Tuna mayo walls

We've had some greatly appreciated assistance over the weekend and now are making real progress.

Lime and hemp plaster a go-go.

This stuff is great - totally tactile (I have been moulding window corners with my hands), smells great, insulates, soaks up carbon dioxide, is a nice colour, and just feels right for the house - which is important for me.

 First coat on the fireplace, with kitchen in the back.

Kitchen showing tile back frame and the final coat, with the first coat to the right of the window.

Chucking it down so nothing in the garden at present - we're concentrating on the gite as we're both sick of the sight of it now!  However, I do have early spuds, garlic, onions, beetroot, turnip, salad and our polytunnel crops all growing away - well, germinating...

Negative calorie carrots.

Deep bed no.3 started today.  3ft of bed yields a barrow load of stones but hopefully will yield something more edible come summer.  Exhausting work and I'm sure I will not get the energy back from the carrots!  However, if I followed that train of thought I would be in a call centre eating carrot sticks so bollocks to that.  This is the reason we're all a bunch of pasty, bleary-eyed, flabby, useless, overly dependant cheesy bellends: someone tells us it's better to do this or that instead of just digging and hammering bits of wood together and suddenly we're half the men and women our grandparents were, knowing nothing useful and having posture problems to boot.  None of my books can tell me what a pig actually eats, either: "2.5kg of a 16% protein nut" - what the hell is that then? Dunno.  Sounds like it fell off a tractor.  What's in a protein nut?  Nobody knows but I suspect it's soya from what used to be the Amazon and pilchards caught by my favourite fishing boat.  What did grandpappy feed his pig before "16% protein nuts" were invented?  I need an old book that has things like "feed it a porridge made from cracked wheat and whey, and all the shite from your veg garden".  Abebooks here I come.
Was also going to weed the asparagus bed but it's a mass of dry turf roots with docks poking through so I sacked it off and went and ate some cake in the polytunnel with a pint mug of tea.
Also got the first sowing of spring broad beans and early peas sprouting in the polytunnel.  Can't believe it's been a year since I did the same thing!  Time flies.

Reap what you sow...

Want lots of spuds?  Then dig deeply.

In the winter I dumped 5 wheelbarrow loads of muck on each spud bed and covered them with black placcy, and forgot about them.  Three months later, I'm double digging the now rich black wormy compost in and have set out our first row of earlies (Charlottes).  The Plan is to plant in deep trenches and earth up to above ground level, forcing the plants to elongate and send off more roots for maximum spud yields.  Lots of water, plenty of liquid feeds and muck, muck, muck will hopefully pay off.  I'd recommend a Bulldog forged steel fork with steel strapped ash handle for this!

Earlies on left, maincrop on right.  Stones in middle from the beds.

A safer bet than a nuclear power station right in the middle of an earthquake zone any day.  Bet they wish they'd gone for tidal power generation instead now.

Cross section of the soil showing er... soil.
Turn over top, loosen bottom with the world's heftiest fork.

None of these to be seen last year and now there are hundreds!