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Just 2015 though. Yesterday seemed like a good day to fork up the garlic crop and get it under cover before the promised showers. Can’t recall any showers, but it was time to pull it up anyway.

Hopefully this year we’ve got enough to get us through both the planting season and the eating season. Think we were about 8 bulbs short this year and had to do a bit of a garlic splash and dash to get us through.

I suspect it’s going to be a bit interesting sitting on that outdoor furniture for a bit though!

They might not look like much, but what you see is a giant leap forward in orchard production. The first time we’ve managed to get a handful of anything much in all the time the trees have been in. It’s only taken four and a half years to get to this point!

I suspect it’s a combination of all that time, some extra watering this year, and so far at least a particularly light year for the dreaded grass grub beetle. Pity about a couple of hail showers, but we’ll take that.

There’s still peaches, pears, nectarines, a plum or two, and some apples to come this year. Assuming they make it! Here’s hoping.

Long time readers of this blog will no doubt have previously been informed that the ground around here is slightly on the bony side. Any more bony and we’d probably consider opening a quarry! So the thought of trying to drag a spade or shovel through a few hundred meters of trenching has not had great appeal to date. So every time we’ve mowed the outer reaches there’s been a long sigh as we’ve had to go move the irrigation pipes out of the way first.

But no longer!

A little orange digger came to play one day,
When Nan and Big Kev came up to stay,
It chugged and it chugged up and down the land,
And cut through the ground as if it were sand,
On the day the orange digger came here to play.

Well, truth is it took a little longer than a day, but then it did have to assist with the creation of a couple of larger raised beds than has been the norm around here. Hardwood ex-power poles take a fair bit of effort to manoeuvre into place, even with the assistance of a little orange digger. And a fair bit of spoil from the BBQ area and the decking needed to be pushed around down the back too. So all in all a hugely productive long weekend.

So now all we have to do is get the pipe settled in the bottom and shovel the dirt back over. A job that’s almost enjoyable. Much more so than trying to get the dirt/stones out of the trenches!

A huge amount of thanks to Kev, Nan and Tom!

Ok, so it has been a very long time since we last posted any sort of update. A looooooooongg time indeed! Sorry! But it has been autumn, then winter, and a very slow start to spring. So really nothing to report for the last few months. Until now. And even this isn’t going to be that exciting, but at least it’s a start, so bear with us and try to appreciate it if you can!

Today I finally managed to get around to re-potting all of the seedlings that have been slowing popping up in the propagation trays on the kitchen table for the last few weeks. I’m not sure how they’ve managed to survive the prodding and poking of the kids, but they did. Which is good. Or will be when they start producing produce.

Speaking of prodding, I do like the propagation trays we’ve got. As well as being self watering through the germination phase they’re great at re-potting time as with a simple prod from the bottom they pop up ready to be transferred to their next home. Bliss! Much better than trying to wrestle them out without pulling leaves off.

Somehow this year I’ve managed to get a much better balance between the seeds sprouted and those that end up getting re-potted. With hopefully just enough spares to keep the workmates happy during the ad hoc seedling exchange meeting sometime this week.

First time we’ve tried to grow melons in the tunnel house, and it seems they’ve managed to grow and ripen OK.

There were even are few sneaky extras that I hadn’t spotted hiding under the back leaves. Just have to make sure we eat them all before they go off. And to try and remember which was which to know what to plonk in again next year.

My self appointed job for the last two days while the kids have either been sleeping or at preschool has been to dig over the back area to make a garden now that the new laundry step is in place. Stupid I know. The ground here is so stony, but luckily the dry summer has made it OK to dig. Although a dust mask might be a good idea, I have managed it all by myself without the help or instructions from the ‘boss’ (apparently he has some type of man flu and is also too busy working from home).

To put my digging into some sort of perspective in case the pic does not do it justice it’s about 4-4.5m by 1m wide on one side of the step and then 1.5m by 1.5m on the other side. You might say that’s not much…… Well then you are welcome to come and dig them many more bigger gardens we have to do. Who said starting from scratch was fun! Not a bad effort so far from me if I do say so myself.

