It seems that the sheep were here for a good time, not a long time!

The feed on the ground has been greatly reduced after a month of chewing by fifty hungry mouths, so with working dog running around, a couple of neighbours controlled the mob and drove them slowly down the road.

Their next destination is a shearing shed a couple of kilometres over the hill where they will get a tidy up before heading to another paddock of feed.

The interesting thing for me is the expected turn around for the pasture in our paddock. Our neighbour commented that it should be back up in a month or so. Considering the rainfall over the last few months, I think that I can actually see this happening.

It makes me think a little more about fencing another paddock for grazing. We have two areas that I’m thinking about; one is fairly wooded but accessible and is about 10 - 15 acres and the other is steep but has good feed and is around 30 acres.

I’ve always thought that fencing was the issue holding me back here, but I think that I can break it down further than that to putting in posts for the fencing.

We have a heap of posts ready to go, but I need to either hire a contractor or find a post hole digger from a neighbour or friend. After doing my fair share of digging around the property, I’m not even considering digging the holes manually…

Eventually the idea will be to have enough pasture to carry our own stock year round, but I think that we are a year or two away from that. In the time being, we’ll just have to let others graze their stock in exchange for cash, meat or services.

We’ve had a few colds starts lately, but this morning we were up well before first light for a trip and really experienced the cold of winter.

The strange thing was that the shower didn’t really bother us. Showering outside can be cold, but with no wind blowing the warmth of the hot water stays around longer.

The shock came when I went to Meg’s car and the back door opened after significant force with a CRACK! The ice splintered and fell to the ground as I looked and saw ice covering the windows and thick on the windscreen.

Figuring that hot water was a bad idea, I got a bucket of tap water and poured it over just before we left. Unfortunately that froze as well and the ice on the windscreen was even thicker.

I reversed with the door open so that I would miss the tree and then drove forward, hoping that the windscreen would start to defrost with the friction of the motion. Obviously this was a stupid idea as I drove a little off of the driveway on the way to the gate and stopped before running into a tree.

We stopped at the main dirt road and I scratched off a porthole sized area of ice with my fingernails while the car idled, struggling to warm up and get the heater going.

With some warmth inside the car, sheets of ice moved across the windscreen as I cornered before it was all over and the ice was gone.

It is great to be reminded of the elements of the earth and I’m glad that we have technology of some sort to deal with them…

It has been getting closer and closer of previous months – the $200 fill of diesel in the Patrol.

Sometimes issues need to reach a certain threshold before they appear as problems; $3 for a pie, $4 beer at the pub, $20 for a decent steak or maybe $2 per litre of fuel. Is this the point at which buying such things turn into luxury? Or is it just a fact of life that it all gets more expensive?

Today I filled up after a few weeks driving around seeing clients, friends and family. The diesel was $1.85 per litre and I put in about 108 litres, completely filling both tanks and resulting in a bill of $199.97!

Mileage had increased to the highest for a while as well, at 12.5L/100km, but I can put this down to driving some very muddy roads in 4WD and towing a couple of tons of firewood uphill in low range 4WD.

I see that the price of oil has dropped significantly from just below the $150 / barrel mark down to mid $120 / barrel and I’m wondering how much of this will be passed on?

Will diesel actually reduce in price or just petrol? There seems to be an ever increasing proportional price difference between them that has been passed off as “demand”, but I thought that worldwide demand had dropped, resulting in a wholesale price drop as described above?

We will see… and I will drive a little less… oh yeah, and plant some more potatoes. I wonder how I can get firewood uphill in a different way? Conveyor belt? Horse and cart? Visiting children?

With recent rain over the last few months, the stock paddock has recovered to the extent that I’ve been looking for something to make use of it.

Over summer we had some Friesian calves to chew down the fire risk. They did a great job and provided plenty of entertainment as well.

Chatting with a neighbour the other week, I asked if he wanted to put some sheep in, thinking that maybe ten or a dozen would suit the eight or nine acres well for a few months.

Meg and I were in Adelaide when the sheep came and returned late at night, so we didn’t see how many were there, but today I had a quick look and stopped counting at 40. That sure is a lot of sheep in that paddock and I wonder how many weeks they’ll last before the feed is gone?

