Summer 2015.......what happened to spring!, Woooooah that was a long gap in posts!

Wow....time flies! , it was December 2014.....and now its July 2015......

Packing the van....

Quick version.....( longer version will be filled in over a few days at the bottom of this post! )

I returned here near the end of February , snow, ice, cold.........but nothing major, cold but no problems travelling in any way.

Driving over it was cold.....drove through the Dunkirk, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, E74....over Vidin Bridge into Bulgaria, took 3 days due to stopping in hotels to get warm!

When we arrived we had been broken into, not much taken.....strimmer, chainsaw, Petchka, gas cooker, gas bottles and regulators etc, the window to room with citrus trees in was open and 50% had frozen to death covered with thick ice

We gradually tidied up, fitted some heating, fixed the doors and the upstairs window

Power from the solar was very low, obviously due to low sun hours, it was fine while the sun was out, I added another couple of solar panels to give more amps and then all was fine.

Quick work on the downstairs, surrounded by ice....-18C outside, heater on inside running from generator and I tiled the floors downstairs, never having done it before it took a little practiced to get them straight....but now they are straighter than the ones I took up fitted by a builder.....

I tiled the downstairs rooms and painted them as well, Gas cooker fitted, running from bottled gas after changing the jets to the ones supplied in the bag with the manual , all fine again, still have bathroom to tile and paint.....but it all works.....

Outside it was alternating between very cold in the night -15C to -35C and quite warm 15C to 20C some days, most days about 10C in the day, snowdrops out, bluebells growing, daffodils growing....even some tulips starting to grow, broccoli was growing great

Sprouting broccoli

I rotorvated the garden , dug out the weed roots, and started planting all the bare root fruit bushes, raspberries etc, pruning fruit trees, and vines, spraying the vines and trees, removing any old fruit still on the trees.

I planted many of the plants I brought with me.....50 new assorted raspberry canes, 3 gooseberry bushes, 3 Black current bushes, a Williams pear tree, a Peasgood Nonsuch apple tree

Trips to Baumax ( Homemax) and Praktis got me 3 peach trees, 3 apricot trees, 12 rose bushes, 2 rose standards

All planted by mid March











By Late March early April it was quite hot

So I bought 20 tomato plants and 4 cucumber plants from the Kazanlak market, the tomatoes were fine, but the cucumbers died within days ( in the house ) from mosaic virus

Petrol power back pack sprayer

Daffodils

Bluebells

Purple sprouting broccoli

Peach tree in flower

Rhubarb starting to grow again

Seed potatoes

More seed potatoes, dahlias, gladioli etc

I planted 750 seed potatoes, including Charlotte, Swift, Pentland Javelin, Pink Fir Apple, Anya, Salad Blue, Desere, Shetland Black, Highland Burgundy, Sarpo Axona, Sarpo Mira, KIng Edward, Maris Piper.....and many more....4 varieties of blue ones but cant remember them all I think 20 to 30 varieties, plus supermarket ones such as Bluebell

More things to plant

Roses, grape vines and more from Praktis this time

By this point I decided to remove the frame I fitted to use as a poly tunnel....and build a geodesic dome....it had to be a strange one with very few sides, only 15....as that way it was high enough for the citrus trees, it is about 4.5 meters high and 5.5 meters wide

Dome frame going up

Starting to cover the dome

I was just finishing the dome, deciding it was too hot, I needed to work on the water supply, quick think while drilling my finger while drilling the dome......

I needed some bits from Stara Zagora for the water , tanks, pumps, tubes etc....to get well water into the house from a tap.....

So.....out of the dome, elastoplast stop the blood.... 

lock the house....

Out of the gate and...........

Oh....What the F........is that!I had found a dog!......I thought it was a dog.....I thought it was dead....it smelt dead.....looked dead.....curled up on the step behind the gate, not moving at all, i gently poked it with a long stick to see if it would move at all, no movement at all but i saw a breath...., then....it opened an eye and fell off the step into the garden, and tried to get up, shaking......

and then it stood up and was alive again....just about!

No idea what to do about this......not an injury this was a zombie dog....looked like he should have been dead....with injuries like this, he has a hole that cant be fixed in his windpipe even...no skin around his neck...photos look better now the maggots removed, no flesh under the pulled back in place skin...!

After a couple of trips to the vets with help from Rachel ( from twichy noses ) who lives locally and runs an animal rescue so knew hot to find the vet.....

Back from the vets to 3 weeks cage rest....to stop his head falling off....

He started to heal a bit.....

Back in March ,Very under weight, hole in wind pipe, no skin joining head to body.... 

Was open underneath until the end of May

Starting to hold together, stitched half round, no stitches worked ever underneath

It took time, lots of time but it did heal up!

Late May 2015

Today he looks like this!, Early July 2015

Frankie July 2015

Back in Bulgaria 2014

We had a very good trip over, stayed at a few hotels on the way, learnt my lesson from last time and paid for the ferry by paypal so they only made me pay once, if needed I could ask for it back, ferry bookings cant be refunded from your credit card unless they want to refund you

We left on the midnight boat and got to near Nurenburg by mid next day , stayed over night , we pick this hotel as even though at a motorway services it has an Aldi , Burger king and camping shop for food. Next morning we left at about 2am and got to hotel in Hungary at about 11am, decided to stay there for a couple of days as it was so hot
When we left it was again a very early start, about 3am ,got to Vidin about mid afternoon and checked on the factory and the house, decided to stay a couple of days in the house there to warm it up a bit and make it feel lived in, left a couple of days later about 4pm got to near Plovdiv just before midnight (after getting lost again ) ended up eventually on the new motorway and found a hotel, again overnight and up about 7am and on to Kazanlak for some shopping at Kaufland , and on to the house in Vetren

I was quite amazed it was all still standing when we got there, few tiny bits more rendering had crumbled in the winter but that was it, the barn roof I was sure would have fallen off was just the same as last year, to be fixed this year

The garden was not that bad....and no elder yet to be seen, I used weed killer made from vinegar on it in June last year and none grew afterwards, but Im going to dig the roots out now anyway to be sure and kill more of it.









The tulips I planted 2 years ago were all flowering, apple trees all flowering, plums all have small fruit about 10mm in size, peaches have bad leaf curl again, I have treated them and taken affected leaves off.

The weather was great for the first 2 days about 25C, but then it dropped , very cold and massive clouds moved in.....down the road!















4 days of rain, all the rivers to the tops of there banks, flood alerts from a car driving round, the river was overflowing at about 6 times higher than normal to the to the top of the banks, only minor flooding from the rain on the roads here though, just big puddles.

One day due to the rain there was a power cut for a few hours, no problem as we dont use it with  being all 12v electric and gas

A quick trip into Maglizh showed just how big the rivers were, this river is just a trickle normally, today you could hear it 200 yards down the road in the Bank

My citrus trees are loving it, the ones I have in Vidin are all squashed in a greenhouse to keep them warm, but the ones here are out in the garden, they are growing fast, they love the sun compared to being under growlights indoors all winter

I have over 100 citrus trees again now, I sold a lot to move as it was too hard to move them all, many of the otheres are in Vidin and some here , the collection has reformed in Bulgaria, most are only a foot or so high, but these few are some of my very old ones.

I Found a giant patch of this in the garden, smells like garlic, looks like garlic...who knows!

 Once the rain cleared up a small patch of garden was rotorvated for the potatoes....

After rotorvating it has been dug with a fork 2 forks deep to remove elder roots, this small patch formed in the bottom corner has about half way across has provided this much elder root.....

Soooooo much elder root!