back in the holes

It was surprisingly hard work backfilling the short remaining trenches: too many rocks in the earth to make putting the spade in easy. The digger couldn't do it as he'd gone home before the chap from the pool company could put his hoses and wires in. So it was a bit of vigorous excercise with a shovel - the one leaning up against the pile of earth in the middle of this picture:



As I also put in four or five cubic meters of sand - black sand, visible on the left of the site, where the pool pump etc used to be, and apparently it's volcanic in origin - I'd hoped to have a bit of earth left over to level off other areas of the garden here. But after building up the stone wall just by the "salle technique" and infilling behind it, there was only a little. I think the man with the digger may have slightly raised the level of the track on the right, and this accounts for some of the missing earth. The rest was probably the hole where the pump and filter used to be.

After it was done I tried to clean the surface of the grass as much as possible with a rake, in the hope that the grass would grow again. here is what it looks like today:



I put some grass seed down too, despite the late time of year. Maybe it will grow: it's quite mild right now and there's occasional sunshine too.

The buried pipes were manhandled quite a bit, and it took a good deal of heaving on a rope to pull them through the conduit. So I was worried that we might have pulled a joint loose, buried somewhere I wouldn't be able to find it. So this morning I pressure tested the buried pipes - using this:



I pumped the pipes up to 2.5 bar - quite enough just using a car footpump - and the pressure has stayed nicely at that level for the last few hours, so I am optimistic that it's all in good health. The brush and jamjar contain washing-up liquid to detect leaks in the test equipment - and there were none there either.

The picture also shows the conduit emerging from the wall of the boiler room with armaflex pipes and an electrical cable, and the yet-to-be-installed pump station which will eventually circulate the solar fluid. One other job yet to be done will be to install a power supply.

It wasn't all digging:



This fine Harris hawk (called "Flossie") belongs to the visitors staying in our gite, who are in the process of moving house from Brittany to Maurs.