I suppose the good thing about having so many in is that the pasture will regenerate in the spring before summer and allow us to have something else in.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is runner a cultivator over the hillside where the rainwater just runs off. Ideally, I’d like to put in some swales and slow the runoff as well as directing it as it heads down the hill. Slower runoff means less erosion and more of it soaks in, so I am thinking of ways to maximise rainfall without costing a lot or opening up the soil to damage from sun or wind.

We could always plant a quick crop of something at the same time and provide some feed for the next group of animals to visit. I wonder what they will be?

So much has been happening lately and we’ve been busy on weekends with trips to Adelaide, building the garden shed and concreting the floor, maintaining firewood supplies and just getting on with life.

But now a question that has been nagging me since summer has become more important. How do we expand the vegetable garden?

The vegetable garden started in March 2007 in the weeks following our move to Clare and into the caravan. As the soil was so hard and compacted, we started with the no dig garden idea with pea straw bales as the garden bed boundaries.

With bulk pea straw bales delivered to us at between $2.50 and $3 each, we’ve spent over $600 so far in garden bed surrounds, soil conditioning and mulch.

Luckily we’ve had a friendly dairy farmer that didn’t mind us collecting about ten trailer loads of cow manure which gave us a good start.

But we are at the crossroads; we have used all of the cow manure and need the dairy farmer to deliver a truckload, the pea straw bales are nearly finished and I find myself trying to conserve them rather than use them and then there is the time.

Creating the no dig garden beds takes time. With the layering, first of cardboard or newspaper and then combinations of manure and straw it takes more than an hour to make a four metre by one metre bed. This depends on temperature, your fitness and of course, the motivation.

Recently I have been thinking about growing more vegies so that we always have a meal in the garden. It tastes so much better, is much healthier, costs less and once established, doesn’t take that long to manage.

Various solutions have come to mind but last week I was sorting out a neighbour’s computer and thought to ask him for a hand. Everybody wins – he gets some IT work and I get a bit of dirt turned over…

Today he came over and brought his 12 foot cultivator behind his tractor – the perfect tool for the highly compacted soil.

I’d marked out an area with some pots, buckets and the watering can along the line of the water pipes that run on top of the ground from the tanks down to the shed. This would form one boundary with the road as another.

The cultivator quickly found the rocks that I’d warned would be there, but didn’t even flinch. What would have taken a lot of sweat and effort was rolled out the way in one pass.

He went over the ground a number of times, each digging deeper and creating bigger furrows, breaking up what looks to be a nice loam.

The area in which I can now plant is more than four times bigger than I had, but the soil won’t be anywhere near as good as in the no dig garden beds so I will continue to use both.

The idea is to plant broad beans over a large area of the freshly cultivated soil and plough them in after harvest in late September or early October. This will add nitrogen to the soil via the beans as well as plenty of organic matter when they are turned in with the disc plough. Some would call this a green mulch crop, but we should get kilos and kilos of broad beans to eat, give away and save for planting next year.

With the soil conditioned a little, we can start to produce much larger crops of the staples that we eat. I’m always reminded of last year when we had heaps and heaps of silverbeet, but didn’t eat that much – only grow what you like to eat!

So the major crops that will be grown in this newly turned soil will probably be corn, beans, zucchini, pumpkins and potatoes over summer, with other summer crops such as tomatoes, capsicum, and chillies grown in the no dig beds.

I know, I think too much about this but after digging some potatoes and carrots for lunch on Sunday I did a brief calculation of our potato requirements; one plant provides enough for about two meals for the two of us so I need about 150 plants per year. With this ballpark figure and the new area, it should just take some planting, watering and harvest time. Shouldn’t it?

Mmmm… A big bowl of freshly steamed potatoes and carrots with chopped mint, a little butter and sour cream for lunch on Sunday. It provided the motivation as well as the energy to get more things done in the afternoon.

So here we are with it all ahead of us and the plan in place. Now I just have to go through the steps of the plan and reap the rewards.

It has always seemed strange to me that “experts” know (or can guess) how much or a certain resource we have in this finite world.

