Week 31

What a scorcher Monday is. 36 degrees of blazing sun all day. We get up early and crack on, Pammi weeding and me painting the fence panels. Eventually though the sun is so hot that the paint becomes almost like water and is impossible to use, thankfully I had just about finished though. Pammi also gets the weeding of the potato jungle completed, a mammoth task. I made a couple of schoolboy errors today: don't leave bolts in the sun, when you pick them up again they are like red hot pokers and always check your ear defenders for wasps and bugs before putting them back on, I didn't and a wasp was in one, nearly a painful lesson learnt. It is so hot by mid afternoon we stop work and go for a stroll around the village. It is like a ghost town as everyone must be indoors seeking shelter from the sun. Not long after we return home the sky darkens and a five hour lightning storm follows. I go to bed about midnight and it is still lighting up the night sky.

Amazing night sky

Starting to be how we envisioned it

Tuesday is forecast heavy rain and storms so we are in no rush to get up. But when we wake the sun is streaming through the window and it is only 7am. So up and straight on with it in case the weather changes. I give the fence panels a second coat of laquer whilst Pammi cleans the house and then does some cooking for the freezer, whilst also freezing our stock of radishes. Today we get to pick broad beans, potatoes, peas, strawberries, lettuce and broccoli. TH brings us round some weedkiller so after my lesson in mixing, how to pump the spray pack and then how to spray a weed, I get on and spray every weed I can find. Five days later it appears to have had no effect. As TH is leaving Pammi and I also leave with the intention of going for a walk but our neighbour G stops. He comes and has a tour of our garden and house as he has never been inside our gates before. He then invites Pammi and I to his house. G is a master grower of everything and we are given a tour of his land. His trees are full of ripe cherries, his strawberries are bright red and huge and wherever you look his produce and flowers are incredibly advanced. We are given a huge bag of strawberries and cherries to take home. But first we must sit and have G's homemade wine and Rakia which is absolutely beautiful. We somehow manage a few hours 'conversation' using our translator app and charades. A number of glasses of wine later we have to go or else we will be rolling down the hill to our house. No evening stroll today then but it was a lovely evening anyway and so unexpectedly hot today.

Potatoes and mint fresh from the garden

Some of todays harvest

Beautiful strawberries and cherries from G & O's garden

Wednesday and temperatures hit 34 today. My job for the day is to remove a few layers of brick from the new sunlounger area walls so that they are the same height as the panels then put roof tiles on top to protect the walls. I get off to a cracking start until TH arrives. He has decided that today we will make new stakes for the tomato plants. This is not on my to do list but does need doing. So whilst I remove nails from old lengths of wood he axes the poles into sharp points for driving into the soil, then Pammi removes the old sticks, inserts the new ones then ties the plants. He is with us all morning but as we have 84 tomato plants outdoors it is a big job and becomes far too hot to carry on doing so he goes home. I desperately want to get the walls done so carry on removing bricks, the remainder of the tomato supports can wait till tomorrow. So that we can work into the evening we light the outdoor oven and put jacket potatoes in. In the evening TH pops in again with some pepper plants. There are far too many for the available space we have so I have to dig out another area of land to put them into. Pammi plants them whilst I am digging but by 9 o'clock it becomes dark and have to give up. It has been a ridiculously long day. A shower, then jacket potatoes and freshly picked salad under the stars with a glass of wine before bed.

Levelling the walls ready for tiling

Maizi and I watching the storms 

Thursday is market day in Opaka so off we go for a look around. We have also discovered a good supermarket there, so our new plan is to get as much of our grocery shopping locally as we can and only use the big supermarkets in the city for things we cannot get locally. It is monthly shop time again so we get what we need in Opaka then as I have to go to Ruse to pick up the paint and brackets I do the remainder of the shop in the large supermarket. Ruse is really busy, then at 12 o'clock all the claxons sound and everything comes to a standstill, cars and pedestrians, everybody. People even turn their car engines off. OK. Has WW3 just broke out or what? The sirens seem to sound for ages, then stop and everyone resumes their journey. It turns out to be in remembrance of Hristo Botev who is a national hero. Once everything returns to normal I even manage to get everything I came to Ruse for, a first. Back home Pammi is still sorting the tomato beds and when I get home the weather is so nice I strim all the lawns and paths. TH comes round again to make sure Pammi is doing the staking of the tomatoes correctly but does not stay long. By the time we have watered the garden it is gone 9pm again but has been another productive day.

