Spending a dozen years documenting life on a small hobby farm during the declining years of western civilisation, has left me in a state of awe. Truly! Think of the sheer spectacle: twelve rotations around the sun, at a rate of around two thousand words per week, is a whole bunch of words: roughly one and a quarter million. Thankfully there is no pressure to come up with new insights, that would have killed the blog after week one. Hey, I’ve got this great idea, would be loudly yelled into the interweb ether! Much rejoicing and celebrations would take place. Week two would be a disappointment, and let’s not discuss the unflattering critiques thereafter.
Anywhoo, new ideas, what are these things? The fictional cop, Dirty Harry, suggested long ago that a man has to: Know his limitations, and it’s true. Inspiration however, does occasionally strike at the oddest moments. So there Sandra and I were in the supermarket, and a bulk pack of the usual toilet paper could not be found on the shelves. So living on the edge, we bought the substitute stuff. Why not? For the purposes of research for this blog, we dived on in.
It’s been remarked upon elsewhere, that those who live upon the edge, may suffer the experience of falling, usually towards the direction of the ground. The clinical trials of the new product produced flaky little chunks of…, and also the occasional finger through… OK, that’s too much information. The stuff is a manufacturing abomination. Clearly people are good with the product, the fact of its existence speaks to that. Anyway, who cares about our opinions? We however, won’t be repeating the experiment.
See, new ideas are dangerous! And they come with all manner of hidden risks. For those readers who are concerned, we burned those unused toilet paper rolls off, and the ash will fertilise the orchards. Nothing goes to waste here.
Yeah decline, it’s a funny thing, and it ain’t just about toilet paper. Long term readers will recall that around a year and a half ago, we altered the household arrangements for gas. The hot water system uses bottles of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). There are solar hot water panels on the roof, but they don’t work during winter when the skies are cloudy and the air is cool. The wood heater has a 30kW hot water jacket sitting inside the combustion chamber, but the way the system is plumbed, the captured heat is used to warm the house rather than providing toasty hot water. At best the firewood produces warm, but not hot water at the tap. The gas makes up the difference between the two systems.
For those who don’t know, LPG is a gas made up from a mixture of propane and butane. Fun fact, butane contains about 9% more energy than propane for the same volume of gas. The stuff is sold in swap over 8.5kg / 19 pound metal cylinders, and down here you can replace them at depots which are all over the place. You drop one off, and pick up a replacement. Easy! Connect it up, check for leaks, and off you go. It’s worthwhile mentioning, that when you purchase a cylinder of gas, you’d really want more butane than propane, as this will give the biggest bang for the buck, but who really knows what is in them.
Back to the recent changes we made with gas. For about a decade and a half we used these really big 45kg / 99 pound LPG bottles. There were two of them, and a company would drop replace them off upon request and pick up the empties. At a rate of about one every six months, we were probably not ideal customers. It’s a volume business, and so they slapped on a quarterly rental fee of around $65 (which excludes the cost of the replacement cylinders). Every bill the rental fee went up. After a while the sensitive person gets the impression that the business no longer wished to deal with us.
What to do? We requested that they pick up the two large gas cylinders, and get lost. Using some scrap metal, a sturdy stand was welded up, and the two big gas bottles were replaced with the two smaller 8.5kg / 19 pound gas bottles. Much lighter, and we could chuck one in the car, and get it swapped over at a depot. We’d reduced the annual costs by over 60%. Winning!
Some folks may wonder why there are two gas bottles? Well, when one bottle becomes empty, you can quickly switch a valve over to the other cylinder, and just keep going with whatever activity it was that you needed the hot water for. You then have plenty of time to source a replacement. It’s a simple system, which works, that is if you don’t forget to replace the empty bottle. Such things don’t happen here, we have lists!
We also keep records. Important things which can alert you to changes in the patterns. Here is a record of our purchases since this journey began:
- 17 Dec 24 – 60 days – $32 gas + $53 for the bottle
- 15 Feb 25 – 47 days – $32 gas + $53 for the second bottle
- 3 Apr 25 – 33 days – $32 gas
- 6 May 25 – 41 days – $32 gas
- 16 Jun 25 – 32 days – $32 gas
- 18 Jul 25 – 35 days – $29.99 gas (sourced a cheaper supplier)
- 22 Aug 25 – 36 days – $32 gas
- 27 Sep 25 – 37 days – $29.99 gas
- 3 Nov 25 – 37 days – $29.99 gas
- 10 Dec 25 – 50 days – $29.99 gas
- 29 Jan 26 – 32 days – $29.99 gas (made jam on the gas stove)
- 16 Mar 26 – 24 days – $29.99 gas
- 9 Apr 26 – 25 days – $29.99 gas
- 15 May 26 – not empty yet – $34.90 gas (trying a different supplier)
Has anyone spotted the recent pattern yet? Spoiler alert: the most recent cylinders aren’t lasting as many days.
