The general blog area for the site. Articles which do not fall into a specific category will appear here.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After the success of last year's sunflowers, we had some self-seeded plants appear in the flower bed. Quite a number in fact!.
Earlier in the year Janet relocated some of the seedlings nearer to the back wall and removed a lot of others. Since then they have grown nicely.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After struggling with Wordpress for some time I have been looking for a replacement CMS to present and manage our website. The Drupal and Joomla! packages that are included with the Synology Diskstation were difficult to fathom, and both are outdated. I took the decision to manually install the latest Joomla! version and found it much easier to comprehend than the older version. The basic template included was perfectly adequate to get going with and the design of Joomla! makes it very easy to modify the system and include features that are not present by default. 
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After pushing many wheelbarrow loads of rubble, sand, and soil up a ramp from the 'dungeon' and then up another ramp to the new planters we now have a new section to the garden.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
The blog has suffered from serious neglect since the new year, although there have been things to write about, I was on a fruitless quest attempting to use a different platform for presenting the blog, for the time being normal service is resumed.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
As part of Janet's food garden she has a herb bed planned. Located just to the side of the house within easy reach of the kitchen for the master cook to pop out to grab the necessary leaves and twigs.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
We greatly miss having a dog around the house and will certainly be looking for a suitable candidate once the perimeter fencing has been installed around the garden.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
With the new growing season looming, our thoughts turned to last year when the local cat population seemed to have designated our vegetable patch as their litter box.
My first option was the purchase of a gun, but Janet wasn't too keen on that.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Janet made an unexpected but pleasant discovery whilst inspecting the garden earlier.
We have a number of aloe plants of varying types, one of which is a baby aloe vera.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
... but not as you expect.
As you may be aware, Portugal is the world's major cork producer with over 720,000 hectares (around 1¾ million acres) of cork forest. They produce around 40% more than Spain, the next biggest supplier.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
We had quite a successful year growing some vegetables. Not everything was as good as we hoped but we are still getting used to the climate and growing conditions.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
The work invested so far over the past year in the garden has paid off, to some extent.
Whilst we never expect to become completely self-sufficient, we have moved a step closer with tasty veggies from the small plot.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
With the hot, hot weather over the past few weeks, we are spending much more time indoors and less in the garden.
But that does not mean we have abandoned it.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
The sunshine has been ever present over the past few weeks and the garden has thoroughly enjoyed it, from the flowers to the fruit.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
... or at least one of his cousins.
I had difficulty accessing one of the cameras which I had set up in the workshop looking out over the garden. It had previously been working fine and I wondered if the recent storms had damaged it after a couple of close lightning strikes knocked out the power.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After pruning and caring for the fruit trees over the past year we have had quite a few cherries from the small tree and many more from the big tree which fruited very late.
Last year it produced about 20 cherries in total.