Keeping warm.

We have inherited an old (local plumber's Grandfather installed it) oil central heating boiler, which uses 200+ litres of oil every month.

Needless to say, it has to go, and pronto, or we'll be bankrupt by summer and will have emptied Saudi Arabia.

We wanted a wood fired alternative, but have found that the TFTS (Technology for Technology's Sake) people have been getting their hands dirty. In France the central heating is un-vented and is at mains pressure. This means that if it gets too hot and has nowhere to go, it explodes. With oil that's not a problem because oil is controllable and you can turn it down instantly. With wood, it burns hot then cools down a bit later unless you put another log on. In the UK you have a water tank in the loft which absorbs the heat and so you don't get ruptured pipes. In France they don't so to get around this problem, if the system is about to go bang, a valve opens and shoots red hot water vapour into the air and an injection system then pumps cold water into the system at the same rate the hot water's irrigating the lawn. Costs E600 for the pump alone, which doesn't work in a power cut in winter when you need it to work.

Older wood heating systems had a pipe sticking out the top of the boiler that water bubbled out of if it got too hot. Our plumber knows people who've got them and they've worked fine for decades: stoke it up, radiators and water get hot, it cools down 8 hours later and then you throw some more logs on. Job done. They're not made any more because they don't work on the newer systems.

Wood-chip and pellet systems are hugely expensive and you need a barn for them to fit in, and they all need electicity for the feed hoppers and pumps, and you need something rat and damp -proof to keep the fuel in. Also more suited to swimming pools and warehouses.

Bit like veggie bacon, are these systems. Someone won't eat bacon for whatever reason but actually really likes bacon to be honest and so gets something that looks, smells and tastes like a crap version of real bacon for twice the price in a sterile soul-less wee placcy carton. Just eat something else for God's sake and accept that you can't have bacon without killing a pig, you feverish shivering wisp!

You like central heating that you can turn down and up when you feel like it? Oil does that, wood doesn't. Either live with oil or get used to cold mornings and a huge overdraft and have wood.

We're getting a bog-standard 93% efficient oil boiler, separate electric heating (atomic, I know, but the hills here are covered in turbines, the reactor at Brest is now shut down, and we might get a turbine ourselves if we win the lottery), and then when we do the kitchen up we'll get a wee wood stove with a hob top and a matching small one in the lounge, and insulate as much as we can. In summer we'll not have the oil on heating the water and a gas cooker, and in winter we'll have two stoves on for heating and cooking and the oil will be only as a backup.

Wood power = 8 grand just for the parts (Perge boiler and 1500L accumulator tank).

Oil power = 3 grand all in (boiler and new fittings, water heater and fittings, and a chatty wee man to fit it all).

Our first livestock and the joys of double-digging

They're not for eating, but they do apparently look like rabbit sans tete et pied. A pair of hyperactive mouse-catchers with stealth capabilities: you never actually SEE them in the kitchen when you shut the door, but then the next time you go in the whole place is covered in wee footprints... Here's K with Petal and Puck:


Limed the four legume/brassica beds this week after hunting for something that wasn't quicklime (which cooks the soil and your hands) - using crushed oystershell. Also started the root break and am double-digging to remove as many stones as possible to prevent humorous carrots. Took me 3 hours to do 4 feet and I filled a wheelbarrow with stones. At this rate it'll take less time to just wait for the stones to erode by themselves. Still, when it's done that's the veg beds done and we can move on to fruit beds.

Also finding how joyous plastering is, digging holes throughout the garden looking for the fosses and soakaways as they're not up the scratch, K's resting her back after hurting it lifting turf (she's ok now), and we're having the central heating boiler replaced. When it's in I might have a rant about wood-fired alternatives and how complicated and expensive they are.

Crack on.

Winter

Some photos of the views when it got a little chilly the other week:

View from the kitchen window across the field to the woods.

The track at the bottom of our field, down to the old mill at the bottom of the valley.

The view from the end of the field to a very big tree on a hill.

We're in!

Bit of a delay thanks to France Telecom taking 2 months to set up the broadband....

This is the moment we open the door to our new home straight from the notaires. Turn back, K! There's mould everywhere and the field's solid rock! The central heating's 40 years old and drinks oil like a tramp with the keys to the Special Brew factory! No one knows where the fosse is, or even if it has one! The living room fire's so hot it melts the sheep netting down the bottom of the field and we can't turn it down coz it goes out!

Ahhh, whatever. Better than a pokey flat in Blighty, eh? Monkey Puzzle tree's life is rapidly running out though - as soon as I get a winch and a saw. Bloody awful things, look like kid's drawings of trees.

Big blisters

We're doing no-dig veggie gardening. This is to keep the top soil where it should be, with all it's micro-organisms and structure that plants find ideal to grow in. Also, the land here is where the ice sheets ended last ice age, so for every kilo of soil you have, you get 2 kilos of stones. As we're having 12 beds each 1.6m by 10m long, plus the 12x24 foot polytunnel, and 10m by 15m soft fruit area and 10 tree beds, I didn't fancy digging for some reason!



Here's our field, marked out ready for the veg beds - at least, the top 10 metre of it is. Rest is going to be grazed by our neighbours cows and sheep until we get the pigs, goats, geese, barley, kale and artichokes in.

K digging. We are digging trenches around the perimeter of each bed to help stop grass from encroaching - the trenches are the size of K's fancy hand-beaten bronze azada-hoe so we only need run it around the edge to keep it clean. Then cardboard goes on top of the grass, followed by manure, then black plastic to make sure the grass is killed off. We're doing this on the potato and squash beds, taking the turf off the pean and bean beds for liming (PH 5 here!), and I am double-digging the root beds. 100% pure daft in the head, me like - the ground is almost solid granite! I'll be a real man when that job's done, with hands like shovels and hair sprouting where it shouldn't.

These days instead of heading to a nice warm office to slip into a coma from sheer boredom, I spend the morning getting covered in brick dust while making loft hatches, or sawdust cutting wood for the fire, then after lunch (cabbage, bread, eggs) K joins me to dig in the freezing mud until we're knackered, then it's tea and cake time, then I get the fire on and we take it in turns to cook some combo of dried peas, potatoes, leeks and garlic for dinner. Then we sit in front of the fire and pretend to read when we're actually nodding off and I wish that I have made some beer three weeks ago.