Taking up the Slack

County Roscommon swelters under the hot sun. There is no wind and the stultifying heat takes away all desire to do any physical work, so 'attacking the bank' gets parked up. The dogs get their mid-Summer (3 mm) clip and look like bright white newly-shorn lambs. It's much cooler for them, though they are still panting for the cool indoors once we have done the walk. Fair play to Andy Murray for even being able to play tennis in this heat, never mind at his level.

The rabbits get their shade covers to give the baby bunnies a bit of relief from the sunshine. They are now in Donedeal.ie to try to sell them. No calls yet so far on that one. It is also a good opportunity to take up the slack on the poly tunnel cover. When we put the cover over first off on St Patrick's Day it was sunny but not especially hot (Being March!). The advice is that you erect the frame set to the lowest hole on your ground tubes, knowing that after a couple of months of the wind flapping it about and also in the heat of summer, you will have built up a bit of slack, no matter how careful you were in March. You then pick a hot, windless day and take your 'assistant' into the sweltering heat of the tunnel. You brace yourself and lift the ends of each arch 2 inches or so, while your 'oppo' whips out the stop-pins from the first hole and drops them back in the next hole up. You repeat for all ten (in our case) legs and thereby take 3-4 inches of slack out of your cover. A taut poly tunnel with less movement should last longer, it says here.

We swap jeans and polo shirts for cotton shirts and shorts. In the garden we are spotting new flowers in all sorts of first-time places. This pink rose (L'Aimant = "The Lover") is doing its thing in the 'Jam and Jerusalem' hedge, geraniums come into bloom where we had forgotten we had planted them, a gift Campanula is showing delicate pale blue in the front-drive bed and the hollyhocks are about to start there. The hedgerows are a white froth of ground elder flowers (like a smaller, more delicate Cow Parsley) and elder (tree) flowers.

When we last posted we were about to be invaded by the Silverwoods who had been out on a car-based 'Treasure Hunt' trying out the new-ish 'game' of Geo-Caching. We had little idea what this involved but it sounds like and enjoyable way to get out and about visiting places you would not normally go to and getting some fresh air and exercise into the children. The 'Treasure' is generally a cache of small trinkets and low-value nice things stored in a closed Tupperware box and hidden at the location, maybe behind a stone, between some sign posts, half buried in a bucket etc. The person doing the hiding will then record on the website ( GeocacheIreland.ie ) the GPS (Global positioning system) co-ordinates. The hunters then use either their car sat-nav, or a modern fancy phone, or a purpose-built GPS hand held gadget to get to the right area, then start hunting on foot.

There may be easy or difficult clues on the website as for old fashioned Treasure Hunts. The idea is that when you find the box, you take one of the pieces of 'treasure' out and place something of your own into the box. There will also be a log-book to record your presence finding the box plus you score your find back on the website. Some of it gets a load more complicated than that and there are even fancy 'geo-coins' with serial numbers which, if you look them up, you can see where they have traveled around the world being found and the re-lost by the geo-cachers. There is quite a community 'out there' now doing this; it's quite a thing. It has really taken off in Germany but not really got going to the same extent in Ireland, so if you have an inkling then get out there, hunt a few caches down, find out what the game is all about, and then plant your own cache and watch the 'traffic' through it.

The Silverwoods had a day at it, aiming to find 5 caches and found 4 of them. They then headed here arriving at 7 pm to a superb tea cooked by Liz, who had been working off and on all day creating bacon/mushroom and ricotta cheese/onion savoury tarts, pizza, green salad, paté and home made bread, plus lemon drizzle cake, flapjacks and a rhubarb loaf. They had a good run around the farm and a nice cuddle of as many of the baby rabbits as each could catch. It was a tired, well fed Silverwood party who got back into the car at 9:30 pm for their 2 hour run home, but they were up again on Sunday, bright and early for some hot sun horse-riding and a trip to the seaside where, if Facebook is to be trusted, they spent a good part of the day burying children up to their necks in the sand. Hope they remembered to dig them all up again at going home time.

