Keynes would be pleased

because I've spent the day digging a hole in the ground, then filling it in. Productive work. At least there isn't a hole in the ground any longer!

It was the trench outside the front door - this one



It has been waiting until we'd finished waterproofing the top of the silo (the old cistern, now full of chipped firewood). I should also say that it's been waiting for some dry weather, which finally arrived today.

The other side is a bigger hole (well, not one full of wood and concrete blocks, anyway). The reason it isn't any deeper is that when I cut down I reached the bedrock, and found that the wall of the cistern came to within three or four inches of it. Someone a hundred years ago had worked very hard with a pickaxe to excavate enough rock to provide for the storage of about 30 cubic meters of water. As now the object is to make the silo waterproof, I wanted to lay a drain against the side wall.

So this is where I started:



After a couple of hours I'd dug out a bit more earth, and reached bedrock again, at which point I decided that enough was enough. The picture doesn't give a very good idea of the trench, but it's the best there is, as I only took one picture.....



..... and of course now it's been filled in. Before doing that I remembered to put in the drain tubing, and wrap it in "geotextile" (to keep the earth from clogging the pipe). The geotextile has gravel in it as well as the pipe, to improve drainage.



I put a bit more gravel on top, then another layer of geotextile - you have to buy a full roll, 25 meters I think, and this trench and drain is about 6 meters long. And then I filled it back in with the earth - mostly rock - I'd started by digging out. There were three trailer-loads of gravel in the hole, just over two metric tons according to Chausson's weighbridge, and my back pretty well confirms the figure this evening.



Even all that lot wasn't enough to fill the hole, so I swept up some of the dusty floor from the hangar - where the chickens come for their daily dust-bath - and added a couple of large wheel-barrow loads of this. I will probably go and get some "proper" compost tomorrow, just to bring the levels up to where they were before. Not too much, as the thin soil encourages interesting wild flowers. The hangar floor is all very well as a compost source, but it is full of foreign bodies, mostly chips of wood and bark, but other unidentifiable or unmentionable stuff too (which I removed).

I've also started treating the shutters on the farmhouse. This is a simultaneous "before" and "after" picture. I don't think these shutters have had any attention since they were installed. This is a new pair (25 years old?), made of oak, but not very well made: the original ones don't have a zig-zag framework on the back holding them together, instead they are made with good wide mortised joints at the corners, held together with wooden pegs. The old ones will get a coat of wood treatment too, but they are nearing their sell-by date I'm afraid. Mind you, they seem to have managed more than 80 years, so I'm not complaining.



After the shutters, just some emergency repairs to the actual windows - fixing the rotted frames, new glass, that kind of thing - and the farmhouse will be about ready for the summer.