The clock was turned back an hour a week or two ago, and once again mornings are filled with the light of the early morning sun. It is a truth universally acknowledged that waking up in the dark is especially hard, for some people. As a child of a rare 1970’s single parent household, waking up in the dark of the early mornings meant access to mad cash. I delivered the news of the day to locals by bicycle. In the pre-interweb days as a humble kid on a heavily laden bike, it was a bit of thrill to learn that the Space Shuttle had exploded well before my fellow citizens knew of the tragedy.
As an avid reader of science fiction novels in those days, the exploding reusable space craft was a bit of a buzzkill for dreams of space travel. But proving that there are both costs and benefits with everything, the mad cash from the newspaper deliveries was well received. At one point my mother had to borrow money from me. Yeah, we can do this, but here are the terms, and this is what it will cost you. Serious business. At a younger age, my grandfather taught me the hard way not to mess around with such monetary agreements. An indelible learning experience much like branding, but perhaps without all that messy hot iron applied to flesh business. Since then, I’ve always treated debt arrangements seriously.
Sandra also used to deliver the local newspapers as a kid, for similar mad cash related reasons. I vividly recall getting to the newsagent at 5am in the depths of winter, and hoping that the journalists and printers weren’t late, again. The panniers of the bicycle sagged under the weight of the newspapers to be delivered. Your fingers would blacken with the ink and freeze with the winter air. Dogs would bark and chase you. The rains chilled your very bones. But the newspapers got delivered. You’d return home in the dark and climb back to bed, that is if the journalists and printers weren’t late.
Nowadays I loathe getting up in the dark, but can do so if required. Friday morning, we indeed woke up in the dark. It was the weekend of the Seymour Alternative Farming Expo. It’s an agricultural day aimed squarely at small holders like us, and we love it. Sure, we can hack the dark early mornings, when there’s that much fun on offer. One of the exhibitors was a bloke who breeds and trains Kelpie working dogs. The demonstration would no doubt fill Ruby and Dame Plum with fears of heightened expectations…
In another exhibit, an experienced snake handler and catcher put on a demonstration. It was with some relief to learn that the local Eastern Brown snakes had been downgraded to third spot in the most deadliest snake in the world competition. Another recently discovered central Australian reptile has proven to be even more deadly than those. All I can hope is that the local reptiles are not annoyed by their sudden fall from grace!
It was a fun day, and lunch was an especially tasty chilli cheese kransky sausage (that’s a Polish variety I believe). It was served in a bread roll with extra cheese, onions and mustard. Yum! The bloke who ran the stall was a master at dealing with the public. It was just my luck whilst waiting in line to be served, that an old guy was ahead of me in the queue. As you do when you want to stand out, he was ever so slightly out of line and off to one side. Locally he’d be described as a ‘Cocky’ (which is slang for an old farmer). So, he turns to me and remarks: How come they’ve got Hungarian sausages instead of Australian ones? Yeah, very funny. Realisation dawned that I had a real live one on my hands. We had a brief chat, but he was probably going to annoy me, so I ushered him forward with a hand gesture, and gave the drawl command: Goo orn! The bloke who ran the stand was the true sausage meister. When the old guy made it to the front of the queue, the master provided clear and simple options and listened to the old bloke. Then, instead of waiting for the inevitable fumbling of the payment, he went back to turning the sausages on the huge charcoal fired smoking grill. After a respectable period of time had passed, he took the money and got the blokes order ready. Working with the public is the school of hard knocks, oh yeah. It’s not for everyone, and I was left in awe at the efficiency of the encounter.
Speaking of the school of hard knocks. The other morning (thankfully) we woke to the joy that is daylight. I took Ollie outside in the cold morning air to perform his ablutions, and that’s when things went horribly wrong.
Ordinarily, the wildlife here is nocturnal. You don’t usually expect to see wallabies, wombats and kangaroos loitering around the orchard during the daylight hours. Except that day. A wallaby was hanging around the raised vegetable beds. It must have been old, sickly or full of our best vegetables. Ollie is clearly more alert than my good self at such early hours. He launched off the veranda and chased the hapless wallaby. I’m pretty sure that Ollie thought to himself that morning: Thank you Lord!
My grandfather was prone to calling everyone he knew well by the most family unfriendly name of: D!#khead. He even called me that, and I later learned at his funeral that it was his form of endearment, and maybe it was? I caught up with Ollie and the tussling wallaby, grabbed the dog by the collar, and that was when the thought popped into my head that maybe the old bloke may have been right there.
Ollie was amped. The wallaby was in shock. The excited dog was dragged back inside the house. The thought: What has my life become? entered my mind. At such moments though, there is little time for philosophy. I headed back outside into the orchard prepared for the worst, only to discover that the wallaby was bounding off and away into the forest. That’s one problem I didn’t have to deal with. For concerned readers, the wallaby hasn’t given up consuming the Silverbeet crop, far from it actually. The hapless marsupial has simply learned that it’s a bad idea to be around in the daylight hours when the household is active.
Two weeks ago we began splitting boulders to produce large rocks for use on the low gradient path project. The boulders in that rock shelf are granite but are of a softer variety, and are a bit easier than usual to split.
Once the rocks are split, they’re smaller and more easily lifted, rolled and/or moved. The bucket of the power wheelbarrow can take a good quantity back up hill for use on the low gradient path.
The rock shelf has now been mostly stripped of its granite, and sadly Peak Rocks is very real. But at least we’ve got a decent quantity of large rocks ready to be used on the low gradient path project.
One of the main reasons environmental activists have such an easy time of it complaining about loggers, despite the very same people demanding forest products, is because the forest workers leave such an almighty mess behind them. The loggers mess we’ve dealt with here over the past eighteen years has been extraordinary, and the job is still not finished. However, I tend to believe that consumers can’t or wont pay for the forest clean up work required to restore a site. We do that work, and know first hand how hard it is. The site where the rocks were removed from was cleaned up this week. All the holes were filled. The soil was aerated and levelled. It’s looking really neat, and in another year it will look superb and be easy to maintain.
Regular readers will recall that over the past few months a number of steel rock gabion cages have been installed. They retain the soil from a steep garden bed near to some sheds. At one end of the line of cages, there are three very large and heavy rocks. Over time, the rocks have tilted backwards.
It was always our intention to bring those rocks more upright so they were level with the front of the cages (or near enough to). For all sorts of reasons, mostly relating to rats, we had to purchase (Oh the humanity!) a small trailer load of 40mm rocks (about an inch and a half) . There were enough spare purchased rocks left over from the rat work to correct the tilt of the three large rocks. The intention is to place another steel rock gabion cage on top of that area.
There were even enough left over rocks to fill behind most of the gabion cages.
I usually don’t really write about the ongoing soil improvement program, but each fortnight we mix up a special batch of coffee grounds + agricultural lime + sometimes blood and bone meal, for the areas producing edible plants. The mixture seems to work here well.
That fertilisation work has been going on every fortnight for at least fourteen years now. The mixture in the above photo was just enough to fertilise the two rows in the sapling fence enclosure. A shovel is used to spread the stuff thinly over the soil surface, then a rake gently works the material into the mounds.
Now that the weather is getting cooler, the raised garden beds in the greenhouse are really proving their worth.
You can see that the orchard is beginning to shut down for the coming winter.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 9am is 9’C (48’F). So far for last year there has been 325.0mm (12.8 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 302.4mm (11.9 inches)