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.

Our recent trip away gave us a fair amount of time to chat and think about where we are going. It was about 6000km of travel in a bit more than two weeks and that adds up when you are sitting beside each other and cruising along.

Meg and I talked about some plans for The Journey and got some motivation and inspiration along the way.

The latest plans for the house are for a large living area including kitchen, dining, lounge with a large amount of decking out over the hill. The position of the house (proposed, at the moment) has this room perched over the start of a gully between two hillsides with the decking joining the hills together.

Other rooms will be self contained with walkways joining them together.

We think that we can start with the larger living area, a bedroom and a laundry/bathroom/wet area room, so three buildings in total. Then, as funds and energy return, we can expand into other bedrooms and guestrooms as well as an office.

Besides the house, there is heaps to do including; a garden shed, another tank for gravity fed rainwater to the shed, winter vegies and a garden revamp, a chook house, some more fencing for stock and some stock of some sort.

This is beyond the immediate day to day requirements of work, exercise, producing vegies, fuel (cutting wood for the fire) and living and enjoying our part of the world.

Talking of dreams and ideas, I’ve been watching a show called “Grand Designs” on the ABC occasionally and picking up a lot of ideas and processes about building. This week a couple is building with straw bale (even though it was shot in 1999) and I am interested to catch it.

You can also check it out online at their web site:
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/

Meg and I have travelled around the East Coast of Australia, meeting up with heaps of family members over the last two weeks.

This included Kongorong near Mount Gambier (you can’t go wrong!), the Great Ocean Road into Victoria, Moe and Gippsland, inland and north into New South Wales and Bombala, Batemans Bay, Armidale, Drake, Casino, Lismore and Glenn Innes as well as a half-day trip into Queensland. Our two day return from Armidale took us through Broken Hill and back to Clare.

Rather than a quick post here, Meg will write up a page in the next little while and it will be listed under “Pages” on the menu.

But here is a quick pic from a night of camping in the mountains of South East New South Wales. Quasimodo (the trip mascot) took a while to get out of bed after a night chatting with Sue and Chris from Berry