2025-07 Bear, Boat, and Basement

Digging work and gravel

Down the side of the house we have had an awkward area to make useful. It was shady and slightly damp. Plants and grass didnt thrive, and there was seemingly always mosquitoes waiting for you. So I made a plan to put in a gravel area because the gravel perimeter has worked well on the garage and other sides of the house. I asked a local digging company to come in and remove roughly 30cm of soil and then I put in a insulated apron and a drainage pipe, under some gravel.

The insulated apron will reduce heat loss from the basement during the coldest parts of winter. It’s a much better insulation plan to dig down next to the basement walls and install the insulate directly against the wall but to do so would be about half the value of the house in digging costs. An insulated apron is a lot cheaper as the digging is shallow, and the work can be done as different projects give access.

Not everything went to plan. I should have thought to buy and lay harder pink insulation over the cheaper white insulation so that the surface would be driveable with a car without crushing the insulation. But that’s fixable in the future and the important thing is that it did get done before winter and it’s good enough for now. A section of the perforated drainage pipe I laid also got a little flattened by the digger, but it was possible to un-flatten it and the water load in this area is small.

Next month we’ll put in a small wooden retaining wall on the earth bank but the bank is quite stable so it’s more decorative, to keep the edge tidy. I also need to spread out the work across different months as the digger and soil-removal used this month disposable income.

I’ve some future plans for this area:

• The basement has windows this side that in the historic past were covered up by the insulation and metal siding that a previous owner added. I’d like to expose the windows and let some light into the basement. This means cutting the metal facade in the right place and then neatly refinishing the cut area. I’m nervous of doing this as it would be easy to turn things into a giant mess.
• On the top of the bank I’d like to plant some dry-tolerant plants. If I can run a water-drip line along then next July I can help keep plants alive here until their roots get deep enough to help the plant survive the hottest periods.
• One day I may use the back of this area to house IBC containers on a small slab. This way I can pump stream-water to the containers in the mornings and water the garden through the day with a drip system or similar.

Removing earth piles

We’ve had some earth spoil piles in the garden for multiple years as a result of various projects. It was going to take me a long time to remove by hand and risk another back injury. As the digger and tractor were on site I asked if I could also get the piles removed. The digger and tractor removed it all in a couple of trips.

Water Irrigation Planning

July is hard for watering the plants in the garden due to long daylight hours and little to no rain. It’s too hot to stay out in the sun and a lot of plants and young trees in the garden will quickly start to show signs of water stress.

I purchased a water pump that can be a permanent installation instead of the sump pump we’d used previously. It has priming requirements that the sump pump did not need, and needs one-way valves in the various pipes. Due to the freezing winters here, any pipe work also needs to have valves to allow draining the pipe before winter. All of these requirements are parts that need ordering and take 2-4 weeks to arrive so I setup a test to try it out and practise the priming method.

After the test it is time to plan out where it will live and where the main water feed from the stream will go, and where water will be distributed. I laid a length of 32mm hard poly water pipe from near the stream to near the house which meant working in the small gap between the transport-agency-installed fence and the hedge. I also got a lot of fittings for the 32mm pipe and some special cutters to make clean end cuts. It’s tricky to work with, like a stiff garden hose that weighs a lot and wants to fight you.

This is as far as I’ve got with it this month. There is a lot to do to get it up and running and by the end of July the first rains have come. Although it’s too late to make a difference this year, I need to work on creating an initial working system before winter, and then next year I can expand on it.

Cycle Ride

It’s difficult to balance tasks that need doing in the house and garden, versus the need to socialise, and also to mentally relax from work and enjoy the summer. I haven’t even mentioned hobbies. With the great weather we did get to go for a good cycle and it was great to get some exercise.

Village Day

We stumbled across a local village day by accident a few year ago. There is a nearby small village 13km north of our own, that we frequent for postage collection, trying a different grocery store and the all important cosy coffee shop visits. This year we made a point to attend the local celebration as a way of trying to support local businesses.

Walking through the stalls, we spotted a pack of huskies, all harnessed up and ready for action although they did look hot. We are not sure if they were actually going to pull anything that day but they were super cute.

After the huskies, there were a variety of stores, selling locally created goods. We stopped to buy some honey. There was a stall showing off some local hunting knife craftmenship. There were also stalls selling a variety of woodwork items, and warm knitted clothing.

After walking through the stalls, we sat in the shade to have a cool drink. It was a very hot and humid day, the result of three weeks of high temperatures and looming thunder clouds. We escaped to the car, just as the first drops of rain forcefully landed on the windscreen.

Visit to island

Although I’d been to the local island by ferry with my parents, we’d not gone as a couple. So one weekend we headed off for the day on the ferry, back to the island. The ferry was a lot busier in-season and we had to share a table for the trip whereas last month there had been a handful of people.

The trip was good fun

Wildlife

I was sat in my home office when I heard a thump on the balcony and a bird call I didn’t recognise. I carefully looked around the curtain to see the back of a bird of prey, about the size of a really big cat. It had medium-brown feathers with dark brown spot patterns. I think it might have been a kestrel but it flew off before I could get a camera.

The foxes have been out and about. They leave droppings in the garden at certain places and I see them in the fields in the mornings or evenings. Sometimes they are limping due to mange but others look healthy.

I interrupted the beaver one evening as I was crossing the bridge over the steam into the back garden. It swam off slowly and vanished under the water. The beavers aren’t popular inside the village as I think people feel there are a lot of beavers and they create a lot of tree damage for properties by the stream. They’ve not caused any problems for us yet however.

The local news got excited with multiple sightings of a brown bear in the nearby village to the east. Eventually the bear wandered into our village and someone got a great video of it as the bear tried to work out how to cross the main road. We not seen it since however so it’s likely gone west into the deeper forest areas.

Basement Planning

I’d really like to turn our old heating room into a usable space but it means moving the heating pump system out which is a big job that can only be done in the warm months and all the plumbers are on summer holiday. As soon as I can get a plumber I can move the unit and then spend about a fortnight digging up and re-laying the floor. In the meantime I’ve removed about 20 buckets of rubble but I cant do much more without making life difficult for the plumber.

I also painted the entire room with a cheap white basement paint, because the room has been used for an oil furnace in the past so all the surfaces were soot and oil stained. I thought the more hygienic it seemed the more likely a plumber or electrician might actually be to want to work in the area.

Growing from Cuttings

In the basement I setup a batch of lilac-tree cuttings. Last time I tried to grow cuttings in water and they all slowly died by about week 4-5. This time I’m using root hormone and purpose-made growing medium.

I cut most down to just one leaf, but I left a few with more to see how they did. I’m manually spraying them with a mist sporadically. At the time of writing it has been 2 weeks with only one cutting lost. Most are showing signs of water stress however (curling leaves).

For future attempts I’d like to have a propagator cover to keep the humidity in. An automatic misting device would be a great luxury and reduce mortality further.

Hot Weather

One benefit of growing cuttings in the basement is it gives an excuse to visit a cool part of the house. Upstairs it was 26C at ground level and close to 30C upstairs. We slept downstairs for most of July using a mattress on the floor like a Japanese bed.

July Garden

All the small Thyme, Strawberries, and large bushes have been flowering. It’s starting to fill out around the garage where we have a stepping-stone path. There is still a lot of work to do but it feels like we’re slowly winning in this area with the plants we’ve put in versus the constant influx of weeds.

Some of the new trees have had a hard time in the heatwave but we’ve been watering them in the evenings.

At the end of July the rains finally came as the temperature has eased off. I get anxious about now because I know winter is coming and I cant possibly get every project done that I think needs doing. I just have to settle for a little progress each year.