Week One

Trev healed quickly from his run in with the chisel and is back to work, with no ill effects. You can see some of his chisel work in the 4.5 metre post that he and neighbour, Tony Dunshea, have just erected, a 3.5 metre one was quick to follow. Then Trev is back to laying out joists and inventing his latest 'help for the loner builder', to assist him to put the 10" X 2" ring beams that will surround the house and the mid section supporting the clerestory windows. Of course I'm creating the right climate for a catastrophic accident because I dare to discuss the kinds of ways this may occur (By discuss, Linda means go on and on ad infinitum about the the number of ways in which I could die or be horribly injured, until I get to the stage where I'm really tempting fate by being forced to say "it'll never happen" - Trev) . In so doing, I must be aligning stars, moons, or altering the bearing abilities of differing elements in order to 'make it happen'. I'm told to shoosh. Here was me thinking that women were superstitious.

Caleb is doing well, he had a haircut recently (it was getting long, but apparently the girls at school liked it that way, but eventually it was going wool blind and was sick of it. He looked in the mirror when he arrived home to discover something that we have long known, 'Oh my God, my ears are huge!'


I've been having some great days running around weeding, mulching, planting,
whippersnipping, watering, digging over ground. It's around 1/2 an acre of ground to weed now.

I've planted out thousands of sunflowers, two 30 metre rows of chickpeas (I love my hommus) 3 X 30 rows of soy beans (we love our tofu), blocks of corn (for better wind germination), strips of alfalfa for bee food and eventually hay for winter goat feeding, plus about 12 X 30 metre rows of wheat, for making our own bread. We think...

In the orchard the chooks are starting to bare root some of the trees, so I watered them well, surrounded them in mulch, then chop up 1 X 1 metre squares of chook wire and chop a 'neck' and a 'head hole' into the wire and then peg it down, with Trev's u-beaut designed pegs (small pieces of wood with a downward pointing nail on one side).

Planted out hundreds of potatoes, eggplants, zucchini, broccoli, beans, tomatoes, pumpkins really buzzing with the whole thing. Planting out 200 square metres of sunflowers, I figure a good pollen crop, oil seed to see if we can press enough to be useful to us, and the rest is an addition to the goat bucket. We grew them in small amounts last year - dried them in the greenhouse, unfortunately birds ate every seed out of the drying heads before we realised. Hopefully this year we'll get in first.

One clucky hen, progeny due on the 9th of November. I just happen to have that pegged as a day off Time in Lieu. So will be around the event. Camera will be in hand.

I'll leave you with a photo of Trev, end of day, contemplating house building, life in general and the quality of his home brewed beer.