Tunneling (1)

The bitter NE winds fade and we can get back out into the garden and, although it is way too cold to be handling the plastic sheet yet, we can assemble the poly tunnel structure so that we are ready to throw the sheet over on the first warm day. Plastic sheet is easier to handle and to get taut if it is warm and supple.

We have decided to position the tunnel in what was the westernmost bay of the three-bay former hay barn. In this part of the world it is pretty near impossible to grow tomatoes out of doors, or anything tender, for that matter, so anyone who is anyone in gardening has a poly-tunnel. Everybody tells you this. Neighbours, friends, the lady in the local charity shop.... Everyone is also an expert and advice comes from every direction as soon as anyone gets wind there-of. Some of it we welcome and value, some we take with a pinch of salt.

The official instructions which come with this tunnel say that to get the plastic sheet taut you must dig a trench around the tunnel perimeter. Then you drop the sheeting over your frame and tread it down into this trench before back-filling with soil. The weight of the soil holds the sheet down taut. Our Mentor Anne and partner Simon, however, have played this game before (they used to have a 60 foot tunnel or two when growing organic salad crops commercially in a former life) and Anne tells us that the wind and weather will tend to wreck your plastic cover in 5-10 years and you will need to replace it. You do not want to be digging that trench again and again so it is more sensible to lay a big timber (a 5 by 2 for example) all around the perimeter, fixed to the ground-tubes by metal brackets. You then wrap the sheet edges round long wooden laths and screw these down to the timber, gripping the sheet and keeping it taut but making it easy to dismantle should you need to move the tunnel or replace the cover. Sounded good to us, so we have gone with this method.

We have also been advised that things can get very hot and humid in a tunnel, so that you risk cooking the tomatoes. It is best, apparently, to plant the tomatoes at the sides so that they never reach the hot sweaty apex - you do your more tropical stuff in the centre bed there - melons and cucumbers. More advice has us warned that placing the tunnel in the hay-barn bay, so that it is to the north of the big front garden trees and the barn wall, might mean we are a bit spare on bright sunlight, and this might affect whether we can ripen toms. However, here we stopped listening to a degree.

The barn bay is the most useful position and is, we think, open enough to the sky to be in full sun through July, August and September. If we do suffer any light loss then this might also mean less over-heating and, certainly, being snug in against the wall and the trees will mean that the wind and weather's tendency to shred the plastic will be reduced. Having made all these decisions we then found that just down the lane, one of the McG's also has a poly-tunnel in a similar position with its plastic held down by the wood and laths method and his has lasted 11 years so far except where his dog chewed through one panel (!). Ah well. We will live and learn and if it all goes wrong we will do it differently next time.

You can see from the pictures that we are well under way, with the main arches and now the diagonal bracing installed. This being the floor of a former hay-barn of great vintage (50 years?) it has soil as you might expect - the local subsoil with boulders compacted down into a pan by the passing of generations of feet, animals, carts, tractors and machinery thinly covered with rotted straw-bale debris and the peat turfs they all store in barns here to keep them dry. The local stoloniferous grass has also moved in to create that frustrating rat's nest of roots and stems which stop you swinging a shovel about. It is a wet bog-hole and has been a mush since we moved here, never seeming to dry out.

We decided to dig across the whole floor first to cut through the pan and get some drainage going, second to extract the stones and peat turfs and third to mix the layers and bury the straw mush and stoloniferous grass. This should help it all dry out and might give our tomatoes a better substrate in which to put down roots. We may have to import some top soil from the nearby bank (source of rusty fertilizer spreaders and current home of the horse drawn hay rake). We are hoping that once the cover is on the area should no longer get too wet. The eventual plans may involve a weed-proof membrane and plank-sided raised beds but for this season, while it settles and we are still 'learning' we will just tread some paths and plant into the dug beds in between.

One area of confusion remains. Generally these tunnels seem to have a door at either end to allow ventilation on hot days. This one came as a kit with only the one door, and only the bits for a door frame at one end. That is also how the display model in their yard is set up. We assume that users who require the 2nd door either bodge one themselves or pay extra for the 2-door version. Because our 'other end' is just the caravan 'site' we will probably bodge an opening frame and a removable panel which can be replaced with a chicken wire version in hot weather.

Part 2 of this story when I have some pictures of the finished tunnel.