Not a real farmer

Well, I made it to two posts in a row. For the last few years that’s a milestone, not necessarily one to be proud of but a milestone nonetheless.

It’s the first week I’m back taking work seriously, and as such my time outside has dropped off a metaphorical cliff. Unfortunately with the milder weather and all the irrigating I have been doing it is also a ‘blink and the weeds are huge’ time of year. Exhibit A…

I am choosing to focus on the lovely meadow view rather than acknowledging that every one of those yellow flowers is a weed seed spreading nightmare waiting to happen.

I am also choosing not to focus on the fact that in my last post, mowing the eastern tree block was on the immediate need to do list. A great illustrative example of why it is important to do certain things in a timely manner when it comes to owning land.

I managed to get some spraying done

This shouldn’t be the big deal that it is but with our land being so exposed on a west facing slope I get a good spray day maybe once a month at best. This time I managed to get out five 9L tanks. Spraying would be one of my most hated jobs, yet most satisfying when completed. Over the following days I get to wander around the garden watching where I have sprayed yellow off, sound in the knowledge that those small patches of land are sorted for the coming months. The only areas I am watching with trepidation are where I was spraying in and around the hedge. It was a bit high risk but the fastest and most effective way to kill off the grass. What’s left will hopefully then be more manageabel for hand weeding.

I basically never get to spray everywhere I want to in one go, so I have learnt that I am better off concentrating on keeping the areas I sprayed last time well managed rather than leaving those until next time. Disturbance weeds come back surprisingly quickly and as is less surprising for successful disturbance weeds, they throw seed in record time. No weeds mean no seed… yay.

The front garden bed almost looks ok

This has been an ongoing project over the years and has been hand weeded more times that I care to admit. We have tried a whole range of ‘we don’t quite have enough money to do it properly the first time’ strategies such as:

• Ignoring it
• Starting at the edges and planting our way in
• Getting some trees in early
• Sowing flowers from seed for Bees

Of the strategies that we have tried it has been defining an edge with concrete curbing that has made the most difference to it feeling like it is meant to be like that. We are now managing as best we can with the small number of flower seeds that have survived, mostly Alyssum and Corn flowers by weeding around them and encouraging them to throw seed in a slow botanic hostile takeover.

Hard lessons

Next time I would bite the bullet, define the edges and get irrigation in before I started planting. Trees might be the exception to that, but this piecemeal approach has probably seen work done five times over if not more.

Small produce wins

And I emphasise the word ‘small’ here. Many people have fantasies about owning land, some semblance of self-sufficiency, and growing your own produce… and we aren’t any different. Several failed vegetable plots over the years have taught us otherwise. Usually it’s not enough time, or not enough time at just the wrong time. It sucks getting a vegetable garden many weeks or months down the line and the first time you can’t give it the attention it needs it happens to be the week that is critical for it to stay alive. But that’s not what this is about… we got a Lime.

To say that I’m desperate to be able to grow good Citrus is an understatement. We have three lemon trees, two limes, two Yuzus, a Cumquat, a Limequat, and a Pomelo. Of those two must spend the Winter indoors with me lifting the heavy pots inside and outside on a regular basis. My wife has put me on a ban from buying anymore citrus that I fully intend to break soon.

Most of the citrus we do have were bought and planted in 2018. Most have gone through cycles of sulking and surprisingly one of the best trees in the ground is a Tahitian Lime that has no business being as happy as it is with the Antarctic blasts that we get from the Southwest. By 2021 with still no fruit I was starting to grumble, and they must have heard me with each lime tree pumping out a whole one lime each. This week it was cocktail time. Having gotten the message, I can now happily say the trees are loaded for next season’s crop.

More for posterity

Here we are again… again.

I am going into this a third time with little expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I have high hopes but I’m a realist on expectation. While I would love to write a blog that others find useful, I am going to settle for something that lets me keep a record for myself of the property as it develops. It would be nice to think next year I can look back at this year and compare how far things have come and or draw on experience already gained. First goal however is to get this to next week.

We have just come off the back of a hot week. With five or so days above 35 degrees I have spent the last couple watering and mowing. Watering is self-explanatory, and while the grass would be happier to be left long there is a healthy crop of weed seed heads that need to be mown down. They can also get caught in the sprinklers stopping them from turning, and with 6hr watering shifts often at night, one of those can muck things up properly.

I was surprised to see that even with the hot weather there are still fresh growing tips on many of the trees. This is unusual for January with things usually fizzling out around later November. It has been a cooler lead into summer which has helped with only one hot north-westerly so far. These usually fry the growing tips and then that’s it for the year.

I also think that my efforts to stick to my fortnightly watering schedule, our blanket watering style, and the size of the trees have started to create a micro-climate in some parts of the garden. I have no measurements to back this up yet, but the eastern tree block is noticeably more protected from the f#%*ing incessant wind (apologies, it’s a sore point) with good shade and what feels like higher humidity. If the trees can have warm humid leaves and damp roots they should continue growing like weeds.

