Wildlife seen around the lanes, mostly my OH's photos this time

I mentioned in my last post that my OH has been making regular cycle rides around the lanes in the early evening, for both fitness and wildlife spotting reasons. Most of the photos in this post are his, although as I was getting a teeny weeny bit envious, I suggested that perhaps we could take the car out and go for a slow drive around to see what we could see. Luckily there are a few tracks where there is space to park and we can have a bit of a walk, so last Weds evening we went out together, despite it being overcast and not great for photography. 

I just enjoyed the magic of getting out for the first time in over three months and having a potter somewhere that's not my own garden. I did see a couple of Meadow Brown butterflies, but want to come back when the sun is shining and a bit earlier in the day when I hope there will be more butterflies about. I also got to see one bunny, who was lying flat in the grass in a cow field, amazingly camouflaged as a cow pat (no photo as it took off the moment I raised the camera), and a Roe Deer and her youngster in a field, who gambolled off as soon as they saw us. It was a great experience for me, and just goes to show there's plenty of wildlife still around, I'm just not seeing it so much in the fields around our property.

This first photo is nothing to do with wildlife, but it's been a year since the new septic tank was installed, and it was time to clean out the grease trap. Only it was clean! Very little pong so it seems to be working like it should. You can see how brown the grass was getting over the tank area, as there is only a few inches of soil over gravel, ditto the filter bed, which although has about eight inches of soil, seems to dry out rather quickly too. Thankfully we had about 50mm of rain over four days which got the stream running again, and all this grass has greened up again nicely.

He seems to be enjoying himself.......

Banded Demoiselle (Calopteryx splendens),
male. OH's photo.

Dirk gets fruity with Rachel. OH's photo.

Meanwhile, out in the country lanes and fields.....

Looks better when the sun is shining!

He's seeing quite a few foxes. The one top right is a mangy one that he's seen in the field
next to the veg patch AND chicken run - lucky there is a 6 foot high fence in between!

I took the rubbish photo of the Goldfinch on the right, he got to see the Stonechat on the left.
I'm jealous!

Stonechat (Saxicola torquata). OH's photo, but shame about the bramble stem!

Black-tailed Skimmer (Orthetrum cancellatum), either a female or juvenile male. OH's photo.

A photo that I took! Wild Foxgloves growing on the field margin.

Himself wandering up a track.

Bunnies - OH's photos.

Roe Deer, including bambi, but very far away. OH's photos.

I'll leave you with the little tinker, aka Bertie, who just loves to sneak onto, and into, my round cushions and make a nest for himself, the moment I stand up. He's so skinny he fits in the hole whereas his rather chunky brother wouldn't!

Health update

Since I got these photos prepared my OH has come back with more interesting photos, but they can wait until the next post. I haven't even been in my garden for five days, due either to rain or (mostly) a rough time after my last chemo which left me feeling pretty wrecked. I even threw up this time, which actually is pretty good going seeing as it was my sixth round, so I'm now half way through! I had managed to get some energy and appetite back in the few days before the chemo sessions and did some cooking for the first time in months. Suffice to say after the chemo it's a different story, and hard to eat anything at all for a while. Hopefully it will pass soon and I'll feel a bit more hunger and energy.  Things are still looking better in the perineal wound department, although it does still flare up every now and again, but it's a lower level flare up, and in general it seems to be healing. My latest blood test shows a slight improvement with four things related to blood so hopefully these weekly jabs for anaemia and the iron tabs are starting to take effect.

I haven't been keeping up with other blogs as some of you post practically every day so no way can I read and comment on all these posts, especially when I'm feeling like carp. I'll leave the carp in as my Kindle's predictive text just changed that. :-)

Edit: Since I wrote the above I did get out in the garden this morning, and can't believe how much things have grown - mostly the weeds/wildflowers in the veg patch but also the lettuce - this cooler weather has been good for it so my Cos has not bolted before hearting up. There are flowers on the courgettes now too! Not many butterflies about and they are nearly all Meadow Browns. I'm going to have another wander outside now but it's rather breezy so carp for photography ;-)

New septic tank installation - Part 2

The continuation of Part 1 which is the previous post here.

The last two days!

The green lidded thing is the pump to pump the water uphill to the sand filter bed.
Can you see where that pipe for the toilet waste is going?

More trenches, although my OH had been filling in and
laying turf back over the trenches further uphill over the weekend.

Yup, the toilet waste pipe went right under my planter with Gertrude Jekyll the rose in it!

Looking out of my office window at a nice truckful of gravel.

The last morning before David arrived, there was still a lot to do.

The two piles of soil were the best he could get from a quarry as we didn't have enough,
however the quality was atrocious as it was so full of stones and lumps of hard clay.

