Water and wood

Since we got back from our little holiday, we have been working on the plumbing for the rain water tank. The soil was so dry and hard when we started, we hired a jackhammer to get the trench down to the required level for the electricity to run from the solar command centre to the chemical locker that we're using as a pump station. Of course, it rained after we installed the electricity. Good thing that it was finished, but a shame because some rain would have really helped with the digging. Can't have everything!

We are also taking this opportunity to re-do the plumbing from the roof guttering to the tank. It's been going strong for 3 years now, un-glued, only held up by poles in the ground, but it's time to finish it properly. Not long to go now.

We got a little distracted by this awesome pile of wood that Marty arranged to be delivered. Oh my, this wood is extreme! The knots, twists and tenacity, it was very challenging. We learned that you have to chop with the growth rings, and not against them (ie: you can't split this stuff!). Marty and I were happily breaking it down by axe, maul and wedge / sledge hammer combination, one wheelbarrow at a time, but we were offered help by a friend from in town, and we didn't say no! It was raining a little as the wood splitting machine made .. uh, not quite what you'd call "light work" of it, but certainly made life a lot easier for us! The whole pile was done in a few hours and they took off to start splitting a pile for another in need. We're very grateful for the help, but also a tiny bit sad that we'll miss out on any more wood splitting fun we had together. There's nothing quite like the feeling of using all your strength and power, axe in hand, the satisfaction of getting a chunk of wood to come off.

I think this wood pile will last at least 2 years, since it filled both the wood shed and a big old wood rack we got an a clearing sale years ago now.. so it'll be a little while before we get to do it again. Considering the wood only cost about $600, I think it was money well spent.

One thing lead to another

Thank goodness I uploaded the photos before the camera app on my phone broke some of them! I think I've fixed the phone, but I completely forgot to post an update here. I hope you'll forgive this late post!!

It all started when we purchased a pressure pump to get water from our tank into the house. With Winter well on it's way, Marty was mindful of the effect running even this small pump would have on our even smaller solar system. We looked into options locally, and yes, we could upgrade our panels from about 500W to nearly 1000W given our limiting factor - roof space. However, we could get 4 commercial 400W panels to fit, and it'd give us a whopping 1600W of power instead. The only thing is we had to get them from Newcastle. It was either arrange delivery or take a little holiday there ourselves. We opted for the latter!

Of course it rained and rained, but it was beautiful! Driving for over 6 hours from the very dry inland, it wasn't disappointing to us at all. As you can see, we enjoyed the water, all the green, the moisture in the air, everything!

  

We brought the panels back home with the use of a borrowed trailer, and a couple of weeks later, our friendly solar installer did the hard work of getting them on the roof, complete with a proper racking system. The original racks were Z purlins and bits of old signage screwed down to hold the panels in place. We might have considered it dodgy, but they did hold up to the weather for over 5 years!

The system has been much happier since the arrival of the panels. The batteries get to float much more often now, even in poor weather. It's amazing to see them perform the same on overcast drizzly days as our old panels would on sunny clear ones! There's so much power, the batteries have all they want with more to spare, giving us power to to use other electrical appliances more often too.

So, we had a little mini-holiday to Newcastle, experienced staying in an AirBnb host's home, had sourdough pizza and spent hours with our feet dangling in the water.. and brought back enough power to make our new water pump run. Excellent!

Magnesium

Looking at the soil test results, I forgive myself for concentrating on the elements that are missing entirely from our soil. The fact that we have any magnesium at all lead me to mentally put it aside in favour of the trace elements of molybdenum, boron and selenium. Magnesium isn't a trace mineral, although you could argue that 0.043% is only a trace amount, and yes, that's how little magnesium our soils contain.

 

The bean symptoms were the easiest to search for online. Yellow between the veins on older leaves, brown spots, eventually dropping off completely. Unsurprisingly, their season is shorter than it should be. The comfrey leaves look similar, so it will be interesting to see what happens as the magnesium makes its way into the soil.

I don't want to use Epsom salts though, because we have an excess of sulphur in the soil already, so I purchased some magnesium oxide, although it will take a while to become available to the plants in this form.

I've also noticed a massive difference in my own health since Marty and I began spraying each other with magnesium "oil" and taking oral supplements. The "oil" is very relaxing, and pain is eased when sprayed on body parts that hurt (this can be all over at times). After supplementing with magnesium for a few months now, I'm beginning to notice a new found strength in my muscles, and my "energy bucket" is a little larger and re-fills quicker. Even Marty is noticing he has more energy at work and is less tired during the day. 

I plan on offering magnesium freely to the chooks, along side both their shell grit (for calcium) and the Livamol (for trace minerals) already available. They take the supplements if they want them, and I don't have to worry about mixing them into food and getting the correct ratios. I trust that they know what they need.

Fine ground magnesium will be added to the garden beds as they are readied for new plants, and I'm happy to spread the love around the whole garden once the cooler and wetter weather comes back.

I really like this quite from Mary Reynolds in The Garden Awakening: "By healing the land, we heal ourselves; and by healing ourselves we can see more clearly what the land needs to return to health."

Wet day timetable

Yes! We're getting some wonderful rain finally, so I stopped gardening in the shade house and instead took a walk around the "wood lot" to see if any of the trees we planted are still alive.

