Has it been nearly a year?

Well, yes it has.

I still haven't managed to get the fox, unfortunately. I've only seen him once since I bought the shotgun, and I couldn't get it up quick enough to shoot the bastard before he ducked behind some trees. And he has been eating the quail - there were hardly any of them escaping from under the slasher last time I mowed.

Still, all-in-all the health of the paddock is pretty good - I've got clumps of trees and saltbush scattered over it,  and there's a lot of grasses and other short plants as well, including some lucerne that Chris and I broadcast-seeded a couple of years ago.

The thing in the foreground is the handle of my Hamilton tree-planter, to give some scale: it's about a foot long.

And here's a photo of a bit of the windbreak from last August. The whole of the windbreak and the micro-forest had this beautiful golden haze from a distance because of the wattle blossoms.

The paddock is no longer quite that green.


I recently bought a second-hand post hole auger, which was really hard to attach to the tractor, and I still haven't worked out how I'm going to store the thing other than on the tractor itself. I think I need some kind of gantry in the shed. After Chris and I spent a day playing agricultural equipment Tetris, I've got everything under cover (the slasher spent a couple of weeks out in the weather). Having sons has turned out to be handy ...

So, the next steps are to find a contractor to put the slab in before the building approval runs out in May, and get some fencing organised. I need to fence in the micro-forest and the windbreaks, and along the creek line, and also divide the paddock into 5 or 6 bits, of a bit over a hectare each, so I can cell graze when I finally put some sheep on it. That's actually not as critical as the rest, especially as too much fencing will make building the Hovel trickier, but I need to at least plan where the fences will go eventually.

A new beginning

Prompted by Ootz, I've decided I need to resuscitate the near-dead orphan blog.

Since I last posted, the tractor's been fixed (it was the battery, and the first replacement was fucked as well), and the paddock has been slashed. The trees have grown, some of them are now 3 or 4 m tall. Not bad for seeds direct-drilled in 2007! Even better, on a recent visit, I disturbed a couple of euros who'd decided my 5 acres of short forest beat the shit out of the surrounding several million acres of wheat'n'sheep as a place to live. (The fox I saw on the same visit wasn't such a thrill: I've bought a shotgun to deal with it.)

Plans for the Hovel are with the local council for building approval (although I still need to produce and send the design for the reed-bed system to deal with grey water), so I may be able to get the first stages of the build underway later this year.

I'll take some photos next time I go up there, and post any that may be of interest - hopefully in the next few weeks.

Biblical floods

I reckon the Robertstown Lagoon will have a bunch of water in it. (A mate of mine, when I told her I'd bought a paddock in the Robertstown Valley, asked if it was in the lagoon, having grown up in the area. Fortunately I was able to reassure her.)

So. I have a new tractor battery, purchased at a discount price (it had some scratches, or something), but it's too fucking wet to go up there. I reckon I'd bog the ute on the way over the creek. I was planning on going up this weekend, but I don't see the point. I've missed the opportunity to slash at the right time for weed control, and I reckon it'll be too fucking wet to burn until about March (which is all the Council cares about).

Update: Still too wet to go up (12th Dec). Maybe next weekend.

The week in review, and other matters

Well. It's been raining a bit up on the paddock, according to the BoM's radar maps and rainfall observations, and I need to slash it in preparation for the bushfire season.

When I was last up there, the fucking tractor battery was too flat to start the engine. That probably had a bit to do with it having just sat there, connected to the tractor, since I last used it a year ago. I've had it on a battery charger for several days, so hopefully it'll kick it over this time. I'm going up for the weekend (if things go well), so I should be able to slash the paddock, and run around the perimeter with the brush cutter. (Or come back Saturday night, cursing the cost of new tractor batteries.)

Update: I need a new tractor battery, dammit.

Starting well into the process

A while ago, I thought it would be a grand idea to document the process of setting up my doomstead. Of course, being as I'm master of procrastination, it hasn't happened yet. (The process of setting it up's been a bit slow too, if I'm honest.)

Still. Time to start. This is what it looked like the last time the Lands Department flew aerial photography of the area. (To get some sense of scale, it's a bit over 20 acres.) That's some time before I bought it, and it looks much nicer now, at least to my eyes. I reckon my neighbours hate me, though, because it'd be a source of weed seeds.

By "weeds", I mean Ruby Saltbush, Fragrant Saltbush, Cutleaf Mignonette (they actually may have a point there, but sheep like it, and it's great bee fodder), thistles, Salvation Jane, tagasaste, a dryland lucerne cultivar I broadcast, and numerous other native and introduced grasses, shrubs and trees, well, really anything that isn't wheat or sheep. There's even feral wheat, barley and peas coming up from when it was last cropped. Oh, and some sheep remains.

I'll share what it looks like when I get to grips with embedding photos. But it's really fucking green. Last time I was up there, a couple of weeks ago, the stuff growing on it was waist deep.

I've got 5 acres direct drilled to random native plants by Trees for Life in the south-west corner, and I've planted a few olive trees along the creek line. The next step is to put in about 100 grape vines, once I work out which variety will be drought-tolerant and give me more-or-less drinkable red wine.

Posts will be very occasional, btw, as I'm probably the laziest man alive.