Maybe it is the combination of marketing and lobby groups hitting media deadlines and stressed out editors, but some of the claims in the same vein as “Australia has more than 100 years of coal left” make me wonder how these figures are determined. Are they fact or fiction? Science or marketing?

I stumbled over some video today that was published in 2002. That is a while ago considering the way in which video is produced and distributed today, but it brought out some very simple concepts relating to the way in which the world is run today and how the policy makers fail to understand the basics of their planning.

The modern world seems to be sold on the concept of growth, or sustainable growth as the newer version of the model works. But how can growth continue indefinitely in a finite system?

Rather than me rehash the story, why not watch them yourself? Please question the concepts as you should be questioning the numbers presented to you about the sustainable economic, resources and population growth in the world today.

(There are eight parts to the presentation.)

Meg and I have been doing a few miles lately, mainly between Clare, Adelaide and Brinkworth. Last Saturday night we were in Adelaide again, moving household items around and helping Raph out.

When I do a bit of driving, I usually take the numbers into account to pass the time and check on the performance of the vehicle, but also because I’ve gotten into the habit. (When I travelled Australian and Europe I posted heaps of data about trips at robstravels.com on the statistics page.)

The tanks in the Patrol were low and as we’d headed to Adelaide, I had been hoping that the bio diesel at Tarlee was still considerably cheaper. A while ago when diesel was $1.82 in Adelaide we’d filled up there for $1.67 – saving about $15 on a tank! But this trip we checked the price on the way through and it was $1.85. With a dwindling tank, I’d resigned myself to high prices in Adelaide.

The Patrol took 108 litres to fill both tanks which was $198.00 at the pump! This was after about 900km of both open road, dirt road, firewood collecting around the property and around town driving. I think that 12 L/100km is pretty good for a heavy 4.2 litre turbo diesel and varied driving.

So with the prices set to go continually higher, maybe next time I’ll crack $200 for a tank? How long before it is $300 per tank? … and how much will this affect how much we travel? So many questions…

Winter is here in full force which gives me a great excuse to sit and tend a fire.

We have three regular fires; the combustion heater inside the shed, the cob oven that Meg built and the bonfire site. Occasionally we burn off the light pruning of gums that is mainly leaves to reduce the summer bushfire risk, but this isn’t very often.

Friends dropping in is a great excuse for a bonfire and camp oven, and the latest recipe turned out a treat. An incredibly simple recipe of sausages, potato, sweet potato, carrot, onion and a large tin of tomatoes transformed into a hearty meal by the fire.

Meg’s been cooking up a storm in the cob oven as well and has discovered the simplicity of chicken drumsticks with soy and honey. The smoky roast potatoes and garlic in local extra virgin olive oil are hard to resist and we plan to branch out with more roasts soon.

A daily ritual in winter is lighting the combustion heater in the shed, and while it is nice and warm with the insulation installed over summer we seem to be burning a reasonable stack of firewood.

On cold nights, it has been getting down below five degrees so far, with much cooler to come in the coming months and I find that Meg and I are filling a wheelbarrow full from the wood shed every two or three days. At this rate, we seem to be going through a trailer load of firewood every couple of weeks, which means that I must find dry days without anything else on to cut seasoned firewood from the property.

I find cutting firewood quite enjoyable if I have the time to spend – there is a bit of a Zen like quality to the monotony of the physical work and the sound of the Stihl on full throttle – but there are only so many easy to get to and well seasoned trees that are either still standing or have fallen so that they lay off of the ground. (The best firewood is old and dry and hasn’t been transformed by white ants.)

The plan last year was to cut green wood and stack it to season for this year to provide for out firewood needs, but the wood hasn’t seasoned as fast as I’d hoped and we are using much more than I’d prepared anyway.

I’m dealing with this in a few ways; I’ve cut a lot of green wood for future seasons and I’m travelling more of the property to find the “ready to burn” wood.

We’ll never be able to burn all of the dead wood on the property because I doubt we’ll be able to get to eighty percent of the available resource due to the steep hillsides and gullies and the groves of bluegum that block an available path. This means that there will always be habitat for natives and (unfortunately) introduced fauna and our property will slowly return to the original state.

