Sometimes it amazes me to look back and think of how things used to be around here. One of the undocumented side effects of producing the recent YouTube videos, is that both Sandra and I are looking back at photos of the property from years ago. It’s quite surprising to see the photos, and then ask the hard question: Was it really like that? Well, the facts on the ground based on the photos, very much suggest that it was like that. Hmm.
Living up the bush, as they say, is a very different experience from that of city life. Sandra and I were both born and raised in the city. That was our jungle, and we could navigate our way around the urban spaces. We had the good jobs, lived in a nice house in the inner burbs, and so had absolutely no idea about living on the land. Yet, you know, we knew how to learn, and weren’t afraid of hard work, kept open minds, and so headed up into the forest and hills off on an adventure.
Years, and years later, we still don’t know heaps about plenty of things, but can at least make the claim that there’s some stuff we do know. It kind of all reminds me of a snoring incident from a year or two ago. The guilty person in this case will not be named. Turns out, despite doing years of martial arts training and long distance running as a young bloke, I didn’t have the slightest clue about the gentle art of breathing. Sandra err, knew even less about this subject, which candidly was about the same level as I. It’s something us humans do all the time too, so why didn’t either of us know anything about it?
In many ways, we’re both natural scholars, and so we decided to bone up on the subject of breathing. Who knew there were people out there walking among us, for whom the subject of breathing – is a special interest. Now, I have nothing but high regard for these folks, and as it’s their special interest, they’ll do all the hard yards and run the months and years of personal experimentation, saving us lesser mortals a lot of hard graft and guess work.
One of the most interesting sources of knowledge was a book by the author: James Nestor, titled: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I can already sense that some readers here are thinking to themselves: Chris has gone woo-woo. Sure, yeah, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. Look I’m a deeply practical guy and focus on results: Does this here thing you’re talking about, work? After all, there’s only so many hours in a life, and I’m not wasting any of them. But admittedly it all does sound a little bit woo-woo, so please hang in with me here!
As I mentioned, the book is a journey, and last I checked, I don’t really need to know how monks perform some sort of unusual breathing exercise in order to survive long periods of time in deep meditation in super cold environments whilst wearing the minimal basic monks garb. Such esoteric knowledge, is a step too far. What I did take away from the deep dive of that time, is that it is probably a very good thing for a person to focus on breathing primarily through their nose. The benefits are quite interesting and rewarding.
As a child my nose had been broken, so I could only ever breathe through one side of my nose, unless I was doing sports. The adrenalin apparently opened up both sides of my nose, and so sport provided a pressure relief for my sinuses. As you’d imagine being the crafty and resourceful person I am, I did a lot of sports and other physical activities. But as a young adult working a full time job, I’d had enough of the problems, and used what little spare mad cash I had, to go to a surgeon and get my nose fixed, which he did. I was blithely unaware of the serious consequences if the the job was stuffed up, which fortunately is a relatively rare occurrence. Anyway, after going under the knife, plus a day or so of healing, the packs were removed from my nose. I never new so much blood could ooze out of my face. The nurse doing that work was characteristically unsympathetic to my distress and not shy about communicating her feelings in the matter. But a fortnight later, for the first time I could recall, I could regularly breathe through both sides of my nose at once. Relief.
Back to more recent events though. It was Sandra who took the initiative on this journey, and forced herself to breathe through her nose as much as possible all day and (most importantly) at night. At the time I was sceptical, but kept an open mind until the results were in. And it was hard to forget that the experiment produced a couple of really nasty blood clots. Horrid looking things, and admittedly I was a bit worried that a crime scene investigation team might get the wrong idea. So we’ve shone the black light on this pillow and found some unusual stains, do you mind coming down to the station to assist us with our enquiries sir? Not the sort of words you ever want to hear.
Turns out, Sandra had also been only able to breathe through one side of her nose. But since this very interesting experiment, she can now use both sides. You may say: So what? But let me tell you this little interesting side effect, breathing primarily through the nose at all times, has meant that we both sleep right through the night. And the snoring has gone. There are other changes as well. It’s been a fascinating journey this experiment, and I’m now left wondering: What else of practical use don’t I know anything about? Candidly, there’s probably more stuff than I have time on this planet for! A dude’s just gotta face one issue at a time, and go from there. If you, dear reader, have an interesting esoteric area of practical knowledge you’d like to share, please don’t keep it to yourself!
