Gardening Bore, Part 7

Yes, it is the return (yet again!) of the Gardening Bore. The red peppers, tomatoes and pumpkins are all coming along well, although a drop or two of rain would not go amiss. Perhaps the asparagus and the artichokes will do something next year.

I have been reading about the fuel shortages in the UK on the BBC website. (Unfortunately, we only get CNN on our TV here in Daveri). It seems to be pretty bad and the government does not appear to be doing much to improve the situation. As for gas prices, yes, they have gone up a lot and probably they will continue to rise. Germany is building (or has already built) a new gas pipeline, in order to get gas from Russia, but I do not think that the UK is part of that. Here in Bulgaria, I think that hardly anyone uses gas for heating. If they are in the countryside, then people either use wood (logs) or wood pellets. In the cities, most people have apartments and they have some sort of electrical heating or maybe an oil-fired boiler. 

I suppose that it will not cheer you up when I say that I drove to Veliko Tarnovo today, in order to do some grocery shopping. There were no queues at any of the petrol stations and there were no empty shelves in the big Kaufland supermarket that I went to.

As for the fence, yes, the painting of it with old engine oil has not been finished yet. That is because there was a bad storm and a big section was blown down. The repairs took quite a long time, as they usually do, and I had to replace two of the vertical posts, as they were rotten and had broken off. The bottom ends of the vertical posts go down into holes inside the wall, so the awkward and difficult part is getting out the remnants of the old posts. 

My dear wife is meant to be coming back on Friday, 1^st October. That is assuming that she gets a negative result from a COVID test in the Crimea a day or two before she returns. But what is going to happen if she has a positive test? She will not be able to get onto her flight back to Sofia and so she will have to stay in the Crimea. If this happens, then the problem will be that her Russian visa is about to expire, so she will be staying on illegally! She has promised to contact me on Thursday evening if there is a problem and then I will be driving to the airport in Sofia to collect her. The Sofia to Varna road is being upgraded, so I am hoping that they will have done a bit more to it since the last time that I drove along that road, back in November of last year. 

We have a rather splendid new badminton net. I ordered it online from Decathlon. What we do not have is a splendid badminton court because the white lines that I painted have almost disappeared and the cracks and the holes have not disappeared because the ground is still so dry. We have had hardly any rain for months now.