I had to add this one because I just noticed the other two cats in it!
Hallie is the black one and Bertie the one who is legging it!

I didn't take many pics as it was all about filling in after connecting the pump up to
the electricity, and then sorting out my rainwater pipe to be diverted to the old tank.

Trying to connect the rainwater pipes deserves a mention because of what we discovered! Running a hose into the inspection trap where all the rain from the front of the house comes into before exiting down the pipe to the soakaway only got water going partway along the new pipe. After a while it was discovered that neither the pipe coming from the downpipe from the other side of the roof, nor the pipe to take the rainwater away, had been sealed in. They had big gaps around them. Meaning that for the last 19 years since the previous owners renovated this place, all the rainwater from the entire downpipes around the house had just been soaking into the ground beside the house! Which probably explains why our coat cupboard right by the downpipe at the front of the house is always damp and in the past turned some of our jackets mouldy, until we left the door wide open permanently, so all I can say is thank goodness for free draining soil! So my OH has cemented it all in (all three inspection traps were like this. Bloody cowboy builders!) and it now works. Now we just need some rain!

And so the work was completed at 11pm last Wednesday - thankfully it is daylight here until gone 10pm in summer. 

And afterwards. The next day we set to trying to rake up the worst of the stones, which was a job and a half, given that our soil is stony, but the bought in soil from the quarry was half stone and lumps of solid clay! Somehow we have to also try to define what is gravel driveway and what is lawn.....

You can't really see in any of my photos quite how mounded our new mound is,
it does look quite ridiculous in our sloping lawn and will be hell to mow.

Nice rocks.

A lot of the rubble went to fill in the hole around the two inspection pipes for the toilet waste and the rainwater pipe to the old tank.

At least I have new gravel, although it probably won't be quite enough.

One good thing has come of all this, our toilets flush a lot better now that they are not going slightly uphill (yes really!) to the old septic tank!!!

Today or tomorrow David is bringing us a load of decent topsoil from his own land to finish off; this however will be dumped outside our gate on the grass so we will be barrowing 4 tons of soil up the steep slope of our drive.... so for the meantime the new gravel will not be spread until we are ready. And anyway, it is so dry and dusty here it's just not worth doing anything on a slope until we have had enough decent rain to be able to bed it in. Which might not be until the autumn rains come, but at least we can do the flat bits here and there, because we are not busting a gut as there are enough jobs to do in a garden this size in summer!

New septic tank installation - Part 1

I've divided this into two parts as I have a lot of photos and thought it might be interesting for some (those of you in France who might one day get the dreaded 'fail' at inspection time!) to see just what is involved.

A bit of background: those of us out in the sticks don't have main sewerage. That means we have to get rid of our toilet waste and grey water somehow. In the past that may have meant a halfway decent septic tank system, a cess pit, a pipe running into a ditch or even worse, just piped straight into a river! So France is cleaning up its act and trying to comply with EU regs and that means we now get inspections every 4 years or so to check out our waste disposal. Whilst we passed OK 5 years ago, last year some jobsworth decided our septic tank for toilet waste only, and separate grease trap for grey water, both of which ran into a soakaway and then into the ditch (which is where our stream overflow runs until it goes under the road and continues on as a stream) was no longer acceptable. Fair enough really. Except WE have to foot the bill, and if you can get it in at under €6000 that means you are probably doing the work yourself.

We chose to have a traditional sand filter bed as it is a lot cheaper than biorock, which is a less disruptive but much more expensive way to filter the water coming out of the septic tank. Plus biorock requires maintenance costs too. In a way after seeing the disruption here we kind of wished we had gone for that option, but at the same time it would have required taking out a horse chestnut tree and probably a lot more breaking up of bedrock, so that would have ended up costing us about €10K. As it is, we ended up paying €8K, which is a lot more than it was originally going to cost (although that does include about €400 for new gravel which he kindly fetched for me from a quarry).

The before. I never planted here after a couple of trees fell, due to honey fungus and old age,
because I knew that one day this might have to become a sand filter bed.

The start of the digging out of the sand filter bed.

At first it went well with nice soft soil which was easy to dig;
hitting bedrock came later.

The cats thought it was great fun -
Harry taken through the kitchen window in the evening of the first day!

One corner of the filter bed square was solid rock!

David, the Scottish guy doing our installation after the filter bed hole was completed.

The filter bed gets filled with an enormous amount of sand. That's Harry again.

Who thought the sand was great for rolling in.

By day 4 David had realised this was not going to be a quick job and enlisted the help of
a friend for a couple of days. That's the pipework for the filter bed on the lawn.

