Maze

Thursday afternoon the Suzuki Jimny Dirt Rat was filled up with some expensive petrol. Did I read that number right? AU$2.34 / Litre or US$6.22 / Gallon for non-ethanol blend unleaded. From memory, that price is up there with the highest I’ve ever seen. Hardly cheap is it? Fortunately the little vehicle has a 40 Litre / 10.5 Gallon fuel tank and it travels a goodly distance on that quantity. The even smaller and lighter Suzuki Swift Dirt Mouse goes even further again, on less. The news that day included an article decrying how bad large vehicles were for pedestrians in accidents. The cynic in me suggests that the drivers of such large vehicles probably have other safety concerns on their mind. Advertising however, can be subtle. But whatever the case is, we may well be witnessing the end of an era for the societal preference for large vehicles.

After filling up, we travelled to the nearby town. With no cows, goats or sheep happily grazing here, fresh milk comes from the supermarket, and that’s where we were headed. I’d thought that the price of diesel was way expensive at the petrol station on the quiet country road. I thought wrong! The servo in town was selling diesel for AU$3.01 / Litre or US$8.00 / Gallon. Ouch!

Hard to know where all this is headed. On that note, a person with a curious mind, reads predictions here and there just to keep abreast of the latest thinking on the issue. Turns out, opinions range all over the shop. The apocalyptic end of the spectrum amuses me the most. A few minutes ago whilst enjoying a tasty meal of excellent sliders (a small burger) where we’d made the vegetable patty and focaccia buns from scratch, with fried eggs laid by the chickens only a few days ago, a video played in the background outlining how computers are going to come and kill us all. Apparently the tech bros are responding to this threat by constructing doomsday bunkers surrounded by vast swaths of fertile land – like they know diddly squat about farming! I loved the comments to the video, and one from @Zamboro struck a chord: “Infiltrator units with living tissue coverings will get into those bunkers. I saw it in a documentary called Terminator”. So very true.

My beliefs as to the future don’t extend to such flights of fancy. Having seen 10% unemployment in the 1990’s recession, and as a young bloke scrambling to get any work, I have personal experience of economic disaster. Demand destruction is a real thing! We’re all more likely to go broke with high fuel prices, than end up in a never ending urban war against the computers and their dastardly killer robots. Mind you, the Terminator was an awesome film, scared the daylights out of me. As to the tech bros and their doomsday bunkers though, they’ll probably eventually run short of diesel, just like the rest of us. And seriously, if they think they can grow food by downloading some instructions off the interweb, good luck with that dudes!

This stuff takes a lot of knowledge, practice, observation, then getting back into the fray and implementing what you’ve learned. Neither Sandra or I were born on a farm – we had no idea about life on the land back in 2008 when this journey was begun. But we do both have natural curiosity, and a lack of fixed opinions on this stuff. What works and why? – are the questions which have guided our actions and systems here.

Forget about killer robots and dystopian urban warfare. Regular readers will recall the three week running battle with feral mice some months ago. That story ended up with a messy scene in the bathroom. We sure did put an end to the tiny rodents breaking into the house in future. That took digging trenches around the outside walls, and then backfilling those with cement. Despite their persistence, we can state with certainty, that the twitchy nosed little nuisances, can’t tunnel through concrete. And that is a fact!

However, last week we relocated the summer kitchen to the area where the dog enclosure used to be. It’s got a nice wide veranda and more importantly is out of the afternoon summer sun. There’s a lot to like about it. But have we lured the rodents to that part of the house? Hard to know. They may not be a problem at this time of year anyway. What I have learned about rats and mice is that attempts to break into a house, shed or vehicle occur during early to mid Autumn. They’re looking for an easy winter feed, plus a site for a snuggly warm nest – and from their perspective, a modern house meets all of those requirements.

Makes me wonder if those bunkers the tech bros are constructing are rodent proof? They might not be. Who’d think of that problem? What a fine joke it would be if those folks survived the killer robot onslaught, which they helped to create, only for the rats to eat all of the food stores and seeds. Oh the irony!

Back to reality though, for I have actually been thinking about the mice near to the summer kitchen, mostly because we have not yet done the trenching there.

Earlier in the week I removed the large gravel placed along that side of the house, just to see what was going on.

