In the immortal words of the actor Matt Damon: “In the face of overwhelming odds. I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” You have to admit when up against the ropes, it’s an option. Today it rained, all day long. There’s more rain forecast for tomorrow. And earlier in the week, another storm delivered the goods. Yep, there’s sure been a lot of rain of late. Serious people suggest that it’s summer.
Long term readers will recall that for the past decade, a bunch of Pacific islander dudes turned up semi-regularly to help out with processing the firewood. It’s a big job, and those burly blokes regularly worked hard for a few hours, and were paid well. However, all good things come to an end. About a year ago, our circumstances changed, they tried to hit me up for a loan, and the relationship ended. There’s no hard feelings on either side (that I know of), it’s just how things roll sometimes.
During the health subject which dares not be named, we were able help them out and give them regular work. They did a whole bunch of work. Sandra and I candidly couldn’t keep up with their work. In fact we haven’t kept up, and the work wasn’t cost free. It’s taken us the past year just to sort of catch up with the work they did during that time. It was too much.
With all of the rain recently, we’ve been rushing to bring in the winters firewood and store it in the shed before it gets too wet. Hopefully the timber dries in the shed, or at least doesn’t get any wetter than it already is. It’ll dry in the shed just fine, maybe. Anyway, we don’t have any other option for keeping the house warm during the winter months, so firewood is serious business here. So yeah, bring the stuff in and store it as early as possible.
The original wood heater was destroyed due to using wet firewood. The steel plate burns out and delaminates. It’s a process that is hard to watch and impossible to ignore. Talk about hard won lessons. Firewood is a complicated energy source and you can’t muck around with the stuff. It’s not for everyone.
Nowadays, just like the stranded character Matt Damon played in ‘The Martian’, we have to make-do on our own. So, we’ve decided to science the shit out of the process completely. The first step was quantifying the matter. Easy enough to do. Each load of cut and split firewood we bring back up the hill weighs around 500kg (1,100 pounds). That’s a lot of firewood, until you realise we’ve recently stacked away 25 of those loads. Or 12,500kg (27,500 pounds) in total of the stuff! The local trees are the variety Eucalyptus Obliqua (Messmate), which is a hardwood with an average density of around 750kg/m3. A bit of quick maths suggests that 12,500kg / 750kg = 16.7m3, which is about the maximum stash the firewood shed can store. In old school speak, that works out to be 4.5 cords of firewood. And there is still a day or so’s work to go.
We’d become interested in this matter about mid-week, because we’d utterly run out of cut and split firewood to bring back up the hill. We were bewildered by the situation. How could this be? Yet there it was.
Earlier in the week after a day of hauling and stacking firewood, the shed looked like this:
At the end of that days work, we looked at the remaining pile of cut and split firewood. Much scratching of the head took place. Were we going to run out, or weren’t we? The head said one thing, the gut said something else entirely, which sounded rather a lot like: Dude, you’re gonna run out of cut and split firewood.
That lot in the above image was also hauled back up the hill where it was stacked neatly in the firewood shed.
The area where the firewood was kept in a large pile to season and dry out in the sun, had been totally cleared.
With the threat of a shortage of winter heating fuel, Sandra’s science brain was put into action. We can do this! Yeah! Dead and fallen trees are already seasoned went the thinking. All that was necessary was to cut them and split them.
At least half a year ago during a winter storm, a very large dead branch fell off an even larger tree. That’ll do the job perfectly. We cut and split the fallen tree branch which can be seen in the above image. The work took a couple of hours, but using our science method of measurement, the tree yielded 1,500kg of cut and split firewood. The stuff is heavy, and we don’t need to go to a gym.
The job was timed to perfection. There was one, or maybe two sunny days during the week where the cut and split timber sat out in the sun baking away. After that, and before it rained again (which it did), the firewood was hauled away, and the shed is much nearer to full now…
It’s good to be nearing the end of that job, so that we can get back onto the other tasks around here. The thing we’ve learned out of the experience, is that we’d previously been rather casual with the energy source. With the assistance of the Pacific Islander dudes, we could be casual and simply use intuition to guide the process, but no longer, those easy days are done.
For ten months of the year, we have to process around 1,500kg of firewood per month, simply to keep ahead of the job. And that’s every month, regardless. If the weather is too extreme, we then have to catch up the following month. It really would be much easier to simply flick a switch and hope that someone else, in the magical realm of somewhere else, is saving you personally a lot of hard work. That’s a gamble, and with only 40 minutes of sunlight today, and no wind to speak of, I wouldn’t be backing the good folks who say that renewable energy sources will power civilisation as it is today. The numbers, experience and sciencing the shit out it, suggests to me that’s an impossible dream.
On the day the summer sun shone, as the big fusion reactor in the sky was growing the plants and sun-baking the cut and split firewood, we headed an hours drive north to the gold fields area to check some other ruins. Off the beaten track was the cottage of one of the three blokes who were the first to discover gold in the colony. So, the story went that the newspaper of the day, held a cash prize for anyone who’d discover gold in the colony of Victoria. The three blokes were working at a nearby station (huge farm for sheep), found gold, and sought the prize. Except the government immediately slapped them with a huge fine for mineral prospecting without a license. They were eventually able to claim the prize 16 years later. Despite the enormous wealth the gold fields produced for the government, not to mention the English, epic really, the lesson learned is that it’s always unwise to think that the government has your back.
Nearby, and not listed on any maps, or even signposted, is an historic Indigenous flint quarry. The scale of the quarry is astounding, and it was quite attractive given that mining had been taking place there for tens of thousands of years.
The two warm sunny days produced some epic sunsets. Check these out:
When it rained, there is plenty of work to be done inside the house at this time of year. We made another batch of apricot jam.
The warmer days speeded up the growth of the plants in the greenhouse. The cool climate papaya Babaco has continued to ripen and turn yellow. I hope they’re tasty!
The extreme humidity of this growing season has been bonkers, so just in case of any disease issues (which I’ve never experienced), I’ve staked and pruned most of the tomato plants.
The dozen or so round raised garden beds alongside the house, grow the plants regularly used in the kitchen. This year we’ve trialled a number of different summer hardy leafy greens, and have been happy with the results.
The orchards have produced a lot of apples and pears. I just need to get some time to harvest them before the parrots do.
And in super exciting nut news and despite the almond crop being wiped out by a late frost, I spotted a couple of the first ever Hazelnuts (filberts) we’ve ever grown. I’m not sure when to harvest them, and would appreciate any advice?
And also this year, one of the oldest sweet chestnut trees has began producing some nuts.
There has been so much rainfall, that the zucchini plants are growing at a furious rate. We decided to harvest this monster because the skin was showing signs of splitting due to having taken up too much water, too quickly.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 18’C (65’F). So far for last year there has been 110.6mm (4.4 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 0.0mm (0.0 inches)