There is plenty of work to be done lately, and more and more of it has been actual paying work for the IT services business that we run.

Meg and I were sitting at our computers tonight while I worked on a couple of laptops and the high end workstation and part time server that I’m building.

It looked a little out of proportion to have four laptops and a workstation with 24 inch LCD lined up together, sharing our satellite internet as well as a 3G connection while we ran some maintenance and connected to the new wireless printer in the “foil” lined shed we call home. (Cue the conspiracy theory jokes about tin foil hats extrapolated…)

But there in the middle was a sign of the rewards. A bottle of Bremerton’s 2003 Old Adam Shiraz from the Langhorne Creek region of South Australia – a gift from a client for a job well done to be shared amongst friends.

Work hard, play hard. Life is for the living!

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.

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.)

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.

Plans have been in place for a while to build some more storage and find a better way of using rain water.

We need storage since the shed that we live in is cluttered with tools and boxes. Other tools and machines are stored in the wood shed – taking up space where the firewood should be drying and there are assorted piles around the place that should be tidied up.

The other problem that we have discovered is regarding rain water.

A while after building the shed we bought a 2000 Gallon poly tank to catch the rain water. With the shed on a slope, the tank is lower than the level of the shed which means that the only real use of the rainwater is for drinking and cooking.

The problem came to us over summer, when we were happily drinking the water but noticing that the level in the tank wasn’t going down significantly. A nice problem to have, but what would happen when it rained? Rainwater running out of the water tank overflow and down the hill would be a crying shame.

The solution was to consider our water use. We pump bore water into a 5000 Gallon tank at the top of the hill and then gravity feed from there. This allows us to use the bore pump (2.2kW) for about two hours a month, rather than pumping every time we need water.

The bore water runs down the hill to the shed to be used for the shower, dishes and clothes washing, as well as a bucket or two for the small garden. The height of the tank over the shed and the use of one inch poly pipe for transfer means that we get about 20 litres per minute – enough pressure for any of our needs individually.

The Nature Loo toilet doesn’t use any water and the sink at the shed is used for washing hands.

We considered this and the luxury of excess rainwater (through our frugal usage) and decided to put another tank on top of the hill for rainwater and plumb an alternate pipe for use at the sink and shower. (The clothes seem to wash fine in bore water and Meg thinks that we will continue to use bore water when we build the “real” laundry for the house.)

The catchment will still be at the shed, but when the tank fills we will pump to the new tank at the top of the hill for later use. Having 5000 Gallons at the top of the hill should provide us with enough storage and if we monitor the use we should have enough for our new usage plan.

The other benefit is for when we build the house. We should already have rainwater in place and ready to incorporate into our house plumbing.

As well as plans for The Journey, Pa was talking about installing another 5000 Gallon tank at his place.

So with ideas expanding and combining with each other, Pa and I prepared sites with many trips to the Clare Quarry for crusher dust.

Pa’s site was dug out with a Bobcat due to time constraints and then levelled and three loads were put on top of the hill at our place for the tank and shed.

It all hinged on Raph coming up from Adelaide during the mid semester Uni break for another part of the “work for the Goon” scheme and I’d ordered tanks and a 3m x 3m garden shed to be ready when he was.

Wednesday was tank day. We’d picked Raph up from the bus on Tuesday night and we were ready for a big day of work.

After picking Pa up at his place, we headed to Cox Rural where we had the tanks ready for pickup. I’d been told that it wasn’t the done thing these days to tow the tank trailer with a 5000 Gallon tank, but they were OK with it and Pa and I had done it before. (Just think about a 3.7m diameter tank on its side on top of a trailer – this takes it to a bit under 5 metres tall!)

Despite a highly embarrassing although minor trailer incident where the trailer wasn’t correctly hitched, we were soon motoring very slowly down the back roads. With the height of the tank we had to be very careful to avoid the trees overhanging the road and zigzagging back and forth at 30km/h.

The tank came off of the trailer easily after the centre post was inserted and was easily slid into its final resting place with the help of the crusher dust.

With one tank done, we picked up the second and headed to Pa’s place to confront a problem. One of the trees looked a little low and despite my enthusiasm to get out the chainsaw, Pa thought we’d be able to ease through.

With a little encouragement, low range four wheel drive engaged and a little slipping and sliding, the tank gently pushed the trunk up and slid underneath! There were a few tense moments, but we were soon crawling gently up the rest of the steep driveway.

With a bit of reversing and some final digging to allow the trailer wheels to be almost level, the tank slid off into place perfectly.

We were happy. Two tanks were in place before lunch with only a one embarrassing moment and no failures. Job done.

After lunch we picked up the shed and plumbed the pump into the water tank at the shed before I had to go and see a client.

Not every day of work ends in so much getting done and it was good to look back at the results.

Check out the gallery for a heap more photos.

A few weeks ago when we were away interstate, South Australia broke the Australian record for heatwaves in a capital city, with 14 days over 35 degrees.

Luckily Meg and I missed 12 days of this with pleasant mid-twenties days on the East coast.

So here we are at the end of March, two weeks after days of 35 and nights around 20 degrees and the temperature has plummeted. Last night was just 1.4 degrees and the night before was only 4.4 degrees.

We’ve had to push forward our ideas of heating and have had a fire for the last two nights.

It is hard to believe the contrast when you consider the garden and its requirements. Two weeks ago, plants were struggling to survive, despite daily watering from the folks. (Thanks guys!)

Now I have stopped a bit of watering, greatly reducing the amount that I put on as the soil is still showing signs of moisture.

Considering these fast changes, how do you plan for winter planting? If I’d had seedling in a couple of weeks ago, they would have lasted about half a day. Now, will they germinate? Luckily I have a few broccoli seedlings in the folks shade house to plant in a few weeks time.

This post is turning into a bit of a rant, but I should at least point out that it rained earlier this week. The 2.5mm that we received was small, but better than nothing and took our yearly total to around 16mm.

Just looking at the Bureau of Meteorology site, on average we should have had about 75mm this year by now and they record the rainfall so far this year for Clare as only 5.2mm.

Here is the mean rainfall for Clare for 133 years, ending in 1994 as a comparison.

So while the title of this post is “The seasons are changing – fast!”, I should explain that I mean that the change from hot to cold, or summer to winter has happened quickly and I’m not providing an opinion on climate change.