The large gravel looked ugly too, and wasn’t all that useful at keeping the rodents out from under the house. As you can see in the above photo, the area has had the rock chunks removed. I discovered that we’d only cemented about two thirds of the ground near to the house. I placed some heavy timber posts against the house so as to thwart the rats and mice until the remaining third of the job is done. That should work for a while, maybe. They’re tricksy beasts, as the bunker lovers may soon discover.

The large gravel was scraped into a neat pile in the former dog enclosure.

The material is proving very useful in and around the long line of steel rock gabion cages. They make for a very solid all weather surface which can be walked upon.

As previously mentioned, we’re constantly trialling different systems just to see what works. Drainage has always been something of an issue in the area near to the summer kitchen. Turns out, years ago, for some unknown reason, which has been suggested by Lewis as: Being a good idea at the time, we covered over the pit with soil. This has actually proven to be a bad idea. In very heavy rainfall, water can wash under the house and that is not ideal for a timber structure no matter how well treated.

The drainage pit was rediscovered in the clay, then cleaned up, as was the 150mm (6in) pipe. The system was tested, and found to work perfectly.

The thing is, to get water from that area to flow naturally into the pit, we have to remove an enormous quantity of soil. We’re up for that. This work does however present the opportunity to use the excess soil so as to create an entirely new path. We just have to finish up a few of the other projects first.

At the beginning of the week I split a few boulders into large rocks which are very useful for retaining soil on path projects.

Saturday the weather was glorious. A truly beautiful early spring day. We hauled plenty of those large rocks back up the hill.

After many hours of hard work, about half of the rock wall on the uphill side of the path in the above photo had been completed.

The steep garden beds on the uphill side of that path are split into two by a concrete staircase. Both have quite fertile soil, and we’ll use them as overflow vegetable beds, plus seed production. For that purpose we need to grow a lot of plants to ensure that the seed remains genetically OK. We’re not quite sure how it will all work out, but with two large beds, one may even be rested up and allowed to go weedy, whilst the other is in use – crop rotation being a thing.

Hopefully that path project gets finished this coming week.

A local artist appears to have used their skills to highlight just how bad the road surfaces in the wider area have become. We live on dirt road, so it’s always bad, but we’re used to that. Turns out, this state of affairs has become quite the shock to people used to nicer amenities. Regular readers will recall that we broke a wheel on one of the cars recently which cost $800 to repair. As would be expected, other locals appear to have enjoyed vehicular issues as well. On a related side story, it baffles me as to why the state goobermint would announce just prior to an election, that they’d cut funding for road repairs in rural areas.

It was amazing, we noticed this artwork one day, and the road was repaired the next. I’m astounded that the local council can react so quickly. I don’t know what all the fuss is about, the depiction was stylistic rather than anatomically correct.

And speaking of roads. Someone ran over a wallaby and left the poor marsupial for dead in my front yard. It is not a busy road. Anyway, that’s never happened before, and I recall during the health subject which dares not be named, that there was no roadkill anywhere around here. My gut feeling suggests that the forest critters will rejoice at the prospect of higher fuel costs…

The weather here is warming, but it’s still early days in the growing season, and the plants are doing their thing, albeit slowly. Even in the greenhouse where you’d imagine the soil would be warmer again, growth is still slow. That’s what medium UV energy (the sun’s ultraviolet radiation) looks like. But at least the cool loving radish seeds mostly all sprouted and are producing adult leaves.

The grapevine cuttings continue to amaze. All seven are now producing leaves, although they are inside the warmer-than-outdoors house.

For some reason, asparagus grows really well here, although it demands a decent feed of quality compost fertiliser mixture. We harvest fresh spears most days from now until February.

We missed that the Globe Artichoke had produced two tasty chokes, and now they are a bit too big to consume, which is a shame. It is worth noting that this plant is highly variable and so if the chokes being produced aren’t good, then pull the whole thing out and start another. Once a good eating quality choke is obtained, you can divide the plant into clones.

The earliest tree fruits, Apricots, have appeared this week.

Almonds are also developing, but they take longer to mature than the apricots. This year I noticed several local species of insects pollinating the flowers, which is a relief given all of the pressures the European honeybees are under.

Onto the flowers:

The temperature outside now at about 10am is 6’C (42’F). So far for this year there has been 915.8mm (36.1 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 914.2mm (36.0 inches)