Speaking of having to work things out, regular readers will recall that Rabbit WarsTM have been going on here this past month or so. We’ve got a huge swath of Echium plants to remove. The dense woody vegetation is providing way too much shelter for the rabbit resistance to hide in, and so they have to go.
It’s a bit late in the season to be lighting a big burn off, and the Echium plants are so twisted and gnarled we can’t run them through the scary old wood chipper. What to do? We got creative and tested a theory on the woody wormwood shrubs which were removed a week or so ago for much the same reason. The gnarly plant material was dumped in a depression in the ground, then we ran it over with the powerful low centre of gravity mower. All the material got blitzed up nicely, so we’ll begin removing the Echium’s over the next few weeks using the same technique. I was amazed at how little material was left over after this week’s effort.
Observant readers will note that in the image above, the soil in this particular forest edge area is very poor, and so hopefully all of the organic material can only be of benefit, maybe.
You have to have systems for everything. A few weeks ago we dismantled an old rusting steel shed. The corrugated steel sheets were left in an area for us to sort out later. We of course hadn’t counted on a brief wind storm, and so the sheets decided they’d be better if they were spread around a bit. This time around, the sheets have been sorted by materials type and size – then weighted down.
The brief wind storm also somehow managed to split a fruit tree in half. As a note, we recovered a dozen pieces of firewood from the tree, and turned the rest of it into mulch using the scary old wood chipper. The mulch was then added back to the garden bed.
It’s been a weird old week of weather. One morning the outside air temperature was 0’C / 32’F.
You don’t really want to experience such weather when the fruit trees are in blossom, because it usually comes with frost. There was ice on the ground in some, but not all parts of the garden. Bizarrely, the orchards and forest were free of frost, except for the very edges. Didn’t expect that to happen. Somehow the trees must release heat at night during this time of year.
Other days, the weather has been glorious and sunny, but on the cooler side of things. The smoke from the many burn offs in the area are producing some stunning sunsets:
The state government has again been conducting large scale burn offs in the area. Quite sensible really, other than the sheer scale of the burns. It would perhaps be better if the burns were done on a smaller scale so as to allow time for the forest critters to escape and fight their way into new homes, if they can.
A few hours were spent shifting large rocks from the new firewood shed site. The rocks were moved downhill, and then placed in the new rock wall which retains soil along the line of the water tanks. The first layer of rocks is about two thirds done. Sadly, yet again, we’ve now run out of large rocks and will soon have to split some boulders.
It’s a busy time of year, and the large citrus and potato enclosure was mown. Also a half cubic metre (0.65 cubic yards) of purchased soil like product was dumped in there. Some of that stuff was placed at the end of each of the potato rows, and will be used to hill up the vines as they grow – which they are, despite the frost.
Most days I’ve simply grabbed some soil using a scoop and then hilled up the potato vines. The art is probably more complicated than that, but this is the first time I’ve taken this approach with the plants. Also of interest to me is that the saved potato seeds from previous years are much slower growing than the certified virus free spuds.
Another cement step was poured on the new concrete garden staircase.
The step dried rapidly in the warm days, and so we poured another.
In the above image, you can see that the wind damaged tree has been pruned and the mulch was placed back around it’s trunk as soil food.
In breaking produce news:
The almonds were unaffected by the frost, and are rapidly gaining in size. Hopefully, they’ll be ready to harvest once the green fuzzy outer coats begin to split open. That should be sometime around late January.
The apricots are showing signs of frost damage, but it’s possible it’ll only be superficial skin damage. Apricots grown in this part of the continent tend to always show spotty skin damage usually from this sort of weather which happens every year. A grower simply hopes that the conditions aren’t severe enough for the fruit to drop off the tree in shock.
One of the smaller peach trees appears to be producing quite a lot of fruit. I may have to thin the fruit on that tree, but we’ll see. I believe the variety is known as ‘Golden Queen’ and they’re very tasty.
Pears and apples are great trees because they simply shrug off cold snaps.
This weeks video is a new format… Just trying stuff to see what resonates.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 16’C (61’F). So far for last year there has been 723.0mm (28.5 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 720.6mm (28.4 inches)