July 2006
July 1
No, while it's a red hot sunset, there's no fire involved. (crossed fingers) This is the view from our block at night, it kind of makes up for how white everything is in the morning. Had a couple of nice frosts this week. Trev came up one morning holding out what looked like broken glass saying, "Sorry, I didn't mean to, but I broke the window". I fell for it. It was a broken pane of ice. Caleb scratches it off the car window and informs me it's snow. Haven't seen any of that yet, but the bureau seems to think it's not far away.
Finally, nor are our house plans. The draftsman is burning the midnight oil on them, and they should be into the council within the week (more crossed fingers) where they should languish for another six weeks, after which we can fire away. The pegs are on the ground and we can see where it will eventually be. At the moment the best we can do, is stand within the perimeter and make believe we're walking from the bathroom into the kitchen.
I've been drawing up plans for a strawbale cold-frame and will be giving it a go in the next couple of days as I've finally tracked down an old window frame to use in it's construction. I want to be able to have a headstart on planting vegies our in early spring.
We've planted out 30 stone, pip and nut fruit trees. While Trev was digging holes we came across an old french drain someone had made. The bricks were old, different ages, apparently there are thumb prints in those made by convicts, but, while they are obviously handmade, they are also deteriorating, and nothing on the surface can be made out. We're reusing them in the garden. Trev has made garden posts, but hasn't fenced it yet, so I've only planted dormant root stock of various things while he potters around rigging up the dam so it gravity feeds to the garden area, and many other worthy ventures. Everytime I go into our current bathroom I try and calculate the percentage of salvaged/recycled/secondhand element to new, and come up with something somewhere over 90%. And it looks good too.
We have a white hawk circling the valley, and we've been watching him as much as he appears to be watching us, someone told us he's a grey goshawk, though where they get the grey from I don't know. He's pure white. Apparently there are wedge-tailed eagles too. But have yet to spot them.
I've got a bee in my bonnet about beekeeping again and I'm back to re-reading the books and musing deeply about having a hive or two of my own. Need to get my busy as one in order to have it organised for spring. We use lots of honey in the perpetual pot of chai on the stove, and it will save us alot of money over the years, and increase garden yield. As per usual, when things get stuck in my bonnet, they usually end up making a lot of noise before eventuating.
There's a local farmers market with most four-legged beasts for sale along with alot of the wing-ed beasts as well, so we will be attending in view of finding ourselves a new goat or two in the next month.
Things have been slow, but they're finally feel as though they are coming together.
July 20
The house plans are out of the draftsman's and into the council!
They tell us six weeks in planning, and then four in building and we should be able to start. However, one of them muttered: 'more like six months', as a joke. I pounced on him to try and verify if this would be the case, but he went clam on me and refused to be be further drawn. She grits her teeth. (Or the little nubby things left in her gums after the last seven to eight months of solid grinding).
So, despite a glass of wine with dinner to celebrate stage 1, We're now staring down the barrel of a potentially long for council approval.
Partially due to the extended waiting time, and the realisation that nothing comes easy in the building industry, we've decided to put on hold any plans to write a book on the process. Lots of reasons, many of them reflecting the state of the publishing industry in Australia. We put thousands of hours into writing the first book, knowing it would never be a financial prospect, but it didn't matter. Now we're building and I can no longer say this is true! However, I will be writing a diary during the process, and it may result in a book, but is more likely to produce a number of magazine articles. The garden is coming along nicely; Trev has finished off the animal exclusion zone and I've been planting out. We took a quick trip to a seaweedy beach recently and forked up a huge pile of already composted seaweed. It looked like decomposed christmas decorations, and I've since festooned it around the root zone of plants. We were worried about the salt side of the equation, but have read in Peter Cundall's 'Seasonal Tasks for The Practical Australian Gardener', that it is salt free. I even threw some of the fresh stuff in with the chooks, and Trev, always the gourmand, decided on a taste test too and decided it wasn't too bad. Considering he fished it out of the middle of the compost pile ... yes, well, I went a little seaweed green around the gills.
I Plucked my first chooks today. The neighbour, sick of the early morning wake up calls of a number of competing roosters vowed to deprive them of their heads. Trev put up his hand for them, as they were only going to bury them under a tree. Hence a couple of dying squarwks were heard in our backyard. I told Trevor I had some things in common with the chooks in that, when I see them killed, I quail.
Plans for the fences have changed a tad. We're now going for earthbagged walls on the southern side of the garden. We have the bags, now we just need to fill them... heck, hang on Trev, I have to, um, pair up all our socks!
We have goats - namely Bella and Annabelle. Bella is a Toggenburg/Nubian cross, which is almost the same cross as Possum was but they are very different goats. Annabelle (the kid) is crossed with a boer goat and has Cashmere in her too. So she hedges all bets being a meat/hair/and dairy animal. But she's only here as company to Bella. They were a bit of a surprise purchase having seen them in the local rag and making a snap decision to buy them. Hence a scrabble for around 12 barley bales to make a temporary structure. A pallet with boards tacked on from our local sawmillers reject boards (we scavenge them from his scrap pile), surrounded on three sides with the bales, pinning them with stakes so they have some degree of stability, and three sheets of salvaged corrogated iron weighed down with slabs of scavenged wood, and half an hour later the two of them are nibbling on the sides of it.
We must get around to explaining to them the difference between hay and straw. We hope, (oh how feverent is this hope), that they leave any attempts to escape until we have dog-wired the current fencing. Faint hope. Nuju is absolutely fascinated by them, and wants to play with Annabelle, they played accidental hidey behind a couple of bales, both of them spending a few minutes walking around the bales looking for the other until Nuju backtracked and they met nose to nose. A simultaneous freak out for both of them. Bella, however, like all goats, hates dogs and has made this very clear by stomping her hooves and lowering her horns. However, Nuju, who, like any teenager, has difficulty reading non-verbal social signals, and still attempts to play, will no doubt learn the hard way (goats heads are very hard), that she is not his latest playmate.
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