the whole rustic design.

But what I don’t like – and I shouldn’t think anyone else does either – is the fact that the whole door is made of chipboard. This would have looked fine for years, as it was cunningly veneered to make it look like solid expensive wood. Sadly, the weather has taken its toll on the veneer, so that it has just disintegrated in various places revealing the horror beneath.

It’s not good to have a patently chipboard front door. After all, it is the first thing that people see of your house as they come in and you only get one chance to make a first impression, as they say.

So after the chest of drawers furniture project, I thought that a new front door sounded like the best thing to make. I need a relatively simple project that will produce rapid results as I have only produced one thing in the last year. I also thought that a door sounded like an interesting project – how are they made? Added to the fact that my door with its wrought ironwork and window is a reasonably complicated one to make.

I could, I suppose at a pinch, veneer the door I have, but frankly, it isn’t worth the effort and I am not convinced that thin veneer is what you require in a weather-resistant situation. It would only be a matter of time before it all flaked off again. So instead, I decided to make a door out of this large and ancient plank (barely a plank at 8 cms thick) of larch or pine which someone gave me. It has been sitting in Jean-David’s workshop for months.

But sadly, after taking all the measurements for the door, it appears that the plank just isn’t big enough. You have to remember that you can’t use the middle of it – the heart of the tree – and what is left on either side is just insufficient for the width of the door. Had it been a touch longer, then that could have worked, but it isn’t. Or if it had been thicker still, I could have used it in two slices. So off it was to the wood emporium again to choose some oak. I am now the proud and poor possessor of two and a half 4.4m long French oak planks. Tomorrow I’m going to start sawing them up.

I am going to unscrew the ironwork and have that refurbished and the coat of arms repainted. For the window, I quite like the idea of a two-way mirror. This is an idea I have shamelessly stolen from this farmhouse which seems to employ the unusual design to great effect:

 

It has the advantage that you can see who is coming to the door, but they can’t see you. A paranoid way of dealing with visitors perhaps, though you would be surprised at the number of Polish students, Mafia-affiliated deaf people, knife sharpeners and purveyors of Provençal tableware and wooden Easter decorations we get around here, in a village with only rudimentary public transport. So I will contact the local glass and mirror merchants to have one made up (unless there is some cunning reason why I can’t).

 

 

The Grim Reaper is a peasant

The other thing I have been doing to enhance my peasant credentials is learning to use a scythe.

I have this sort of bank outside the back of the house which I let grow wild in the summer. I can get the ride-on mower down it and sometimes even up it, but it always looks naff when I do, like a shorn patch of weeds. It’s dangerous for the mower too, as the bank is basically a large pile of rocks and stones – probably the fruit of some sort of excavation back in the day.

By letting it grow wild, it makes quite a nice contrast to the rest of the lawn, and even produces some wild flowers. Insects seem to like it that way, as does the cat who enjoys hiding in the long grasses and plants (to leap out and kill some unsuspecting creature no doubt).

But at the end of the season, the grasses and flowers start to die away and the whole thing looks very ragged. It is at this point that you need to cut it.  However, with the plants a couple of feet high, you can forget getting the mower on it. A neighbour once used a scythe on it which was very professional and only took him a few minutes. When I suggested another year that he might like to do the same thing, he came round with a strimmer. This was less satisfactory. I’ve got a small strimmer myself, so I could just as well have used that.

I also have a couple of scythes, which, like assorted rakes, ladders, and garden implements, were left by the previous occupants of the house. So I thought it was about time I started to use one.

A lot of scything still goes on in Switzerland, especially, from what I can see, the German speaking part. Quite often when taking my bike over some mountain pass, you will come across peasants in the fields cutting hay with scythes on some ridiculously steep slope. They give you a look as if to say “another cretin on  motorcycle up to no good”, although if they are younger they might be thinking “that looks like good fun – a lot more fun than doing all this scything”.

I figured that the scythe would need sharpening, seeing how it has been hanging up in the woodshed for at least the last 8 years and probably longer, so I looked up how to sharpen the thing on YouTube. This video also showed me the rudiments of using it and it didn’t look as though I would be that likely to scythe my foot off, so away I went.

 

Result: one scythed bank. Yes, it does look as if it has been given a haircut by some species of apprentice barber who should probably be trying to forge a career in some other field, but that’s good enough. It looks a damned site better now.

My next door neighbour, who is a bona fide peasant, seemed impressed with my efforts. That’s efforts, rather than results. Being a peasant is all a question of attitude. Peasants use scythes. Non-peasants and bourgeois interlopers use strimmers.

Making schnapps - a step towards peasantdom

I’m turning into a peasant.

I’ve always thought that this was a much funnier, if less likely, translation of “je deviens paysan” than “I’m becoming a farmer”. You always get taught in school that a farmer is “un fermier” in French. Well it may be, but no one around here says it much. It’s always “paysan”. I’m not really becoming a farmer, but I have been doing a couple of peasantish things recently which are doing my peasant credentials no harm at all.