Friday Pammi plants out 20 cabbage, brocolli and cauliflower plants. Meanwhile I try and work out how to get a slope on the walls for the roof tiles. Evan drops in to give his suggestions but after a few attempts which fail decides to leave me to it. He is so funny with a really dry sense of humour and is always a real pleasure when he comes by. Eventually I work out how to get the correct slope and a few hours later the first two walls are complete. But today is a mixture of scorching heat, rain, thunder back to blazing sunshine and the main mudbrick wall will have to wait for now. That will be a full days work. Tonight we had avocado salad with fried crushed new potatoes, from the garden, cooked in garlic, tomatoes, sweet peppers and chilli. Yummy.

Tiles on

The worlds smallest cauliflower?

Spring onions normally grow to leek size here but I wanted this for tonights meal so picked it early

Baba B has asked me to cut down some trees for her so Saturday morning by 0700 I am already at work. I get one section cleared but the apple tree she wants cut down is huge and I am a bit concerned about doing it so may seek Evans help as he is a master woodsman. Next job is to clean all the old cement from the bricks I took off the walls so that we can re-use them. I sit out the front of the house on an old beer crate in the intermittent rain and the neighbours look out at me as if I am insane. But the rain lasts minutes then is back to full sun again and it is so warm that I dry out really quickly. By lunchtime there are about 50 bricks cleaned. Onto the next job of putting sunshades over the tomato plants. A quick trip to the merchants in Opaka and they have all the materials I need, a good week for getting what I need for a change. On the way back I accidently run over a snake in the road which must have been about a metre and a half long, I thought it was rope until I ran over it. Back home I get the shades up so that the plants do not get burnt in the intense summer sun. We are starting to look like a real Bulgarian garden. It is still only late afternoon so I decide to strim the front of our house and up the steps towards what will be our campsite. But looking back down the lane I can see the neighbours fronts all need strimming so I do those as well. It takes an hour or so but the lane looks so much better for it. Pammi has spent the day cleaning the house and weeding as usual. That evening I cook us a chinese meal of stirfried veg and sweet and sour noodles. A good weekend for food. We stay up late into the night watching music videos on youtube which was different for us.

Sunshades for the tomato plants up

Starting to clean the bricks of mortar

All cleaned and ready to re-use

Our lane all neatly strimmed.

 This villager has just been to the woods to cut stakes for his plants

Sunday we sleep in as we had a late night but the sun is bright and makes us get up. It is 0900 and 31 degrees. After breakfast in the courtyard Pammi gets straight into the kitchen garden weeding. She plans only to do a few hours and all my jobs are big ones so I set up the sunloungers and spend the day relaxing. Pammi finishes by lunchtime then makes us a salmon and pasta salad. Delicious. After lunch we relax in the sun before going for a walk, watering the garden and writing the blog.

Pammi weeding the kitchen garden

Wine in one hand - Maizi's tennis ball in the other

Pammi said I had to include this to prove that I do relax sometimes

I just wanted to include something on the health benefits of our new life here. We have both always been active and kept fairly fit. But now we are doing far more physical work we have both each lost about 12kg in weight, about 2 clothes sizes. This despite now eating three good meals a day, albeit fresh salad and veg whereas I used to eat only one meal in the evening. For the last 15 years I have worn glasses, now I only wear them for driving, probably as a result of only rarely using a computer now (although Moni says that bad eyesight is a result of something missing from your life, when you find it your eyesight will improve). We are both toning up and are bronzed. The long days and hard work have had many benefits and the fresh food with nothing pre-made or processed is obviously really good for us. It will definitely be very happy days once we are making our own wine too!!

Well that's it. Take care everyone, have a great week.