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Another week, another bed rises up out of the weeds. Pity a row of beets had to be sacrificed for this one, but it was for the greater good really. For some reason the original garden bed we’d dug was quite a bit longer than the others. I suspect we dug them before we obtained the builders line which now gets rolled out on any occasion requiring a straight reference line. To the general rolling of eyes from someone who thinks it’s a bit unnecessary. But it would have saved the beets!

We also realised we’d made another rookie mistake. When we earlier moved all the wood to give a nice spot close to the gardens for all the compost we moved it all right to where the next bed will go. So before we can start on that one we’ll have to do a bit of rearranging. At least there’s a bit less wood to shift than there was.
We’ve got wood for another four beds. I wonder if they’ll get installed before summer? At this rate, not quite!

It would appear from the lack of recent entries on this blog that we’ve not been up to anything much worth reporting for about a month. That kind of feels about right, actually. Sorry! Hope you managed to entertain yourselves in the meantime. But finally, we have news worth reporting!

Meet a pile of compost. MMmmmmmm. Compost!

It’s quite a big pile really. And will take a bit of shifting. But it would have taken a lot more shifting if we hadn’t got around to moving the pile of wood that arrived a couple of days before out of the way a bit. And once we shifted it out of the way we got around to some light construction with some of it, and finally managed to get some edges organised for the plots we dug out last July. We’d gotten really, really tired of trying to work out just where the edge of the garden and the start of the weed patch was.

So by the end of Saturday we’d finished the first one.

And by the end of today we’d finished the second one.

Just the last one of the original plots to go, then it’ll get a bit more complicated as we try to work out where to add another few. But so far we’re very happy with the result. Looks a lot tidier already. And a lot more maintenance friendly! Only problem is a few of the last winter veg will have to be sacrificed in the name of getting them ready (yes that means moving that huge pile of compost) for the summer veg, but I think we can live with that. Now we just have to cross fingers that the warping and twisting stays to a minimum…

From her:
Don’t worry, we haven’t got our Christmas decorations up already or started the Christmas baking. The massive pine trees we have out the front got a bit of a haircut, as did the neighbour’s smaller ones down our boundary fence.

If you have ever seen the tree trimming machines in action you will know that you don’t really want to stand in line of any falling debris or anywhere near the machine. And the debris can spread quite widely! Think helicopter blades attached to something out of one of the Mad-Max movies. Although they have quite a blunt instrument attached they are still pretty lethal (well they have to be to cut through the size of some of the branches). So if it accidentally flew off I am sure I would not want to be in the path of the blade! To make the event even more interesting to watch, when cutting the big trees out the front was it was blowing a good ole norwester (and for those of you that have not experienced one here they can be pretty damn windy), which made for hard work lining up the tops of the trees.

But with any tree trimming comes the cleaning up, and when the trees have not been trimmed for at least six years that’s quite a lot to pick up. Most of somebody’s Saturday morning was spent moving all the fallen branches from the road-side to inside our boundary. Luckily the neighbours came along with their trailer and a helping hand to help us pick up the smaller branches (not any good for firewood) and then let us kindly dump them onto the fire they had already got roaring on their land. Then we did the same down the boundary line, loading up the trailer and then dumping on the fire. And we didn’t even remember to get the marshmallows out. Although not sure how pine-smoked marshmallows would taste anyway.

Next job is to cut all the wood that remains into firewood. But that’s another weekend’s job hopefully with another helper who wants the wood. Not looking forward to that one. Anyway will leave you with this interesting fact or myth: did you know that apparently pines can grow during night time?!

The photo really doesn’t do justice to the HUGE pile of trimmings and wood there that all need sorting out. But we’ll get there! And hopefully we’ll get a better photo of the wood pile too!

From him:
When someone says “Most of somebody’s Saturday morning” just who do you think they meant?! I hurt. Everything hurts. If it doesn’t hurt, the thing next door hurts and so it makes it seem like everything hurts!

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Even typing hurts. I give up.

We’ve been donated strawberry plants from 2 sources over the last wee while, and to date they’ve been hanging out in the tunnel house suffering various amounts of neglect. As they’ve been the only living plants in there it’s been easy to forget about them. I don’t count the seemingly dormant lemongrass, but it could just as easily be dead lemongrass. (We’ll no doubt work that out sometime soon!)

So since we’ve managed to dispatch the weakest, the rest should be winners, right? Deserving of a home under the open skies? So today we made them one out of the slightly concrete tinted old boxing timber the builder left stashed up the front.

