You may see Squeak's aviary back there.. he's on the ground waiting for the sun to arrive. The tree guards at the front of the picture are young Saltbush plants. Saltbush are known to be extremely tough plants, good for beneficial insects and food for stock like sheep. We'll use them as a hedge and as mother plants for many more cuttings to be planted around the property.
I zoomed-in on the daffodils that have been flowering for a month now. Some of them were pulled up by cockatoos last year, but these two remain, thankfully!
We planted some trees a little earlier in the winter, putting in some tagasaste and saltbush mostly. Someday, stock will enjoy pruning them for us. :)
We still have at least 25 or so more trees and bushes to get into the ground this season. They're almost all locally native, with a few exceptions for other tough trees. They really have to be tough! They should be going in this week.
As you can see, some of the grass and weeds have grown a bit out of control. We've not been using this garden bench, you can't really get to it!
It's a bit of a jungle, but it won't last long as the weather warms up. The mandarin tree has lush green leaves in places where they were badly burned last summer. We've gathered a lot of lovely green grass and added it to the compost heap. It makes a big difference to our otherwise high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio compost. Sometimes we've been using the little Kubota with the front end loader to mix the compost, and it's steaming and looking very good!
Other than that, we've been doing a fair bit of this..
The BabyQ gets used every single day, rain hail or shine.
The old Weber kettle set up for low and slow brisket. This is the snake method, which keeps the kettle going at roughly the right temperature for about 12 hours. The wood chunks add a pink colour to the edges, and also a flavour that's hard to beat.
Not just brisket though, but in this case, ribs too. No, we didn't get through it all in one sitting!
We're doing pretty well on the carnivore diet, although it's no quick fix by any means. Part of me wants to tell you that we're miraculously healed.. Well, our health has been improving, but it comes in cycles. The good days or weeks feel quite good, the bad days or weeks are not as bad as they use to be. On the purely positive side, this diet is the easiest we've ever been on, and we're not tempted to cheat often at all.
Last weekend we needed to be in Wagga Wagga, and we were tempted by the thought of eating out. It would have been 7 months since we cheated or had any carbohydrates at all! We walked into one restaurant and walked right back out again! We didn't end up cheating, it just didn't seem like it was worth the potential pain or bloating, or the setback to our healing progress.
Excuse me while I show off my little repair job on Marty's work pants. :)
We've also been playing with our solar system lately. Realising that Blue (our Victron charge controller) is STILL acting up, Marty has been keen to get it sorted out. We think it might still be under warranty. The only trouble would be that disconnecting Blue and sending her in to see someone will leave us without power for potentially weeks. So, to get around this issue, we researched alternative charge controllers, and found the Morningstar TriStar.
A quick search on eBay, and wouldn't you know, there was someone selling several lightly used controllers, with the monitor, for less than half the price of new. Excited, we purchased one, and went on the hunt for the required cords and instructions. We've managed to update the firmware and program it to suit our batteries. That was fun!
We learned about serial to usb adapters, and that, try as I might, I couldn't update it using Wine under Linux, so we eventually gave up (it took until 3am for me to give up, Marty went to bed a few hours earlier!). We then tried using a virtual machine running Windows XP. That actually worked, and now we're ready to swap them over, just as soon as this last cable arrives which measures the battery temperature.
The benefits of this charge controller over the Victron is what made us keen to try it. The firmware on the Victron couldn't be updated without spending at least $650 on a special cable, and we were not happy about that at all. (The TriStar itself cost us $500, and the cable cost us $40-something, but can be found cheaper online.) The TriStar's data logging is comprehensive and able to be viewed, saved, and graphed over our local network without additional expensive devices or cables. If it works (fingers crossed), we'll have a much better idea of what is happening with our system over time.
If Blue is still under warranty, we'll send her back and maybe they'll be able to fix her up. We can keep her as a spare, or use her to control another system of solar panels some day. Of course, the same fault may occur with the TriStar at the helm, in which case the issue may be with the batteries.
So hopefully all's well that ends well. I'll let you know how it goes - my inner geek is all excited!