I even have a sore shoulder and butt cheek on my digging side. Now just to get out some more stones, take out a bit of dirt, put in some compost, plonk in the now obligatory irrigation pipe and sprinklers and then pick something to plant in there. Then I will be happy with having completed another of the endless projects we have to do around the house.

After all the hard prep work has been done, I finally got a little bit of help or shall we say interference from ‘the boss’, and so a week later the compost, irrigation and some plants have been added. And that there completes my laundry garden!

And it was the pimento de padrons. Nine of them fried up in olive oil with salt. The saying goes that one in every ten is a hot one so I wondered if we’d get a goodie or not.

We started chewing through them from smallest to largest. By the time we’d got through the first seven with no surprises I was starting to doubt, but both the biggies were little bundles of hot goodness. Yum! Here’s to many more surprises.

We’re getting very close to the end of the summer break now and having not really accomplished too much to date it was time to roll up sleves and get into shoveling a heap of compost and whatever else smells strongly of pigs into the messy back strip that has mostly laid barren other than a citrus tree or two since we moved in. I’d managed to get motivated enough to get some edging in a while ago, but not bothered to fill in the gaps around it or sort the soil out. Or the weeds. Or the bits of timber lying around from the edging. Frankly it was all a bit of an embarassment.

So into it we got. First jobs were to fill in the gaps around the edging and to give it a bit of a dig over, and or course to pick up all the stones that magically appear everytime you show the soil a spade around here. Not too bad today. Only the 13.5 buketfuls to be carted away, but really that just made a bit of space available for the compost etc. Pity we’d picked a very hot sunny day to be doing all the heavy stuff, but there you go.

And so here’s the finished article. Much, much better. Now we just have to keep it clear of weeds, start watering it so it’s not as dry as a cracker, then work out what to plant in it. That can all wait for another day!

Well as you might have been able to tell from the lack of any posts there hasn’t been that much happening around here lately. What’s mainly been happening is “no cows” in the back paddock. We’ve been telling the kids for some time that it won’t be long before the cows are back to eat all the nice oats that have been growing since the last post.

But it looks like the cows won’t be coming after all. We arrived home to find the paddock looking like this:

When there is something happening around here we miss it. Bugger! There’s a little boy here who would have just loved seeing the “tak-tah” go round and round for a while. Also means that we weren’t able to catch the before shot showing all the lovely green oats that were there this morning. And I suspect we’ll be explaining that the cows are not going to be coming now for about as long as we were telling them the cows were coming soon…

It has been a decent prod to take a few “before” pictures of the areas where there just might be something planned to happen soon, just in case something happens sooner than we think. Maybe you’ll hear about them…

A bit more catching up on recent events is required. Two weeks ago it started. A new chapter in the life of the back paddock.

First stage will have to go unrecorded, but was apparently just a bit of general cultivation with a ripping and rolling to both chop it up and even it all up slightly. We were trying to guess at the time if it had been drilled again at that stage, but the neighbour helpfully confirmed that it hadn’t been.

We were around when we got to stage 2 of this round though. The actual drilling late the day after next (Sunday). Oats again, apparently. I didn’t manage to get a photo of the real action though. As soon as the tractor arrived our nice neighbour jumped in the digger he’d been using and walked it over to flatten out the big piles of dirt that have been cluttering up the paddock for a while now so the drilling could be full paddock, rather than having to go around the piles. So the area previously known as “The Pit” is no more. We’re not sorry to see it gone though. Good riddance! (He also did us the favour of ripping out our annoying gorse bushes too on the digger walk back. reminder to self: More beer required to pass over the fence!)

Getting back to the main story, it’s actually more correct to say the farmer partly drilled the paddock. There was a bit of a pause in proceedings when the wheels fell off a bit. Literally!

Apparently he knew before he started that they were munted, but just kept going until they were not going to go any further!

A couple of days later, armed with a couple of new tyres, the final bit got drilled.

Then a day later there was a rumbling and a rolling, and the paddock got a bit of a flatten out.

So here it is. The final result. The best it’s ever looked, I think. We’ll see what it looks like after it all sprouts again, and then what it looks like after the cattle have been back!

But for now it’s just nice to a) have something interesting going on, and b) having someone else look after it!