September Silliness

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It’s time for an update – so here’s a bit of the goings-on during the September silliness season!

It’s getting very dry around the Farm, with not really having had any decent rain of any consequence since about March.

We’re sooooo much luckier than the poor drought-ridden southern Farms are though, in that we don’t have stock and mass croppings to try and keep going.
Its such a tragedy to see…

Yep – its dry here, and the lawn is going brown bit by bit, but we not only have water available, but we are super-careful with the water that we do use, even though its easily available to us, and we recycle almost all of our water by putting it onto the gardens, into pot-plants, and on the grassed areas.

It seems like we’ve probably had the last of the properly cold type weather – which we actually love(!) – and each day it’s getting a little warmer.
Nights have also warmed up sufficiently that we’re back to pondering the eventual need for an air-conditioner, and are already running the fan each night.

We’ve been watering basically just enough to keep alive the plants that are still hanging in, but have continued to lose at least one a week on average.

Sooo – there hasn’t been a lot going on around the Farm of late!

We’re in the process of working out how to put a watering system in – particularly in the big vegetation garden – which can take a mammoth amount of time to get properly watered when we’re hand watering everything everywhere.

We’ve bought one of those big ‘chick-a-chick’ sprinklers to put on in the house yard every few evenings, and have a sprinkler down in the orchard to put on a couple of times a week also, but we need to be moving all the orchard trees for when we can get the grader in to make some swales – so that will happen as soon as we either get a downpour to soften the ground (more likely), or the ground sucks up enough of the sprinkler sessions to soften (less likely!).

Of course, once said downpour does eventuate – then it’s going to be too wet to get the grader in – unless its a one-off (!!) 😐 but we’ve got a pile of big pots ready to go to put the trees in when the time does eventually come!

The bananas are still on the tree, and are slowly gaining some girth – we’re just hoping that they make it through this dry patch, and we get to actually eat them!
And the apple tree has had some glorious flowering going on as well, and the first rose for the season on our little miniature has bloomed.

We did wake up this morning to some light rain, and it’s still overcast – so our fingers are crossed…but it’s incredibly windy – so it will probably get blown away…

We’re also wanting to get a bit more cladding done this weekend, but have work on Saturday, and a lunch-date with friends on Sunday – so it’s almost bound to rain just enough to make that little job a non-starter – being that we’ll only have a few free hours to get into it! lol

Whilst we were hoping that with the whole national ‘strawberry fiasco’ was going on, we’d be able to buy a super-cheap glut of strawberries to make jam with, this hasn’t been the case thus far – but we’re still hoping we can come across some.
We might even go to our local strawberry farm after our lunch on Sunday, and put in a bit of pick-your-own support…

Our pantry staples of home-canned food – especially the pasta sauce – are getting seriously low, and our tomato bushes have also been struggling, so it’s a bit dire there too…!

This week we also had a visit from one of our little reptilian locals.
Blaze (cat) alerted us to the fact that it was outside the sliding glass kitchen door, and then popped over the barrier that we have up so the cats can get in and out but the dogs cant, to have a close look – but the snake skiddaddled off toward the nursery with such lightning speed, that Blaze just couldn’t be bothered with it, but the snake wasn’t taking any chances, and shot up into the nearest tree – which just happens to hang over the nursery area and rather close to our front door.

As we were unsure of its breeding, and there have been a plethora of Browns out and about on the Tablelands of late – combined with the fact that it was very windy, which increased the likelihood of said snake possibly being blown out of the tree onto our doorstep – the snake-catcher was called in to do his thing.

Wayne’s a lovely guy, which a cracker of a sense of humour, is covered in tattoos and has a killer smile – but best of all – he knows his stuff!!
Well the poor guy spent about 30 mins trying to get the lil twerp out of the tree and at one point was soooo close to nabbing it, but then during a big gust of wind, the snake managed to get from the small short tree, onto the neighbouring gum, and promptly zipped up to the top canopy – some 40 odd plus feet up!

Snake 1 – Wayne 0.

Thankfully, Wayne had definitely managed to get close enough to identify the lil lightening-bolt, and it was a blue tree snake.
We’ve named him Usain.

Speaking of wildlife – we have a couple of birds whom routinely ‘help’ with the dishes each day, by sitting around close by and not only having a conversation with the dish-washer of the day, but also singing up a storm while the dish-washing process is in full swing.

However – the other day they were being particularly needy, and decided that their human-of-choice hadn’t spent quite enough time out talking to them, so they instead came inside to continue the conversations!!

Both cats and dogs happily slept obliviously through the 20 minutes that they spent indoors chatting before they were shooed back out the door.
They’re probably just so used to them now, that them being inside wasn’t anything special lol.

So that’s it for this round-up…!
x

Bird helping with the dishes.

Inside for a chat

And another inside chatter

miniature rose in bloom

apple tree flowering

hoops for the big vegie garden so we can cover the plants with netting

smallest zucchini ever

can you see the full length of Usain?
Arrow pointing to the branch he’s on

and this pic is just cos you can never have enough bread porn!! 😀
(& to help you get over the snake pic lol)