The March bottle was purchased after the dust up in the Middle East had begun. Also there was that mysterious fire at the only refinery in the southern part of the continent back in April: What we know about the ‘unprecedented’ Geelong refinery fire. Apparently the specific parts of the refinery affected by the fire involved LPG production and low aromatic gasoline. That first product mentioned, is sadly the gas we use. Oh well. Anyway, demand for the gas had been exceeding supply in this state, despite the muppets-in-charge continuing to add more people to the mixture.
Decline is a funny thing, and we’ll run short decades before zombies are roaming the streets hungry for brains. It’s a slow grinding descent into that most awful state of: less stuff. Here, we can adapt our systems, and will probably purchase a third gas bottle, which should provide a bit of extra buffer. Still, as a consumer it’s hard to really know what is going on, and like the experience with the toilet paper, it’s a bit shit!
The season of winter is remarkably humid here. Months can go by with humidity hovering around the 99% mark. You don’t have to water the garden during the winter months, put it that way!
Before I continue, the circus has come to the nearby town. The lights of the big top can be seen from this elevation. Stephen King’s novel ‘It’ has left me with a preternatural fear of clowns, and so we won’t be visiting the show. It’s quite pretty, at this hopefully safe distance (Pennywise sure got around):
The rats or mice have continued their attempts to get under the house. The benefits for them are many, including a toasty warm and dry winter abode. They were thwarted by strong steel mesh on this occasion:
Best if we continued to surround the house with rodent proof concrete trenches. I’m yet to meet a rat or mouse who could dig through properly cured cement. That work continued this week.
Respect the super strong Bakelite bowl. It’s most useful for scooping soil. Once the trench was properly dug, we had to keep a lookout lest a rodent from the nearby garden bed shoot under the house.
A strong water tight mixture of cement was soon poured into the trench. Take that, ye pesky rodents!
Rats could easily dig through wet cement, so whilst the stuff is drying, we’d regularly check to see if there had been any untoward activity. Rodents are usually more active at night, so it’s unlikely they’d try creating a tunnel, but you never know.
More trenches were dug on the uphill side of the house.
Those were also filled with cement, none of which was sampled by the rats or mice.
Observant readers will note the two gas bottles previously mentioned, but such clever people will also note that the soil has been scraped back to clay. Previously, large-ish rocks of about an inch in diameter were used to thwart the rats from getting under the house. It just didn’t work to stop the mice. Now we have a lot of these rocks spare, and are using them to shore up the soil behind the long row of steel rock gabion cages. Nothing goes to waste here.
One of the cages was sewn shut, and more of the geranium on the sloping garden bed was removed. There are plans for this area! The plant material was slowly burned off in the brazier, and the ash will be distributed in the orchard and mixed into the soil.
The soil removed from the rodent trenching activity is an awesome resource. We’re using the material to build up the path and garden bed immediately below the house. The stuff is full of volcanic clay and lime, so it’ll grow plants easily.
The downhill edge of that path has a long line of rhubarb plants. They were planted out this week:
In order to place the soil on the path, about thirty bearded iris plants had to be relocated.
We’ve been a bit late this year cleaning out the greenhouse. With the summer plants now done, we pulled the remaining tomato vines and dumped them in the paddock. A mower will be used to chop up the lot. The soil critters will do the rest.
We try not to do mess here, but sometimes that can’t be helped. Here is the greenhouse after we removed the tomato vines:
The inside and outside surfaces of the greenhouse were hit hard with the pressure washer. Gave it a nice clean up.
The shelves on the right hand side of the greenhouse were removed. They’d been shading the garden bed underneath them. The plants growing there weren’t doing all that great. In the above photo you can see that the turmeric is now planted in a garden bed – which should make harvesting the tubers easier.
It’s been a travesty to have to buy chilli’s, but the above plant is the only one which has done well this year. It is neither over shadowed by the shelves, nor was it crowded out by tomatoes. There is a lesson there, or maybe two or three of them!
One of the shelves had a lot of ferns growing in pots. We’d purchased them mid last year for a project which hasn’t been completed, and may not be for a while. There is no need for these local plants to be growing in the greenhouse, so they got kicked out into the wilds, with some help from the ex-tomato soil.
About ten Mother Shield ferns (Polystichum proliferum) were planted surrounding a Rough Tree Fern (Cyathea australis). There were already two such tree ferns growing in the bed, and in a year or four, it’ll look awesome.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 13’C (56’F). So far for this year there has been 379.8mm (15.0 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 371.8mm (14.6 inches)
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