Time flies…

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Firstly – we’d like to thank all of you wonderfully kind folks who sent your thoughts, love and support (and $$s!!!) to our Family members who’d been through the trauma of Hurricane Irma…

Between the worry for our Family, a bit of down-time with illness, a sneaky weekend away, and work interrupting Life (as it does!) there isn’t too much to report this time round.

Most of our ‘spare’ time has been spent back at the house in town, culling more stuff, bringing stuff we want to keep for the time being, out to the Farm, and general cleaning and tidying.

We’ve finished up the painting of the hallway and bathroom ceilings, and got a first coat of fresh paint on the west-wing hallway walls.

The room under the back deck has been cleaned out, and culling of the workshop has commenced.

We’ve decided that a lot of the old tools that we don’t have a need for, we will offer to the local ‘Mens Shed’ – as we feel that they will be able to bring all the old ( & old fashioned) stuff back from the brink, and not only make use of them, but will also appreciate and use them.
Some of the old-fashioned tools we will keep – as keep-sake ‘decorations’ around the Farm – so you can expect to see them popping up in odd places. 😀

Its been very windy for the last fortnight – and a few really hot days have been thrown into the mix also – so the place is drying out super quickly at the moment.

Its a bit of a brutal reminder that summer is just around the corner, and a tap-on-the-shoulder to us, that we need to get on with it, and get a workable form of irrigation laid down for the orchard, the big vegie beds, and the front beds, as we are currently hand-watering everything.

Hand-watering the house-yard is fine, it takes under an hour to do the entire thing including the ‘nursery’ – but add in the other areas, and its a whollllle different matter, which takes literally hours every few days.

The time it takes to do the house-yard will be cut down even further once we get all those plants in the ‘nursery’ that we want out, planted.
(theres just the small matter of us deciding just where we want them to go, to be dealt with first…) 😐

We got the big double-door stainless fridge moved into the kitchen, and moved everything out of the other fridge we’ve been using into it, so the other fridge is finally unplugged and not adding unnecessarily to the power-bill.
Money-saving can be a wonderful motivator to get some chores done – thats for sure!

Speaking of money-saving – we managed to score another bread-maker for $20!

After having to make bread pretty much daily during the 2 weeks the Kidults were here, it became obvious pretty darn quickly that having a second machine was going to make those times when we have extra people to bake for, much less of a burdensome time-consuming chore.
We don’t actually make/bake the bread in them as such – but just use it to do the first knead and prove of the dough, as its quite a time-saver doing it that way.
Having the second machine tucked away for just such times is definitely a blessing!!

Sunday before last, we got another three trees planted in the house-yard, along the western side.
An Indian Mast tree, and two weeping Melaleucas.

We’ve got more lettuce ready to go in probably either at the end of this week, or on the weekend.
We do succession planting, particularly for the salad veg, so that as we finish one lot, we’ve got another coming on.

We’re still waiting to yank out our winter tomatoes, so that we can top up those beds and add a pile of nutritious compost, but as tends to happen when our plants get wind of what we’re planning to do – they’ve up and got a whole new set of fruit on them, and they’ve outdone themselves this round – there’s going to be a glut – again!
We already get on average at least 5 fruit off the vines each day…
It is definitely time we did another round of canning of some Strigidae Sauce. lol

We managed to sneak away for the weekend to go to the Elton John concert.
We’d booked the tickets waaaaay back in March, and had promptly forgotten about it – until suddenly the media perked up that he was in the country, which reminded us that we did actually have the tickets!!

The concert of course was great.
Despite him now looking a little doddery on his feet, he can still belt out a tune as well as he ever has!
We can’t say that the two hour wait for a cab to get back to our hotel was quite as wonderful 😐 GAH!

With the raised temperatures, its back to mowing and whipper-snipping pretty much every chance we get.
We’ve loved being able to have a bit of a break from it over the cooler months, but Winter was pretty much a non-event this year.
We were only discussing last night that we’d really only felt truely cold, on a couple of evenings – and had two days that had been overcast, blustery and cold.
Disappointing for people who love the colder weather…

We’re in the process of putting a screen door on the main door of the Farmhouse, to keep the critters out.

The warmth bring out not only every insect with wings, but is also snake season, frog season and toad season – and we’re not that much into the nature-lovin’ that we feel the need to share the indoors with them, as well as the outdoors!

A couple of weeks ago we made new screens for all the windows, so we can leave them open the majority of the time now – to catch the cross breezes without the added bonus of the insects etc.
We’ll have to look at making some awnings for the windows eventually, so we can also leave them open during the summer storms, as at the moment we need to close them when it rains, as the water comes in.

All the newly planted trees in the orchard are loving no longer being in pots, and are madly throwing out new shoots, and some even have fledgling fruit on them.

Lots of flowers have been popping out, which makes wandering around the garden that much more of a delight.

The big fenced yard that used to be Digbys side of ‘Palais de Poochi’ has been moved down to the back corner of the Farm, and is the new temporary ‘Cluck Manor’ for the Girls (hens), until we get to fencing the whole area properly.
They are loving having a bigger area – but love it even more when they’re allowed out during the cool of the afternoon, to scratch about in the paddock.

A fabulous dinner was had for Sarahs birthday.
Chicken Oscar – which is a chicken breast stuffed with bacon and prawns and a sinfully rich garlic sauce, with farm-house chips on the side – also smothered in said sauce.
Deeeeeliiissshhhhhh!!!
(and the burps were outstanding!! lol)

So thats about it!

Still plodding along, still gettin’ things done…
If slow and steady wins the race – then we’re definitely WINNERS!! 😀

ps: we finallllllly got some soaking rain!
It wasn’t enough to put down any ground-water, but it staved off the watering regime for a few days lol.
We know it won’t be too far away until we’re back in the midsts of our tropical storm season, and the place will be a quagmire once again – but for now, we’re really glad to have got the much-needed downfall! 😀