Hello Again

It’s been almost a year to the day since we last wrote here, and it’s been a year with a lot of ups and downs and a lot of good and some not so good – no different to anyone else on the planet really – but at the end of the day we’re still very happy, we still love our Farm and we still love each other.

Our ‘heartkid-grandbaby’ has had another operation, and has pulled through fabulously (such a lil trooper!) AND there have been another couple grandbabies added to the chaos!

The last year has seen a lot of growth from the paddock plantings in particular, and it seems like the various groves just suddenly decided to put on about a metre of growth in one short season, and are growing lushly and abundantly.
(we’ll add more photos of those soon.)

A couple of the groves have already done the job of blocking out parts of the neighbouring houses, and are proving to be very good ‘sink and store’ areas for water when the heavier rain periods have come through.

We have one area of the Farm which has unfortunately recently become a bit of an unintended dam when the monsoons came though, due to the way that a neighbour has built-up their fence-line plantings, but hopefully in time we will be able to have a grader come in and do some more landscaping type works along that area, to reroute some of the run-off in a better way.

A couple of our neighbours have recently put their properties on the market, so we’re expecting that by this time next year we will have yet more new neighbours.

With the short Mumma recently having had surgery and being mostly out of action for the last month, we decided it was time to get somebody in on a semi-regular basis to help with some of the bigger jobs around the garden.

After putting an ad up online for about 30mins, we were lucky enough for it to hit the right note with someone we already knew, who thought her husband would be perfect for the job; so a couple of weeks ago we had our new garden-helper Mr MG come and do a couple of hours so that we could see if it worked for him – as well as for us.

His first day he did an awesome job of taming some of the wildest neglected areas by doing a load of whipper-snipping, which hadn’t been properly tackled since our Son was here in early January.

The next week Mr MG made massive in-roads to the cement area that had become a major catchall area for crap that needed sorting, putting away, using or dumping.

Not only has he cleaned the whole area up and sorted through everything that was on there, but has thoroughly rearranged the area, and made a huge pile for things that need dumping or donating.
He has also started gurneying the shipping container that is our laundry and extra home-storage area, and has made a huge difference to it already!

We’ve had a massive summer with torrential monsoonal rains for most of it, bringing in 1250mm which is just slightly under 50 inches.
Whilst it has kept the temperatures at a more bearable level, it has meant that the only way to move around the farm is in knee-high  gum-boots.

To be fair, our property and especially our driveway has held up remarkably well considering that a lot of the dumpings we’ve had have been big amounts, and with the ground often already at saturation point, it has meant that run-off has been an issue, creating small streams and some areas of large pooling.

We haven’t been away in Noah the bus of late, as it has again been back down the hill to the mechanics.
We are hoping that this next round of repairs will be an end to the ‘bad luck’ we have had with it, and we can get back to having regular adventures.

We got to see a few of our kids and grandkids over the last year, which has been really heartwarming, and we got to go on a lovely little holiday at the end of last year – our first in almost four years – that encompassed South Australia, New South Wales, and South East Queensland; and during the time got to go to the Outback Spectacular, two Zoos, and a Safari Park.
We also got to meet our newest grand-baby.

We are hoping to post a little more regularly over the coming months, but not making any promises as ‘Life’ has a habit of getting in the way and sidetracking us – however if you’re wanting more regular updates – or at least random photos from our Life whilst we’re in the midst of living it – we’re still posting fairly regularly on fb & insta.

As always – we’re adding a small sample of photos below – which we hope will give you a little window into not only what we do on our Farm, but will also give you just small feeling of the why that we do it…

In closing – if you are having any difficulties with viewing the photos that are added to any post, please let us know!

We hope the new year has started well for you all, and that many wonderful times are ahead for you over the remainder of the year.