Firstly, I have been “doing a barrel” (“faire un tonneau”). Not meaning, as you might have thought, that I have been rolling down Swiss mountainsides, or testing out waterfalls, but rather that I have been making schnapps. There are a lot of fruit trees in Switzerland and they seem to produce more fruit than the Swiss are inclined to eat, so they have a habit of turning it into fruit schnapps. It is the biggest spirit segment in the country. The colourless schnapps comes in a huge variety of flavours, but your local café can be expected to stock many of the following: pommes, prunes, williamine, abricotine, kirsch, coings, framboise. Apple, plum, pear, apricot, cherry, quince and raspberry if you prefer. Visitors to Switzerland should be encouraged to try these. There are others.

I have got quite a few fruit trees too: cherry, marello cherry, apple, pear, plum, quince and there comes a time when you just can’t make any more fruit tarts. Up until now I have always frozen what I can, but the freezer is full, so egged on by the local butcher who lent me a barrel, I set out to fill it with cherries.

It’s a long and time-consuming business. I don’t know how many cherries you can get in a 60 litre barrel, but I know it’s thousands, because I idly counted a thousand of them when I was picking. It turns out that even if your cherry tree is festooned with cherries, only some are right for putting in the barrel at any one time. The others are either not ripe enough, or overripe or bad. In fact, not being a professional cherry picker, it took me days to fill the barrel – days of concerted effort. I suspect I was a bit anal about it, and only put in cherries that I would happily have put on a tart. I don’t think you have to attain this level of fruit quality to produce decent kirsch. What you don’t want though, are the stalks. This is just as well, as generally, it’s not that easy to keep the stalk attached to the cherry.

Once your barrel is full, you leave it a couple of days or so, then add a bag of sugar mixed in with a litre of water. This is to kick start the fermentation. You should cover the barrel with its plastic lid and put a heavy stone on it. As any fule no, the fermentation process breaks the sugars in the fruit down into alcohol and carbon dioxide and if you don’t let the carbon dioxide escape from the barrel, the latter will explode eventually – which will give you a lot to clean up, never mind about the wasted days fruit picking. On the other hand, you desperately want to avoid air getting in. The heavy stone will ensure that the carbon dioxide, under massive pressure, will lift the stone enough to seep out of the barrel, whereas the air, under atmospheric pressure, is not strong enough to lift the stone to get in. This also means that you aren’t allowed to happily remove the lid on occasion to see how it is all coming along and to admire the bubbling cherries, or show your barrel off to visitors. Naturally, I found out all this rather late. The peasants seem to keep it all a little secret and are very vague about exactly what you are meant to be doing.

After a couple of weeks, the fermentation process should have stopped and you can seal up the barrel and take it to the local distillery. Because making schnapps is so traditional throughout Switzerland, there is bound to be a small distillery not far away which makes its business from distilling the barrels of fermented fruit provided by the local farmers. Here the distiller will write your name in chalk on the barrel lid and promise to ring you in a few days when he has distilled your barrel. It sits about outside in a courtyard containing the fruit of all the other local farmers. You are well on your way to becoming a peasant.

Full peasant status is achieved when you go to pick up your schnapps, or in my case, my kirsch. This is because quite apart from paying the distiller for his work, you also have to pay a tax to Bern on the quantity of alcohol produced. But…. If the schnapps comes from your own fruit trees instead of just from fruit you have bought for the purpose, you pay a lower rate of tax. You are officially recognised as being a peasant.

The distiller fills in a couple of forms for you and you pay him and take away your flagons of booze. But you still aren’t really allowed to drink it. You are then told that your schnapps will in fact improve over the next few months, if left somewhere in contact with the air. The more interaction there is with the air, the better, as this will smooth it out. Hence, you don’t want to seal up the flagons but put some cloth over them and store in a place where there is the most temperature variation, preferably an attic. I don’t have an attic, so my flagons are sitting in the woodshed. Best I can do.

So what’s the verdict? Well, I have ended up with about 12 litres of two different sorts of kirsch at 43% alcohol, since once I had filled up a barrel of cherries, I then went and bought another barrel and filled it with marello cherries. I didn’t know anything about the stone, the air, or the length of time necessary for fermentation. I did know that if I sealed the barrel it would blow up, so at least avoided that mistake. Consequently, the cherries had actually been left in the barrel a little too long, but more importantly, air had got in. This all means that the finished product was lower in alcohol than it would have been and doesn’t taste as good as it should. I have got 5 litres of kirsch.

The griottes on the other hand, hadn’t really finished fermentation when I took them to the distillery, so they had been pretty much surrounded by carbon dioxide and not air, even if I did keep lifting off the lid to have a look. They have turned out better and I have 7 litres of this sort of kirsch. So now I’m just waiting for Christmas when I can drink some of the stuff, but what I am going to do with 12 litres of kirsch I have no idea. Makes a lot of plum puddings, or fondues and will get you very drunk. More presents, I suppose. At the end of the day you spend your life around here making jams and such like for the pleasure of giving them away to all and sundry.

