Mid-March Already!

Good grief – we’re at the middle of March already!
Not quite sure how that happened…

The good thing about that though – is that its the start of Autumn, which should mean that the cooler weather will be on its way in a while, and thats a much happier time to be in the garden, with the plants liking it a whole a lot more – instead of being baked to within an inch of their lives…

The bedroom feature wall has finally been finished as we told you – but still needs some tizzy-ing up, along with the installation of our big kingsized bed from the house in town – but for the time being, we’re happy with our faithful old queen sized one.

Along the wall that is shared with the bathroom, we plan to build a cupboard into the wall which will be able to be accessed from both rooms.
The bottom half of the cupboard will be for hanging clothes, and will be accessed from the bedroom.
The top half of the cupboard will be accessed via the bathroom, and will hold towels and spare linen; and “things-we-don’t-use-much-but-have-to-keep” will be stored right up the tippy top.

We’ve also still got to do the lining above the window, but the weather (and of course time) has not been conducive to being able to get into that of late.
It will probably have to hold off until our ‘helper’ has got all the fence-lines back under control, and we can use him in helping with some of the work around the Farmhouse, instead of around the paddocks.

We’ve been keeping up with the mowing, but have had more grief with the brush-cutting.

After finally getting the grass down, it was time to get to the brush-cutting – and as we told you as time, the damn thing wouldn’t run for more than a few minutes at at time, due to the shaft constantly vibrating loose, which made a pin pop out, which then made the whole head turn to an angle that it couldn’t be used.

So we headed off to Bunnings with the offending brush cutter, and swapped it out for a new one.

Round two commenced Tuesday.
20 minutes in, and the new cutter started doing the same thing as the old one.
More than a few expletive were shared, by both us and our helper – who had been mad-keen to get into the job.

At first we thought it must be user error, but nope – it was definitely a fault in the manufacturing of the actual pin that that was in the shaft.
So back to Bunnings, and this time a refund was requested, so we could source a different brand from a different supplier.

We now have a husqvarna – which does not have a split shaft, and so far has proved very simple to start.
We had planned to give it its fence line debut on Friday, but of course the morning began overcast and mizzly – so it was put off – once againnnn…..!

We finally got to put in an hour or so with it on Saturday though, and we’re pretty darn impressed!!
Haven’t seen the Lilypillies near the container for a few months, but 5 minutes of cutting and they’re back out showing off their pretty colours 🙂

Even managed to get the cutter restarted ‘on the hip’ – not having to take it off with one holding while the other tries starting…that right there is a +++ bonus!!!

A couple of good scores came our way in the last fortnight.
An OpShop visit netted us some good old fashioned cook-books for breads, jams and preserves – as well as a mid-sized wok, and a small roasting pan with rack and lid.
And a clean-up by a client saw us getting some left over furniture goodies……

Annnnd the local online Buy, Swap, Sell site had a huge dog kennel listed – for FREE – which we were lucky enough to be the first in on, and its even more huge than it looked online!
It hung well out of the trailer on the trip back to the Farm, and will definitely be a welcome addition to ‘Palais-de-Poochi’, for Mr Digby.

Last week, the new-build we told you about back in October, had the new family move in.
Its been quite amazing to see how quickly various aspect of the build have gone – and to the outsider (i.e.: us!) it all seems to have gone quite smoothly.

A mate who is one of those clever people who can work out land levels using one of those three-legged stick thingys, came out and did some ground levels around the Farm for us.
We were pretty pleased with ourselves, that the knowledge we have gained just from ‘watching’ our land for the last numerous seasons, that his recommendations pretty much tied in with what we had already thought we needed to do, to sort out a large part of our waterflow/runoff issues.

We’ll probably have to wait until a bit later in the year to tackle that job, as if we were to get in any earth-moving equipment at this time of the year, it would either get bogged, or would rip up the yard so much that it would just be one big mud-puddle that would take ages to get sorted.

We’ll also need to move ‘Palais-de-Poochi‘ along a lil bit, as where the small dogs yard and kennel is, is where we want to funnel the run-off water through – and they might not appreciate the ‘harbour side views’ quite so much…

We’ve been collecting newspapers at work, for our garden beds, and last week we managed to get about 1/2 of the wanna-be food forest covered and mulched.
We’ve run out of papers and mulch now – so have to scrounge around for a few weeks to get some more of each 🙂
In the next couple of weeks we’ll be getting back into sowing seeds in pots, ready for planting out in the garden once they’re big enough.
And today we planted a lovely Jacaranda about 2/3 of the way down, near the bottom of the western fence-line.

We’re aiming for a minimum of 20 trees by the end of the years – so we really do need to get a wriggle on, if we’re going to achieve that – but we’re of the opinion that much more will be getting done around the garden, once the weather cools…

So thats about it for this time around…as always – if you’re enjoying the ride so far, feel free to sign up to get each new update directly to your inbox.

And remember – sharing is caring… 🙂

Until next time – have a good one and look after YOU!