After a week of not knowing what we were going to do (for those not in the loop, Steph and I were considering selling up and moving on to bigger/better things), we have decided to stay here for a few more years, and really make our mark on this place. We're in a good position on all fronts and if anything happens which causes us to lose an income, our lifestyle isn't threatened, any of the options we were looking at, would have meant moving on again (with a loss probably!). So here we are....
This weekend I bought a nice new trailer, we've had a small one for quite a while (Steph's brother bought it as a Christmas present after we moved here, but it's had a lot of use, and it's had too many encounters with fence posts (my driving on the bike!) and will no longer pass it's warrant of fitness. Since we are intending staying, and there are heaps of jobs around here that require a trailer, I drove to a town about an hour away and bought one, measuring 7ft by 4ft. I also bought a stock crate as we occasionally move stock around (from the sales and then to the slaughter yards!).
With the trailer, we decided to have a crazy cleaning weekend, we took lots of old fencing to the tip (it's been sitting around for about 18 months!), and brought back 72m of flower bed edging and another trailer load of misc timber (I like to have a mini timber yard in the workshop so when I'm doing "things" I'm not left waiting (it's quite a trip to town just for one piece of timber). Whilst we had the edging, we decided to stop in a local garden centre to look at a few shrubs, and as typical we got carried away and came home with 26 different plants. We managed to rip out half the beds around the house, and re-edge and replanted them (they look really good now). That was a pretty full on day!
Today (Sunday), we started by chainsawing up the timber frame of a shed that had been left to rot since we moved in! After loading it into the trailer (stockcrate was a real bonus as it increased the capacity of the trailer about 6 fold), we trundled (slowly) off to the tip, once more intending to get a few more shrubs (we need two more grasses for the front bed), we came home with 51 plants! We have now planted flax all down two sides of the arena, a cabbage tree on either side of the entrance to the arena. We have some grasses for the bank leading to the arena (waiting till next weekend to plant those, as we only just weed-sprayed the bank). The arena area is going to turn into an extension of the garden as we're going to build a picnic table out there, it should look really nice when its finished.
After planting the flaxes Steph tried another saddle with Markissa, unfortunately it didn't fit, and I planted out another bed. Once I had finished that I took the tractor over to a neighbors paddock (where our sheep our) and mowed about 3 acres, only took it to about 20cm, but it did deal with a lot of weeds.
Once I got back, we stopped for a tea, I spoke to Mum and Dad for a while, whilst Steph was ripping up what was to be my herb bed (but never did). Instead I'm now going to plant a lime tree there as it will be along side the lemon and grapefruit tree. That bed was edged with bricks which I used to build a hard standing for our new bin (which should arrive soon).
We've made a massive pile of dying plant matter, two trailer loads.
Oh, today Strider got another hen (the chick we hatched a while ago)...I wish we could stop him, this morning he got a "severe" telling off because for the first time we actually caught him at it!
Anyway, time for a shower then tea..
Till later.
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