Another Year Begins

Well here we are most of the way through the first month of a new year already!

As many of you will have noticed, we have been more active almost on the daily of late on our socials on fb and insta, which is why we haven’t been quite so diligent with writing a new blog post.
Its also the reason that you will be getting less photos with the update.
(we’d love it if you shared and invited others to join our socials!)

As we get this ready to send out, Cyclone Kimi is hovering off the coast and expected to intensify and cross the coast in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

We spent yesterday afternoon securing as much of the loose things around the yard that we could.
Taking down the plants off the nursery shelves and sheltering them under trees and in garden beds, upturning garden furniture, and packing as much as we could away into sheds and containers.

If we decide to stay home for the duration we will move our cars over to near the big veg garden, away from the trees that are near where we usually park.

Our main concern during a cyclone is always that the trees very close to our house, will come down.
Particularly one of the ones that we had trimmed earlier in the year.
Despite the pruning having been done and the ones on our side now being fairly ‘safe’; there is a very big very old tree just behind those ones in our yard that is in our neighbours yard, and another few more a couple of metres further back.

The biggest one is right over the fence and looks to have a circumference of well over two metres.
(we haven’t actually measured it, despite the fact that we can touch it from our side lol)
Prior to us getting the lopping done, it had a number of branches that reached right over our house – and freaked us out on the regular, with dropping branches without warning.
[ #WidowMaker! 😐]

Meh!
Lets get on to more fun type things though – like what we’ve been up to…

A big part of what we have been doing between the xmas/new year break and now has been inside jobs.
This has been for two reason:
a) its been stinking hot and we’ve wanted to be inside in the aircon and
b) its been too bloody wet / rainy!
To date, we have had 490mm of rain since Christmas eve.

Jobs we’ve been doing inside:
– made a pigeon pair of shelving to sit either side of the drawers that holds the tele
– built new pantry shelving for in the kitchen next to the fridge
– finished ¾ of 3 of the 4 walls in the deep-pantry / storage walkthrough
– installed a sliding door for the inside bathroom
– lined the wall behind the fridge, gapped and painted it
– re-installed the new fridge and new pantry shelving once the wall was finished and painted
– lined the gable wall above the kitchen bench, gapped and painted it
– finished the lining around the main door, gapped and painted.

We are in the process of making 5 new raised garden beds, and whilst most of them have been cardboarded and laid with sticks, rubbish offcuts of timber, and rotting vegetation, they have yet to be fully filled with soil – but again the rain has impeded progress on that front.

We’ve got a pile of seeds (three different types of radish, cucumber, squash and pigeon pea) that are currently sprouting on the kitchen bench, ready to go in the garden once the ‘blow’ is done with.

We turned most of the carrots that we picked on Christmas morning into carrot and ginger soup which we canned, and the remainder have been stored in the deep-pantry.

The first bunch of bananas for this year finally began to ripen on the tree, so have been lopped and are hanging in our outdoor area.

The bunch weighted in at around 30kg (guesstimate) and there are two more huge bunches still growing.

We’ve been eating them daily in one form or another and yesterday we made two dozen muffins, most of which were taken into the RW office for sharing.

We’ve also been making banana slab cakes, which we can section up and freeze so that we have ‘fresh’ cake throughout the year.

We’ve got a bit more organising to do before we go to bed tonight, so we’ll sign off for now.

Wash your hands, wear a mask when appropriate and keep safe folks!