Earlier in the year a business wanted me to do some work. Candidly, there was some reluctance. Anyway, I put in a generous offer, and didn’t hear anything. The words: “Thank you Lord!”, formed in the darker corners of the mind. A plan was rapidly put into action. Apply some more stringent requirements and add a new super tight deadline for the offer. A little whisper at the back of the mind suggested, based on the tardiness to date, they’d have no chance of meeting this. Sure enough, the plan worked. The proverbial Gordian Knot had been cut, and the dread work was avoided.
Regular readers will know by now, that just like the Ghostbusters, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Sorry, instead of ghosts, I meant to type the word ‘work’. Oops! Whatever. Hard work was never the problem, it was the politics of big organisations which bamboozled me. People would love to have meetings, simply for the sake of the meetings themselves. Perhaps I was easily bored, or even tactless? I’d listen, contribute, and then blurt out an action plan. Where’s the door? Right, over there, I’m going now. See ya! That’s not how meetings are supposed to go, but I move fast. As a side note, my meeting etiquette really annoys some verbose people.
When dealing with the natural world though, it often pays to move fast. In 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius went off, it didn’t end so well for the slow moving people at Pompeii or Herculaneum. Just sayin… Clearly a person can move too slow. We run risks here with the natural world. When Sandra and I joined the local volunteer fire fighting brigade many years ago, one of the first things they told us, was not to expect a fire truck if the conditions are really bad. There is only one road in and out of here, and that’s too dangerous for the crew on the truck. Fair enough, it’s better knowing these things and then decisions can be made from a point of knowledge.
Sometimes though, even Sandra gets annoyed by how quickly I’ll respond to a problem. However, she doesn’t get annoyed when such skills get turned upon the rats. Long term readers will recall the awful problems we had with rats and mice a few years ago. They were getting access to the chicken enclosure. It defied imagination to consider just how many juicy and healthy looking rats we were regularly feeding. They really had lovely looking coats. And where there are rats in sufficient quantities, snakes will surely follow. Let’s just say that I was motivated to deal with the rat problem.
I’ve spoken with folks who keep poultry about the subject of rats, and they give me this worried and ever so slightly superior looking expression, before then saying: “You really shouldn’t allow the rats into the hen house.” Sure. I’ve seen heaps of chicken enclosures over the years, and very few look rat proof to me. But we made that happen (for now at least). Those other folks poison the daylights out of the rodent population.
Two years ago we modified the entire chicken enclosure over the course of two months so as to exclude the rats. Every single access point was sealed up. Dame Plum and I went out most nights observing their activities, then hunting the rats. That is why the dog has a title, she earned it. The distressed rats gave away all their cunning ratty ways, and I sealed off every opportunity, one by one. Steel and cement are wonderful materials for this task. Here is the shed two years ago as it is being modified.
Here it is today:
The rodent population here has taken a serious blow, and is now much lower. Once the chicken enclosure was declared rodent proof, our attentions turned to the house. Over many years, the rats had managed to break into the underneath of the house. Winters would have been warm and dry under there. I was always mildly concerned the rodents would chew through a cable and/or pipe. It would be ironic for a house which was designed and built to withstand bushfires, burnt down because of some stupid stuff a rodent did. Stranger things have happened.
After modifications to the house were made, the rats had been kept out for a while. Every day now, Sandra and Dame Plum walk around the house checking all possible access points. And a week ago, the rats breached the modified outer defences. You could hear the rodent celebrations under the floor of the house. What the rats didn’t count on, was that we would move quickly. And new fortifications were installed that day.
Unfortunately, we moved a bit too rapidly and inadvertently sealed the rats under the floor of the house. They could not escape. It’s not nice to let them starve to death, and under those conditions cables and/or pipes might look super tasty. Nope, so we left a them a special feed, just in case.
Ordinarily I do not poison rats. Habitat exclusion is preferable and is a more permanent solution. There are a lot of owls and foxes living in this area, not to mention the dogs, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Poison a rat, and you’ll end up poisoning something which consumes the dead rodent carcass. Always a risk. But if the rats are stuck under the floor of the house, well, why not? Poison away.
