It has been a bit hotter lately and I’m obviously concerned about snakes about the place.

Most weekends now involve at least an hour on Penfold (the ride on mower) as I try and keep the grass down and the ground visible for when we are walking around.

Of particular importance is the vegetable garden, as the pond in the middle provides a water source and the variety of lizards and small animals provide a potential meal for the snakes.

Tonight Meg rang as she arrived home to find a brown snake on the concrete outside the roller door of the shed, “looking for a way in”.

After advising Meg to keep an eye on it, I quickly packed up and headed home.

Arriving home in a cloud of dust, I saw Meg standing under the pergola at the end of the shed. The snake had left and she had been following it to where it disappeared, under some rocks on the corner of the concrete slab.

After making sure that it wasn’t still visible and turning a large rock over, we revealed what looked suspiciously like a snake hole…

Meg wasn’t all that fussed though, and we’ll just look carefully when we enter the shed and try to ensure that we don’t have mice. As well as this, Meg taped up a small gap at the bottom of the roller door of the shed.

While this excitement was going on, the very small, male mistletoe bird was twittering around us, landing on the car antenna and also on one of the small blue gums next to where we park.

I grabbed the camera and the 100-400mm lens and snapped him a few times in the approaching twilight.

Before packing the camera away again, I thought I’d capture the new flock of sheep that we have grazing in the paddock. Hopefully they’ll eat their way through our bushfire risk in the next month or so and won’t keep me too awake at night.

Check out more in the gallery.

So we’ve been planning to build a house for a while now, setting deadlines and breaking them before setting them again.

When we moved up here we wanted to soak ourselves in the environment, learn the seasons and use this knowledge to build a suitable home on the property.

Of course, it seems pretty simple to say “I’m going to build a house” when I have limited experience, but I’ve never had a huge amount of experience in anything that I’ve done before throwing myself into it. Learning fast and also from my mistakes before things turn ugly makes life interesting to say the least – but I’ve done a fair bit of research on housing and think that we are making all of the right compromises for us.

Some of the main features we have planned are:

• Orientation – having a north facing house so that winter sun enters the windows for warmth and the summer sun is blocked by eaves.
• Materials – using rendered straw bale infill walls with have huge insulation properties (an approximate “R” rating of 9).
• Using a slab for thermal mass and (combined with the walls) bushfire protection.
• Open plan living without internal walls downstairs.
• Outdoor living – we currently spend a lot of time outside and want to continue this with large decking and indoor/outdoor spaces. This means that some of the decking will be sheltered from the weather and used as a year round living area.

The plan is for a loft design with high pitched gable and the second floor in the roof space for better summer heat dissipation, better use of space, cost effectiveness and a unique cottage feel. The design also means that the house can be built by a minimum number of people and is something that Meg and I can accomplish together, with a little help from friends and the occasional tradie.

Last January’s deadline for submitting plans to council died a quiet death and the deadline was reborn mid-year.

Having a third wind a month or so again, I obtained the paperwork from the council and have started going through it. This means learning new terms, having to expand TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that are used everywhere and generally starting to manage the project.

So the check lists have started in earnest now. Meg has contacted the company that will do the soil testing and I’m contacting some earth movers for advice and vague costing.

It is a little strange that the project has costs associated with it that are dependent on the cost of the building, but the cost of the building is a variable thing. For example, materials costs may fluctuate, some parts of the build may use tradespeople or not. I think that the variability in this figure could be 50% of the cost of the build.

We’ll keep our eyes open for pitfalls, but expect that we’ll fall into a few anyway. But then isn’t that all part of the fun?

After a few weeks waiting for parts, Penfold the ride on mower is back up and mowing again.

It took a few goes to get the right bit, but we got there in the end with the correct part being delivered after a few false starts.

Installation wasn’t too hard and after pumping up the front tyres, filling with fuel and with a quick check over the machine we were slowly putting around again.

Even though I’ve spent hours on previous weekends pushing the standard Victa around some of the more important parts, the grass has grown very high in just three weeks. Below the shed I couldn’t even see the difference between where I would normally mow and where I haven’t mown before and just made it up again.

A few hours on the mower combined with a wander around with the brushcutter has me feeling a little better about the fire risk as well as being able to see snakes more easily.

I also caught up with a neighbour who has some lambs to put in our stock paddock again. I wonder if we’ll be able to see them though the grass when they first go in?

I received a phone call out of the blue this morning with an offer of some more fish for our pond.

Whether it was meant to happen or not, I’d been thinking about getting some friends for “Guinea Pig” – the original and possibly very lonely gold fish.

“Guinea Pig” was so named after his or her status as the first experimental fish in the pond, and the experimental procedure stated that no fish food was to be supplied.

More than a year later, the big guy was getting bigger, so the experiment was deemed a success. Living on algae and bits of the pond plants and maybe the odd mosquito larvae worked and this phone call was just what was needed to enter phase two.

After collecting the three new fish, I returned home with the esky and plonked them into the pond. The fish were a little stunned and I stood quietly watching them for movement.

The movement came from behind me and I slowly turned to find a 1.5 metre long brown snake in the adjacent garden bed, spanning the width with head over one side and tail the other.

The snake sensed my movement and quickly slithered off, leaving me to contemplate a few things with fast beating heart.

The fish didn’t seem to notice and it was time to get some “real” work (read: paid work) done, so I headed to the car.