Despite careful planning, measuring and generally looking like I knew what I was doing I still managed to screw the construction up slightly by putting one end inside the edges, not on the end, if you get me (and I’m sure that you do). But the strawberries aren’t going to care, and frankly today I don’t either (more on the reason for that later). It’s likely to be only a temporary bed anyway. But then we said that about the ones we made quite a while ago now, and they’re still going strong, even after being relocated.

As soon as the plants look like they’re happy we’ve even got the straw on standby to mulch them with. I’m sure it’ll last right up until the first nor-wester! Maybe next weekend’s construction project might need to be a netting lid for it. I’ll just have to remember to screw things up in exactly the same way!

Yup, all the signs are there… Fruit trees covered in blossom:

Or about to be.

Lone daff in flower up by the gate waiting for its mates to pop.

Neighbours paddocks are filled with yummy looking lambs frolicking…

Willows down by the river have suddenly turned green.

Outer regions of the place are covered in dandelion flowers. And I have some radishes and peas up. Yup, it’s spring.

Of course what you can’t see and it’s difficult to get a picture of is the very strong gusty winds that we’ve been having that have made it not so enjoyable to be outside to enjoy it all. But this morning’s a pearler! Off to enjoy it.

Yes, it is another line of small, spindly, hard-to-see-against-green-grass trees, and yes, it does indeed look like the previous line from the other day. But it does, in fact, run in another direction, honest!

As we’ve been promised some rain soon this morning’s task was to get a few more of the cyprus in. As we’d no better place to put them they went in down the next fence line. Let’s hope that’s where we want them!

Or the trees are just a bit bigger, so they’re off to a faster start than last year by a couple of weeks.

Whatever the reason is, I’ll take it. And also hope that we can manage to get just a little more fruit from the orchard this year!

Last lot of trees for this season (we think – for now at least) went in yesterday. A 70m line of Cupressus Arizonica, or Arizona Cyprus. At 1.5m spacing, that was 45 trees. Luckily the ground is still pretty saturated, so digging them in was actually pretty easy. Also made a lot, lot easier than the big trees we’ve just put in by the fact that the roots were still in a very little plug relative to the height of the seedlings. We were thinking that it might take us 2 days to get them all in, but in the end it took us just over an hour. And that included lining up the string to make sure we got them roughly in a straight(ish) line far enough out from the fence to still get the mower in for a while.

Hopefully they’ll cope with the local conditions here and grow, grow, grow. They should do. That’s why we chose them!

Now we just have to work out what to do with all the extras we’ve got still sitting in a bag. Good to have some spares on hand in case the hares have a crack at the run of them, but we might need to come up with another line or two just for fun. Of course we might need quite a few replacements on Monday, but more on that later…

(This might make slightly more sense if you look at the individual story, and not the condensed view on the front page… Click here if you like.)

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And that pretty much sums up our fun-day Sunday! Hope you can work out just how much fun we had in the cold, grey day. But at least that’s another 88 shrubs/trees planted. Just the last 100 of yet another size and shape to go. They’re going to follow a similar pattern though, I suspect. Good job we’ve got the perfect algorithm sorted now!

Let’s just hope we have the same level of assistance (i.e. sleeping) from munchkin when we’re planting the next instalment.

I have no idea why I’ve got Grease songs on my mind at the moment. I suspect I must have seen a promo for an up and coming viewing on TV some time soon. Threw me mentally back years to being forced, forced I say, to endure a showing every weekend as my sister wore out her video tape of it. I think I still might need some professional help for that eventually… But anyway. Onwards to the actual story for today.

Yesterday we went and collected another 193 trees and shrubs. That’s quite a lot. Luckily some of them are quite small, so it only took 2 wagon loads to get them home. But once they were home we had to plant them. First up was the bare root trees, as they’re obviously the most in need of soil around their nether regions. They were also by far the biggest, and therefore most expensive, so worth looking after immediately.

So. In went another two maples (of differing spreading habits) and another two Claret Ash, all out the front joining the previously installed stand of a maple, another Claret Ash, and a Golden Elm that it would appear we didn’t document fully, but two out of three ain’t all that bad. So now there are seven.

We also added another nectarine to the orchard, as we couldn’t quite work out why we’d only installed one last time, while the apricots and peaches got two variants. I’ll save you yet another picture of what looks like random twigs.

As you can see from the long shadow, by the tie we’d got those in it was getting pretty late. So to recap. On day one we’ve installed a grand total of five trees. Only 188 to go! You know what that means. Tune in tomorrow for the next instalment! Unless I don’t get it done tomorrow, in which case find something else to read over your morning coffee…