Roundup!
The weather report today sounded like conditions would be much better for spraying, so we loaded up the car again, and off we went. Sounds easy, but we were trying to drag ourselves out of bed as early as possible so we could start in the early morning when we figured the wind would be still asleep too. And just to make it that much harder, it was the daylight-savings change last night too, so we lost an extra hour. Yawn!
As it turned out, the advantage of starting early today wasn’t so much avoiding the wind (which managed to stay away just about all the time we were there) but managing to avoid an hour or two of the baking hot sun! Boy was it hot! And spraying about 900sqm isn’t quick with only a backpack sprayer, but we got there without expiring. Well, I say we, but Bec did most of the spraying in the heat while I did other chores like pulling out fences and rolling up wire. I’m not sure who had the better deal really.
So hopefully that’s stage one towards getting a reasonably big bit of dirt ready to plant some natives on sometime soon. The only small wrinkle is that one of the trees we planted 2 or 3 years ago that we thought were now dead sticks has a couple of itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny leaves on it that means we’re not quite ready to pull it out. It might mean that in our stand of natives we have a single maple tree with purple leaves*. Hmmm. That might take some explaining! I think I give it a 60% chance of survival anyway. Mind you, it has managed to last this long. We gave it wide berth with the spray anyway.
The real bonus of the day turned up about 11am. A digger! So we were luckily on site when the first bit of dirt got shifted for the house. Well, dirt might be a bit of a misnomer. I think it’s probably 60-70% shingle and rocks, and 30% dirt. But at least some of it might be useful in a vege garden. If we can work out a way to separate it easily enough.
We even managed to keep out of their way most of the time as we were too busy with our own chores. I wonder how long that will last! For us it’s all pretty exciting really. I guess it’s starting to be a bit real now!
Still looks small though!
*That might sound a weird way of putting it, but three of us can’t work out if it’s leaved or leafed in “purple _____ maple.”