We planted some wattles and yellow box and river red gum trees last winter. Given how dry the winter was, and how harsh the frost was too, I'm really surprised to discover that we've hardly lost any trees at all. Some are even thriving! It's so hard to make them out given the mess the area is in. If I wasn't a complete tree-hugging hippy, I'd say this area was especially weedy and in need of "a few sheep".

But just look what "a few sheep" can do! At best, anyone else might say the land on the right is well managed for fire. No weeds, no grass, no snakes. I guess it's "safe"..?
The visible trees on the left were planted a couple of years ago. We could have planted a lot more by now, but we're taking it slowly, making sure not to suffer huge losses from one poor season, or an incorrect tree choice. We plant in autumn, to give the trees as long as possible to establish before the next summer, and their first watering is their last from us. I'm starting to feel confident though.. I think I'm going to plant a lot more this year. :)
Oh, and we don't spray anything or weed around the trees. Sounds like a complete waste of energy, time and money to me! I have a very limited supply of all those things. We used second hand tree guards, and old fencing wire as protection. I did buy the bamboo stakes and the trees (although there are a few home propagated wattles in there too), and I guess I did use a tractor to mow the long stuff down a little before planting. I do love the tractor, but as you can see, it doesn't get much use here.

I turned around for this photo of the Murray Pine trees. The young trees take SO long to grow up. The young trees on our side of the fence have been there longer than we have! To make matters worse, they're apparently tasty to sheep, and ripped apart by wallabies and kangaroos on a whim. We've had to cage a few from wildlife on our side of the fence, but they don't stand a chance on the other side. The same amount of wildlife pressure I assume, but on the left in the photo above, far too many sheep.

Actually, I think he only has about 35 sheep on probably about 15 acres if you include the grain silo land that your seeing here. That land has only degraded further over the years, while ours gets more diverse, at least in weeds. :)

But I love the weeds! Maybe I need a new sign for the front gate.. "Weeds Welcome!"
(That might upset the locals though)

Not that I've got anything against sheep! We'll probably get a few some day. Maybe after a few of the trees have grown up enough to provide some shelter, and after we set up water troughs, and fencing for rotational grazing, etc. There won't be any cute lamb photos for a while yet though.

weather and stuff .. pictures of the garden .. another boring blog post?

Well, weather does play a huge part in our lives. Yesterday was just cool enough under the verandah to make some cages to go over the planting trays. That's to give them protection from mice, which enjoy eating the sunflower seeds and new sprouts.

Mice are a fact of life, as are the snakes that eat them. The butcher bird found the Willy Wagtail nest and took one of the babies back to theirs for dinner, the second chick died too but the third one survived and is being cared for by the parents around the garden. That's their second clutch for the season, with four little chicks surviving to adulthood last time. I love living here and watching the interactions of nature around me. Some of the best parts have been creating habitat. The shadehouse has been a bug catcher for generations of Willy Wagtails so far, and it's only getting better, albeit slowly.

 

The tomato stakes were great perches for Willy to wait for a big juicy bug to go past, but now the tomatoes are taller than their stakes. Written on the description for the seeds I saved in Stawell, the yellow pear tomatoes (left hand side in the photo) get to 1.5m tall (and even there, they didn't grow that tall). They've well and truly topped 2 metres tall now, with green fruits and more flowers coming along. I hear the buzz of the blue banded bee, who are still nesting in our wall, but I'm so glad they're around. Those, and the huge orange and black wasps that drag large hairy spiders back to their nests in the ground (although one has made a mud nest in the bathroom, as have many other types of mud wasps!). Sure, we'll get the odd spider, especially the orb weavers that make their web across the walkways and sit right in the middle, waiting for dinner, or someone careless enough not to be wearing a headlamp! But I'll take that any day over spraying termiticide that lasts 10 years around the house every year (the local man doing this had never seen the big spider catching wasps).

Past 9 or 10 in the morning, though, and the heat becomes too much for me, and too much for many of the critters around. Cicadas call, lizards run and hide in the dry straw or dead plants as I walk past. If the wind is up, everything looks terrible, even in the shadehouse. The sprinklers turn on every 4 hours for 5 minutes at the moment. I'm still trying to work out what is best, but that helps keep the humidity up a little and the plants wilting slightly less during the day. I water everything in pots every morning. Almost everything in pots has a drip tray of some description, or it simply dries out too quickly. It's been over 47°C (116.6°F) under the verandah, the house slowly rising in temperature, but hovering around 32°C (91.4°F). The mud brick walls don't cool down easily, and the indoor temperature doesn't fluctuate much. That's really lovely at any other time of the year! There are still things we can do to improve conditions, they're on my To Do list, ok? :p

Something we did get done was to attach some reo-mesh to the side of the structure. I did want to grow some passionfruit along there, and I have two vines waiting for more favourable weather before planting them out. The soil will also need work before I do.. But the mesh is finally up! I took a photo of one of the better welds that I did. They're not all that good! So, we moved the tractors, moved the strawbales from one side to the other, got Michael's metal detector out and looked, once again, for Marty's wedding ring. It must have been over a year ago since he lost it. I've used the metal detector everywhere from where the strawbales were (he was getting some fresh straw for a chicken nest), all the way up to where the chooks were housed around the almond tree in "the orchard". We've found so much scrap, bits of fence and even melted metal, plenty of screws and washers too. Well, that day we found a slightly dusty titanium ring resting in the straw! :)

Marty's been working hard in town every day for the last 6 months, putting us on the exciting road to becoming debt free in just 6 more months time. Hopefully then he won't have to work so hard in the near future and can spend some more time at home.