In the meantime while we wait for the bush to return and watch the development of our land, I’ll still plan and react to our firewood needs as I can, driving the 4WD and trailer where I can, cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for warmth and comfort.

A week or so ago on a calm, dark night, I went outside for some reason and heard the rustle of leaves in the blue gums along the path between the shed and the toilet.

Being a curious bloke, I grabbed the torch and crept slowly to about where I’d heard the noise and pointed up to see a furry little fellow. It looked like we have Common Brushtail Possums on our property, which are listed as “rare” by the Department for Environment and Heritage.

Tonight I heard the distinctive rustle again and quietly returned to the shed to put the camera together.

Using the Canon 28-70mm f2.8L lens with the Speedlite 550EX flash for starters, I used the torch to identify the general area that the possums were in before clicking off a few shots. Shooting directly up into the branches was a bit of a stretch for me, and after using the torch I couldn’t see anything through the view finder as my eyes didn’t adjust in time to the pitch black, moonless sky.

It must have looked quite interesting from the neighbours place across the hillside, with the trees occasionally lighting up from the powerful flash!

I changed to the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L to try and get a bit closer and this greatly increased the level of difficulty of getting the possum in frame, but the shots that I did get were much better.

I think that it is interesting that the possums were eating the blue gum blossoms and not the box mistletoe that I’ve been told is their food source. There is plenty of mistletoe around, although we have been slowly reducing it by selectively pruning with both chainsaw and rope saw.

Possums are meant to be quite rare in the Clare Valley area. I’ve read that the average is down to one per hectare, the lowest in the area including the Yorke Peninsula and the Mid North and I’d wondered where and when we would see one – we should have more than 40 on our property.

While many people don’t like them, I haven’t seen evidence of them in the vegie garden yet, so as long as they stay in the trees then maybe we can just get along together.

Check more info with the Dept of Environment and Heritage Fact Sheet

After pumping water into the new tank, the next project on the list was the new shed. It is a bit embarrassing to talk about this storage area as a “shed” in a place where sheds usually span at least six metres and are composed of three or more, three metre bays but we had bought as big as we could without having to get council approval to build it.

So the “shed” was three metres by three metres and would do to house mowers and garden tools and get a heap of other stuff out of the way.

A trip into Clare to buy cement was an opportunity, as always, for Raph to get a pie and we loaded 16 bags of cement into the trailer from Mitre10.

With that amount of cement, we needed a heap of gravel. Consulting our new “How to make concrete” booklet, we worked out that we’d need at least two trailer loads of sand/gravel mix. Erring on the side of caution for a change, and with the quarry closed over the long weekend, Raph and I did three quick trailer loads before tackling the pre-pack shed.

It was a bit of a laugh how easy it was to zip the shed together. Even though the wind came up, the two of us managed to hold and fix walls together and then fit the roof. Thanks to Raph’s ingenious use of straw bales as a “third person” to support a wall, we were soon admiring out work.

Of course, our haste to build the shed saw us erect it next to where we wanted it to live, and the next morning with a bit of grunting and a little bending, Meg, Raph and I man-handled it into position to prepare for the concreting.

Being an opportunistic scavenger, I had leftover reinforcing from when the “real” shed was professionally concreted and this was enough to cover the floor with a little overlap outside. Using leftover pavers to lift the reo off of the ground and then the shed off of the reo gave us about 100mm for the concrete slab.

After Meg and I returned from the ANZAC Day dawn service in Clare, Raph and I set to work to mix the concrete with the resurrected mixer. I shovelled while Raph carted, spread and finished. We worked hard and fast with the threat of rain and in a couple of hours, the inside was finished.

Tired after the early start and hard labour we retired for afternoon as the rain spoiled any chance of further work and the goon started to flow.

24mm of rain fell on Friday arvo and through Saturday and it was Sunday afternoon before Meg and I set to work to concrete the outside apron around the shed. Of course, as soon as we finished more showers came in, but the overall result will be functional.

The last few days have seen both a flurry of activity and construction as well as some relaxing DVD time, listening to the rain on the shed roof.