I’ll tell you about my other peasantish behaviour tomorrow. This post has gone on quite long enough.

 

Springtime in the garden - a Monty Don moment

Spring is completely sprung here, with the unseasonably dry and warm weather, and I have been very busy in the garden. This is currently looking pretty much under control, or as under control as I can really be bothered to make it, not aspiring to having the sort of garden that people pay money to come and visit.

I have taken a few rapid iPhone snaps and thought I would post them here with a few comments for the limited amount of people who may be interested:

The rampant wisteria is starting to flower, the laurel has been moved outside. The green tub next to it contains some sprouting artichoke seeds. I have had to cover the tub with chicken mesh as the cat thinks it's a great sunbathing spot. You can also see the seed-tray of tomatoes getting some sun, little pots of bigger tomatoes ditto and my herb rack - different thymes, parsley, rosemary, chives and mint.

 

The veg garden doesn't look that exciting, does it? But it is looking more exciting day by day, It already contains broad beans, carrots, onions, garlic, lettuces, radishes, cabbages, leeks, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts. Put it this way, a few weeks ago it looked like this:

I spent an entire day hand weeding it and moved some lettuces and carrots that had survived the winter (probably a waste of time). Then I got a friendly peasant to stick his cultivator on it which reduced days of back-breaking digging to a 15 minute job. There has been much further weeding, raking and fertilising. So it may currently look dull, but I'm pleased.

 

There's a good herbacious border along the house side of the veg garden, which gets minimal upkeep and attention. Various things flower at various times of the year - tulips at the moment.

 

There's this rock garden thing at the front of the house, courtesy of the previous owners, containing various odd plants. The heather is now past its best, but it was a major attraction for bees a couple of weeks ago. They move on and the spiders move in, spinning annoying webs overnight which almost cover the heather and have to be destroyed with a broom. This does not perturb them for long. That's a hazelnut bush in the middle, which planted itself. I quite like it. Hazel is virulent around here and I have two big ones so unsurprisingly quite a lot of further self-planted ones.

Just about got the magnolia before it finishes flowering. It is truly magnificent and has recovered completely from a late snowfall a few years ago which destroyed a big hunk of it. Behind it is one of the huge fir trees, and the female hazelnut tree. More wisteria on the veg garden fence. The "lawn" is what it is. Just about to kick off a project to prepare and reseed the bit under the hazel with a shade supporting variety of grass, but I suspect it will always be starved of water.

 

Looking over to the other monster fir tree, you can just see the male hazel behind the lilac - or is it a buddleia? I always get confused between the two. There are shrubs all the way down the drive on both sides. More pruning and weeding.

 

The other front garden. The quince tree on the left is starting to flower. It is always the last, and the quinces are the last fruit to pick in the garden. The hawthorn mound got pruned last year, I think, so happily won't bother this as it is a prickly nightmare. I sorted out the blackberry bushes on their trellis on the right. Behind this is an old pear tree which has just finished flowering and now seems festooned with nascent pears. A bit of an event, as I didn't used to get any until the hawthorn was brought under control. Behind the camera is a large morello cherry tree in flower (but obviously, you'll have to take my word for it). "Lawn" even more feeble in this neck of the woods. Just too much sun and not enough water in summer, and I can't water the whole garden.

 

The clematis is starting to flower seriously. A real success story, as I only put it in as a spindly twiggy thing a few years ago. It seems very happy on its south-facing wall. It's going to be a good year for apples, as there is major blossoming of the apple tree (one of two now). Sadly, these apples are cookers and there are only so many apples you can cook, so I spend much of the autumn picking up barrowloads of windfalls and putting them on the compost. There were almost no apples last year, for the first time ever, so I suppose the tree has had a rest. Under the apple tree is my wild hedge that I planted three years ago which is now really getting established. It was looking dodgy for a while.

 

Had to show my favourite tree - the "giant" sequoia or wellingtonia I planted about six years ago. It is actually more impressive than it looks here and is quite clearly very happy with no competition as all. Just behind it is the horse-chestnut I planted the same week - also happy. And that's another apple tree on the left but as it lives in the rented field, I don't have to bother picking up the windfalls. The grass is just grass here - no attempt at a lawn, although it is cut regularly. When I arrived all this was a cows' field.

 

In the foreground another williams pear tree which I planted three years ago. It has just flowered for the first time and a couple of hours ago, I noticed it is planning on producing a lot of pears. Oh joy. Behind it is a huge cherry tree now covered in little green cherries. The bush on the left is a rampant honeysuckle I planted to hide a hideous metal telegraph support pole. It has surpassed my wildest imaginings. Down the slope from that it a weeping maple I got given as a twig and planted, little thinking that it would grow into a huge tree. Poor thing. It keeps getting bits broken off by storms, but just produces a new replacement top branch. There must be something about the site it likes.

Right. That's the Monty Don moment over. I may or may not put up some more pictures as and when things change. I leave you with what the cherry tree was looking like a couple of weeks ago.