Heading away from the vegie patch down the drive, I spotted the snake about 30 metres away. I still can’t get over just how quickly they can cover ground when they want too…

Plans for the house have been coming along well and Meg and I have been working hard on decisions for the house; what to build, where to build it, how am I going to be able to do it etc etc.

Raph came up to visit and as part of his Uni holidays, he spent a while on the spade and crowbar.

A couple of “lightening strikes” saw some trees fall over near the proposed house site, so we thought that we should get rid of the stumps.

How hard could it be? Surely we could just dig them out?

The Blue gums around here tend to grow with multiple trunks sprouting from a base and trimming the trunks down was easy enough. The plan was to dig around the base and hopefully under some roots before lighting a decent bonfire to burn the rest away.

This sounds great in theory, but the first fire that we lit went for three days…

The end of the first stump was the second burning and coincided with the first camp oven chook. After burning for a few hours, the monster chook (over 3Kg) was stuffed with lemons and onions, seasoned with pepper, salt, garlic and chilli and placed on a bed of lemon peel in the camp oven.

Raph dug a huge hole, about a foot and a half deep next to the fire for the camp oven. We backfilled with red hot coals from the base of the stump to about the halfway mark before putting the camp oven in and completely covering it over the handle – even though the handle was pointing straight up.

Three hours later, we hooked out the camp over and had the juiciest roast chicken with gravy and steamed veg picked from the garden.

With the first stump pretty much finished, Raph and I started on the second after a night of a neighbour’s great cleanskin Cab Savs. (Maybe a mistake?)

The blisters came thick and fast as we tackled the second stump and consumed what felt like our bodyweight in cool rainwater.

Pa came over in time to lend a hand and we dug up to a metre down around the stump. Not a bad effort for three hours on the spade.

The fire was big, but safe as the hole was surrounded with dirt, stopping the wind from blowing embers across the ground.

A heap of wood and days later the stump had taken a battering. Maybe one more burning and it will be gone.

It sometimes seems like we are taking small steps in the process of building the house, but each step gets us closer.

With a history like mine, it had to happen one day. I finally crashed the mower.

While it wasn’t a crash to rival the motorbike crashes in my past, it was enough to call the end to the day’s play on our ride-on that Meg named “Penfold”.

All I was doing was cruising around near the shed, trying to reduce the snake and fire risk a little when the front left wheel clipped the stump of a long dead tree that had been cut off only inches from the ground.

The left wheel caught the stump and a crack signalled a problem as the steering went light. Further investigation showed that the steering pivot joint had snapped.

After removing the pivot and checking out the operation, I managed to bodge it back together for the ride back to the shed.

At least it wasn’t a rollover (again)…

With considerable rainfall in the last month or two, it seems that we have had a good winter in the mid-North this year. If the look of our cars are anything to go by, you’d have to agree that we’ve had some decent rainfall.

July was above average, making up a little for a poor June, while August saw the average fall – around 81mm. See more at the BOM site. 

Living out of town with only dirt roads connecting us is enough to keep cars dirty, but the council have decided to run some full scale repairs on a large section of one of these roads and have been interrupted many times by heavy rainfall. Therefore the road is regularly a quagmire with six inch deep slosh to wade through. Sometimes I think I should wear a Captain’s hat as the Patrol steers like a boat!

I’m glad that Meg has a 4WD now as she’s had to use it a number of times just heading to and from work. It would have been touch and go in her old car. 

My car has seen even more of this, due to my work with farmers around the district. Some of the roads to the farms can be very waterlogged after heavy rain and I feel that I am justified in running a “proper” 4WD. Its funny watching clods of mud fly out the front of the vehicle, only to land back on the windscreen as you drive through them and I’m now used to keeping a finger on the wipers to wash away the muddy water that seems to jump out in front of me whenever there is a puddle about.

In talking with locals, it seems that this year is a return to Clare winters of old, where it rains regularly from June through to August. Some have been saying that we haven’t had a winter like this for ten years. 

The garden has definitely taken a turn for the better with longer days and sunshine triggering lush vegetation. We’re eating broccoli every day and have an occasional feed of potatoes, leeks, English spinach, spring onions, bok choi, radishes, parsley, coriander and Chinese cabbages. The broad beans are coming along, as are the peas and garlic.I’m busy planting as many spuds as I can to try and keep up with strong demand! Each meal I try to cut at least one eye from each spud and have been storing them in egg cartons until I get a moment to plant. Hopefully this will result in at least two plants to harvest all year around when things really get going and that will make us self sufficient in potatoes.  

One of the chores that has come back with the end of winter is mowing the weeds and grass around our living areas in preparation for snake season. I’ve mowed the last couple of weekends and the grass seems to be taking this as a challenge, jumping back out of the ground.

In tight spaces where the ride on mower has a bit of trouble, I mowed with the standard garden mower and collected a trailer load of clippings that went straight to the open compost area. The differed aspects of the garden are slowly taking shape, with the compost and soil creation area (dirt, manure, organic matter) at the top of the hill above the vegie garden as most of the ingredients are delivered by trailer and it is easier to carry things downhill with a wheelbarrow. The other advantage is that any nutrients that wash away will wash towards the vegie garden and not away from it.

There are always things to do, but I feel that the vegie garden is now supporting us to a fair degree and I get a great sense of accomplishment from that.

View the photo gallery for more pics.

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?