AUGUST
WEATHER ...
Started hot and got increasingly hotter until there was a ten-day period
of temperatures around 39/40 degrees Celsius. Everyone wilted in the heat. It
cooled off slightly in the last week of the month and settled back to a
pleasant 27 degrees.
Latest
Crete Weather Link.
_____________________________
By
Royal appointment - see story below left....
Village Life...
By
the time this gets on line, our leader and his best-beloved should be back
from their tour of friends and relations in the UK.
Welcome
home!
Water,
water everywhere (NOT)....
Every
summer, as soon as the cicadas return in mid June, our village water supply
becomes erratic. We have been unable to find out quite why this is – we have
been told it is because people are watering their olives, but there is a
different water supply – agricultural water – for this purpose, and the
village water is supposed only to be for household purposes. The houses in the
village that don’t have a storage tank on the roof are totally without water
some days. We soon caught onto this idea and now have two tanks on our roof.
Last winter we sent off for dozens of packets of seeds and grew hundreds of
tiny plants for the garden. We nurtured them all through the seedtray stage,
pricked them out into 3” pots, and potted them on into larger pots. (We
probably have at least half of Crete
’s total supply of one litre plastic pots). Naturally enough, when we
finally put them into the ground we try to give them a reasonably chance of
life by giving them an occasional watering.
Yes,
carrying two full watering cans around the garden is great fun and extremely
good for the biceps, but when you are on a slope and have put in lots of
steps, as we have, it gets a bit hard on the knees.
The folks in the village watch us in amazement, toiling around the garden
early every morning, trying to water all our little plants. They think we are
crazy anyway, just having a garden for pleasure – we are always being told
that we should grow a few vegetables or keep chickens. It will be some
considerable time before ‘Ground Force’ are sent to
Crete
to re-vamp someone’s garden!
On the days the village does have water, we can sometimes connect up a couple
of hoses and fit sprinklers. Unfortunately, we have discovered that there is
only one pipe into our storage tanks – it has a two-way valve in it - and
this pipe acts as an ‘in’ and an ‘out’. This means that the tank on
the roof can only fill if you are not actually taking water out at the same
time, so you have to fine-tune the operation so you are not just draining the
storage tank.
Not so many weeks ago some helpful soul suggested that we should connect up to
the agricultural water supply for garden watering purposes. Bingo! Why
hadn’t we thought of that? We made enquiries with our friendly local
hardware shop owner – who would benefit from our business with all the
plastic pipe and fittings – who kindly offered to go to the relevant office
and do all the paperwork for us. He also arranged for two men to come and lay
the pipes.
Agricultural water hydrants are scattered far and wide throughout the olive
groves, but a neighbour
showed us our nearest one, some 800 metres away.
These hydrants are festooned with pipes and individual meters, and each
hydrant can only be used for a certain number of days a week. For example,
hydrants 1, 2 and 3 can be used between Monday morning and Wednesday morning,
numbers 4, 5 and 6 between Wednesday morning and Thursday morning, and so on.
On the days the individual hydrants are not in use, they are chained up to
prevent unauthorised access.
Two very nice young men came to fit our black plastic pipes one Tuesday
afternoon and laboured into the evening to complete it. On Wednesday morning
we visited the hydrant, threw our tap and waited for our meter to
whiz into action.
Nothing happened.
“There must be air in the pipes,” said Richard – ever the optimist.
“Let’s leave it for a while to clear.”
For
the remainder of Wednesday – nothing. Early Thursday morning – nothing.
Late Thursday morning – two bucketsful. Remainder of Thursday – nothing.
Apparently there was a general problem that week, as new pipes were being
laid. So we heaved a sigh, picked up our watering cans once more and waited
for the following Wednesday.
The
following week, water gushed out for a whole hour, during which time we filled
a 500 litre tank (for watering cans) and hosed everything in sight. The
pressure was so great that we had to peg the sprinklers to the ground, as they
were leaping in the air. Then nothing. About midnight, Richard heard the
pattering of water and we were 'on' again, so he gave everything another good
drenching before it disappeared once more.
To be prepared for week three, we bought
another 150 metres of plastic pipe and drip nozzles, and ran it over the
garden, to visit all our more precious plants and our ten olive trees.
Wednesday dawned and we hardly dared to hope for anything. Just as well,
really, as we got 40 minutes of water in our allocated 24 hours.
So here we are, connected up to two separate sources of water, neither of
which is actually coming up with the goods. It's hard not to get a little
down-hearted sometimes, especially when the temperature is over 40 degrees and
you can almost hear your garden screaming for water!
But
I have a cunning plan. What about a de-salination plant? Does anyone have a
spare 10 billion euros?