Nice mess of pipes going around the old grease trap which was crumbling
and also leaking! Here we have two pipes for rainwater,
two pipes for greywater, and a pipe for the air vent from the tank
which is going up the side of the house in a corner.

The hole for the septic tank. 3/4 of this was solid granite and took many hours
to break up with a rock breaking attachment on the digger
(the reason it cost so much more). It then started filling with water
as I guess we were down level with the ditch outside.

On top of sand goes a layer of thick gravel and that is our new air vent on the corner of the roof.

The pipework in place and more gravel added.
You are only allowed 8" (20cm) of soil on top of this.

Here comes the fun bit. The old septic tank gets pumped out.

And cleaned too, because this will now be my 4000 litre rainwater tank!

5th day - half naked Frenchman starts filling in the filter bed with topsoil
and creating our strange mound in the lawn.

The new tank being part filled with tap water to hold it in place
(and which thanks to new regs only needs to be 3000 litres, thus saving us a hell
of a lot of money as more rock would have had to be broken up to get
a larger tank in! You can see the ground water in the bottom;
this was pumped out umpteen times but just gushed back!

Round the front of the house the toilet waste pipe had to be located and was discovered
that it had been cemented in place which is a big no-no, adding more time and work.
The rainwater pipe also had to be located so it could be diverted.

And here we are at the end of the first week with a temporary toilet pipe going
slightly uphill so we could use the loo during the long Pentecost weekend!

Continues in Part 2.

Septic Tank Saturday

No, not Cockney Rhyming Slang but the joys of rural living!

So what do you do when you discover a blockage somewhere in the outflow from your upstairs toilet? Now, normally, had we still been on mains drainage our first thought would have been to grab the Yellow Pages and look for our nearest Dynarod or equivalent and got them to come and deal with it all.

(By now I expect you are either totally grossed out or nodding and saying "yup, been there, done that". Sorry if the former in which case don't read on!)

However there's something about having a septic tank that makes you that little bit more self-reliant, as for a start you are more aware of what goes into your toilet (nothing but the obvious and toilet paper) and how it all gets, shall we say, processed by the bacteria in the tank and that hopefully, only reasonably cleanish water comes out at the other end. So you think, OK, let's see if we can sort this out ourselves.

First port of call - ask on a local forum what other people have done in similar circumstances. Hooray! It just so happened that a friend who lives 20 mins away has a drain upblocky thingywotsit that attaches to a Karcher (pressure washer) and knows how to do this. So over she comes with it. (Photo credits to her by the way - I was too mucky and having far too much fun to remember to take photos....)

So we lift off the lid and we look and we have a poke around and realise we need to deturf some more cos there's more to this tank than we thought. I also realise I'm kneeling on the underside of the tank lid which is covered in scum!

Note the big grin on my OH's face.

Right time to get down to business, note all the marigold gloves. As it turned out they weren't long enough but we didn't know anyone who has those long gloves for sticking your arm up a cow's backside which could have come in handy....

Grins gone temporarily as we umm and ahhh and decide what to do next,
now that we have two holes to look into.

Somewhere down here there's a pipe where the loo contents enter, only the entrance is under water somewhere, quite a long way down. I tried first and let me say, bin bags are NOT waterproof. So my OH who has longer arms had to have a go. He failed miserably as well as the hole was too deep down. And got a wet arm too.

By the way, because our tank is very healthy there was hardly a pong and apart from a bit of surface crust the water was really not mucky. You probably don't believe a word I'm saying, if anyone is still reading, that is.

Taping a bin liner around his arm. Serious face on.

So, plan C, or D, or wherever we had got up to. Try to stick the unblocky hose thingy round the U bend of the downstairs toilet. Now this was mucky because earlier in the day it had overflowed all over the floor of my hallway, due to my dear OH repeatedly flushing the upstairs loo to try to shift the blockage. Ooops. I couldn't get the hose in due to the strange design of our U bend which was rather tight but I had a lot of fun trying. Honest! You can see from my face I was having fun!

All in a day's work.

Eventually the problem was solved by drilling a hole into the pipe in the septic tank where the toilet outflow comes in, above the water level, and sticking the hose up that, which worked a treat. We've not had any problems since and we know what to do if it happens again. All in all, a good afternoon was had by all. Thank you for reading, if you got this far!

(Now here's the mysterious bit. This blockage happened soon after we returned from holiday and French housesitters had been here looking after the house and menagerie. The only thing we found floating in the septic tank which shouldn't have been there was a small label with a name and logo on. Upon Googling said name we discovered it was a French cheese we had never heard of before. So we are left with a mystery as to whether someone flushed a lump of cheese down the toilet causing the blockage, or ate the label.)