We weren’t exactly sure that rats were stuck under the house, but when the stink of decomposition began seeping into the house, we knew. Unfortunately, I had to go to work in the big smoke that day and so was unable to remove the dead rats.
The stink got stinkier, and bizarrely was strongest in my office. I have a very good sense of smell, and long ago was paid regularly to sit on an odour assessment panel by the folks who ran the massive sewage farm in the suburb of Werribee. Mostly during the test, I read a book, and rated collected air samples on a scale of one to ten. Stories aside, I returned home late from work. My office was suffused with the aroma of dead rat. It’s potent, and I’d rate it a solid ten out of ten. But it was too late in the evening to do anything about the carcasses.
The next morning found me crawling around under the floor of the house retrieving two dead rats. The stink receded, but hadn’t gone away. It’s truly not pleasant to wake up the following morning to discover the air going into your nostrils is redolent with decomposition. Yet another crawl under the house, and a further two carcasses were discovered and removed. This time I poured vinegar over the soil where the bodies were found.
Days later, I can still smell a mild decomposition smell. Presumably the stink had gotten into the thick insulation under the floor. But really it is now barely noticeable and slowly fading. It also helps to keep the windows open.
It’s been remarked upon elsewhere that as in politics, so too it is with rodent matters, and timing is everything. Go under the floor too early, and they might attack you. I’ve been attacked by rats, and it’s a frightening experience. The toothy critters can jump at you. Go under late and you’re left dealing with the stink. But go under even later, and the stink is hard to remove. Mostly, I’m just learning as I’m doing.
During the week, we did a bit of digging on the low gradient ramp project. The project is nearing completion, but the path still has to be dug on the uphill side of the formerly rat infested shed.
This project sure does eat a lot of large rocks. Peak rocks being real, we’d run out of large rocks. A day was spent breaking boulders into more easily moved, yet still large rocks. We split a lot of boulders that day.
As we do that work, a house wrecking bar is used to pry up any rocks out of the ground in that area. They can be a bit of a fire hazard. The steel cutting blades of mowers can hit the rocks poking up out of the ground and ignite dry vegetation. Anyway, we collected a few of those rocks too. They’ll end up as fill for the steel rock gabion cages.
Then more digging took place on the low gradient ramp project.
It’s nice doing slow landscaping. It’s a lovely slow speed, doesn’t require super expensive equipment, and you don’t have to go to the gym for a workout. We did some more digging on the ramp project.
If you’ve ever wondered about where all the excavated soil goes, it is used to fill up holes and depressions in the paddocks and forest. Fixing that sort of thing up, makes the place easier to attend to.
The weather has been really nice for outdoors work. Cool, sometimes sunny, barely windy, and mostly dry. Such weeks are to be taken advantage of. I used the brush cutter to remove any grass from around half of all of the fruit trees. That was a big job. The grass competes for minerals and water especially with the younger fruit trees. With the older fruit trees, the grass provides shelter for slaters (aka woodlice), and I reckon they consume the bark on the trees if given half a chance.
Somehow, I also managed to find time to cut up the head of a large tree which fell to the ground about two months ago.
The huge branch was cut to firewood length size, but much of it still needs to be split. All of it needs to season for a year prior to use.
The deciduous fruit trees are losing their leaves, many of which fall onto the paths.
The leaves falling onto the paths get raked up and placed on new garden beds as soil food. They also help with weed suppression. The leaves which fall onto the grass will get mowed, which mulches them all up nicely. The worms and other soil critters do the rest.
A lot of work was done around the farm this week. I told you I wasn’t afraid of no ghosts, sorry, I meant to say ‘work’.
When I was brush cutting around the fruit trees, I noticed one odd fruit tree which appears to have somewhat grown in the past year. It’s been very slow growing, and a few weeks ago I spotted an example in the nearby Kyneton Botanical Gardens which was 20m (66ft) tall, and it even had fruit. It’s a Chilean Wine Palm. Surely, it can’t get that big here, can it?
We’re getting closer to the time when the huge crop of Kiwi fruit will be harvested. The rats and birds are already onto them, but even if they take half, we’ll still have hundreds of fruit.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 11’C (52’F). So far for last year there has been 341.2mm (13.4 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 338.8mm (13.3 inches)