When we bought The Journey last year, we knew that the fences were pretty bad. It wasn’t as though they had been neglected over the years and deteriorated due to age, stock pushing on them or misuse, but the subdivision that created our block had just been fenced badly.

The existing fence was four strands of plain wire, over-tensioned in many places and with large spacing between droppers and using a minimum of posts and stainers. This caused a strange mix of very tight wire that pulled low over the crest of hills, pulled droppers out of valleys causing the wire to rise to such an extent that you could drive under it, and other sections that sagged. In short – it wasn’t designed to hold stock.

The section that we’d considered for our initial experience with stock is a relatively clear paddock of about nine acres. This was an obvious choice as an internal fence already existed and the only new fence was to join about 50 metres.

I’d watched the contractors redo the neighbours place about six months ago and noted some of their modifications; they’d removed the original strands of wire and installed sheep and lamb wire with two plain strands on top, replaced some droppers with posts in the valleys and they built some new strainers as well for added support.

The feed in the our paddock had been left to the kangaroos for the past few years and had a considerable amount of Salvation Jane (or Paterson’s Curse, the Purple Peril etc) throughout. I’d considered slashing it and had read up on the effects of this weed on livestock and come to the conclusion that a mob of sheep would reduce both the feed and also the fire danger by early summer.

In thinking about taking sheep on, I had to consider a number of factors such as drenching, shearing and dealing with lambs and well as ownership – to buy or agist?

A farmer mate of my fathers was talking to him about it all and said that he’d be keen to put some sheep in, so the right pressure was put in the right place and I had a goal, a purpose, a need to get the fencing done.

I had a chat to the guys at Elders about some sheep and lamb fencing and ended up with some rolls of 6 30 90 – six strands with vertical wires every 30 centimetres and a total of 90 centimetres high. My idea was to strain it across the posts and then just twitch it to the existing fence, hopefully providing a very strong fence that will last for years.

Of course, I had to buy a heap of droppers to put in between the existing droppers – I figured about two extra droppers for each existing as the current dropped were about 25 metres apart!

Rolling out the wire, straining and twitching took a considerable amount of time, much more that I’d thought it would. Pa helped me with a fair bit of it, but there were a couple of afternoons of twitching on my own.

Way back in January when we’d put in the strainers (yes, this project has been going on for a while!) I’d guessed at the size of the gate and figured that I’d just use a couple of gates from another part of the fence on the main road. I couldn’t see us using that particular gateway again as it was very steep uphill and straight off of the main road. It had seemed like a good idea.

Transferring the gates wasn’t too hard, but it seems that I had been a little generous on the opening size, leaving a gap that a lamb could easily walk through. The solution was to put in a removable middle post for the gates and I had just the thing – another one of the permapine posts from the pile. To make it removable, we dug a hole and cemented a tin sleeve for the post to slide into. The job worked well and even looked as though we’d planned it that way!

The fencing certainly changes the look of the place. It was looking a little derelict with corner strainers and no wire and metre high feed and weeds in the paddock. The fencing project has been a big step forward. Now we need to get some stock in.

A few months ago we moved out of the caravan and into the shed. This major milestone also meant that the van had to be cleaned up before heading back to the folks place and somewhere in the weeks following the migration to the shed we discovered a couple of potatoes in a draw in the van, obviously forgotten and starting to sprout.

I’d heard about people growing potatoes and read up a bit on the way to grow them, but potatoes have been pretty cheap to buy and I’ve tended to grow other crops.

These sprouting tubers had given me the opportunity for an experiment, so I’d popped them into a garden bed and forgotten about them until the leaves started appearing through the mulch.

I’d read about mounding up around the stalk as it appears and used “slices” of pea straw for this. (As you use a bale of pea straw, the bale pulls apart in square “slices” which stick together unless you tease them apart. In this way, the “slice” is reusable for a number of purposes and lasts longer.)

Today we had lunch with the folks and took a wander in the garden afterwards to pick some vegies for Reen.

The potato leaves had curled so we dug them up and were surprised at the number – 21 small to medium potatoes! A ten fold increase on the two tubers that I’d planted.

Meg picked some mint and we had them steamed with some of our broccoli and carrots. They were so fresh, with crisp skin and great flavour. I don’t think that I’ve ever had better potatoes!

My mind is now changed. Growing potatoes is not only easy, but the results are great. Good quality and yield and I didn’t water them anywhere near as much as the rest of the garden. They were easy to harvest and had hardly any dirt on them when dug up. In fact, some had burrowed into the pea straw wall of the garden bed and these hardly needed any washing.

All in all it was a great experiment, turning waste into great tasting food. Now I think that I might have to start a production line for propagation – cutting the eyes from spuds and tempting them to sprout before planting them, rather than just adding them to the compost.

Mmmm… Potato!

 Check out the other photos in the gallery.

Australia can be a dangerous place. It has started to get a little warmer lately and we’ve already had encounters with some brown snakes outside.

Tonight was different though. We have the usual community of millipedes, ants, beetles and spiders, but we don’t generally get anything bad crawling through the shed.

It was late at night, and I was about to go to bed when I saw a scorpion wandering across the floor in front of the tv. I was a little surprised as I’d only ever rarely seen them under rocks and here was a scorpion crawling slowly across in front of me.

I grabbed a pint glass and covered it before grabbing the camera for a few happy snaps.

Initially I just put my 28-70/f2.8 L lens on, but was soon reminded that I’d need the Speedlite 550EX flash to get around the lens on close up shots (the standard flash is too low and the size of the lens causes a shadow in the shot).

I set up the camera and tried to get a good shot, but it was hard with such a small object and the lens is more for portrait work rather than close up macro shots.

To try and get some perspective, I lay down on the floor, trying to get as close as possible and modified the angle of the flash for different lighting effects. I’d lift the glass with my left hand and take some shots, trying to get the detail of the scorpion – the end of the tail, the hairs on the body, the angles of the pincers and the shine in it’s eyes.

See how the grains of dirt on the concrete floor show up – the scorpion was only about five centimetres long.

I was having trouble getting a full frame, so I swapped lenses to the 100-400/f4.5-5.6 L zoom. With this lens I had to be much further back, but it gave slightly different lighting from the flash.

After taking shots from all angles, I put him back in the glass and walked outside, releasing him along the driveway.

OK, it wasn’t really a scorpion attack, but it did raise the heart rate just before bedtime.

After the “Shed Raising Party”, Meg and I had had some requests for another camping weekend and had organised the October long weekend.

Again it was a cross section of family and friends from all around the place, with many seeing The Journey for the first time.

There has been a lot of change since the last weekend in July, with the wet area setup including shower, sink and washing machine, Meg’s cob oven and the vegie garden producing well.

The kids were entertained with heaps of games set up. Thanks to Caro and Rod they had volleyball, badminton, totem tennis, soccer, cricket and kites as well as the water pistols that Meg had found for each of them.

The main event on Sunday saw a good crowd for lunch, with a big barbecue and roast chicken from Meg’s oven to feed everyone.

Some afternoon arrivals were a blast from the past – the Errey’s dropped in to see the place. Peter was a year 7 teacher when I was in primary school and his daughter Cassie was in my year. 25 years later and only a little has changed! Peter and his wife Zan live around the corner on Spring Gully Road.

It was a relaxed atmosphere, chatting around the fire at night and catch up on all of the news from people that we haven’t seen for a while.

Raph and I joined in on a huge game of hide and seek with the kids on Sunday night, roaming around the vegie garden and fruit trees by torchlight. The kids found some pretty good hiding spots and we all had a good laugh.

Thanks to everyone who came along and contributed to the weekend – we’ll see you all again soon.