I still must mow the eastern tree block in the coming days as it is where the pipes already were from the last round of watering. I am not looking forward to it as the Pin Oaks continue to send their branches to the ground from where they slap me in the head as I attempt to mow under them. I hope to get the last laugh, but I am reluctant to prune the lower branches up while the trees are so actively in growth. Waiting to winter would be best but I am not sure my pride can make it that far.

I have the sprinklers running during the day today as there is stronger winds forecast in the coming days. I will need to move them again this evening, hopefully getting two full shifts in today if I can stay up late enough. I might mow the ‘fancy’ lawn later but otherwise I’m inside attempting to work for the rest of the day.

So I’ve been here before, this is the first post… again. The real first post was three and a half years ago, maybe four. There may have even been a false start in-between but I’m hazy on the details.

A bit has happened.

I’m a dad, twice. I’ve changed jobs, twice. The house we built is finished, but it isn’t. Maintaining 5 acres is harder that it has even been, all of which has given rise to an impressive collection of first world problems I feel suitably ashamed of when compared to ‘real’ problems. If I had to try and wrap it up neatly in one I would say Father Time is an a#%-hole and if he ever decides to anthropomorphise at my place I would barely feel guilty about kicking him in the junk at the moment.

Any hoo… I feel I’m off down the wrong track here.

I couldn’t sleep the other night.

It wasn’t a self inflicted case of caffeine over consumption, I tend to avoid it after lunch for that reason. It was a convergence of thinking. Everything I had to do and everything I want to do. Unfortunately they don’t seem to line up and ‘has to’ seems to win over ‘want to’.

It didn’t help that one of out neighbours sheep had gotten itself stuck on our property, seemed to insist on hanging around our house, and I am assuming regretting its decision decided to let everyone know about it. Sheep by their very nature like to hang out together, to describe someone as a sheep is to imply they are comfortable in the flock, following and doing what everyone else is doing. When the flock on the right side of the fence moved on the sheep wasn’t very happy. Well mr sheep, maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to break in. Yes our grass is indeed greener on this side of the fence, we only planted it weeks ago but you weren’t exactly spoilt for choice on your side either.

I had contacted the person adjisting the sheep on our neighbours property but having gotten home after dark it wasn’t the time to try and push it back through the fence, hence we had a boarder for the night. Contrary to popular belief counting real sheep when you want to sleep, or at least waiting for the next bleat is not very relaxing. Sleep, unfortunately not sheep eluded me for a while longer.

My wife and I are lucky enough to own a small patch of the lovely Adelaide Hills, about 5 acres. Well, we rent it from the bank. Apparently it will be ours in 24 years at the current projection, understandably I haven’t marked it on the calendar yet.

About a year ago we were blessed with a daughter, its the best thing that’s every happened to me. But, being highly mobile and still working on her balance its shift work between my wife and I to keep her from the big falls and out of the things she shouldn’t be in. Needless to say not a lot of time for the property. Having a kid definitely teaches you to be much more efficient with any time you do have.

Why am I attempting this again?

I come from a family of rural diary takers and I have read that it can be good for you as a point of reflection.

My memory is also s#%t, chronological order is a particular problem, and I want to be able to look back and see what we have done.

The last attempt was about building the house. The title was something like a ‘journey of building on 5 acres in the Adelaide hills’ and I managed to get 6 or 8 entries in. It was very enjoyable writing about it but the house project began to lurch from one disaster to another and became a journey of endurance just to keep things on track. Understabdably the diary entries fell to the way side.

It was such an unpleasant experience we fell out of love with the property. Many people would dream of this so we just need to get on with it and fall in love with it again.

I need this to feel like something I really want to do, not have to do.

Rain… We do it quite well in the Adelaide Hills, in fact we may have even been out doing our selves recently.

The Bureau of Meteorology has predicted a wetter than average winter and we are definitely on track. In a farming community it can be very important when it does and doesn’t rain so you have to be mindful of whom you say what to when. Very quietly I really wish it would go away for a while, at least until the house is weather tight.

In the past few weeks we have had three significant rain events, +70mm and are working our way into another one. The ground in sodden so anything that lands now is running off to fill creeks and dams around the area. Until a couple of weekends ago where a bit of handy shovel work set us right it was also filling the area around our house. Even with our new and improved drainage it’s still nothing but shoe stealing mud for several meters around the edge.

Our winter’s creek or ‘beck’, an old English word recently discovered to me, is flowing swiftly and making me wish I had used some of the finer weather to shore up our track crossing. If it’s still there when the next string of fine weather finally happens to line up with a weekend I might have to do something about it.

The brickwork has been progressing although slowly. Apparently because the bricks we have used are so hard fired, translation, ‘crispy fried’, they don’t absorb any moisture from the mortar and cannot be laid when wet. If they are laid wet, the layer of water on the outside causes the brick to ‘swim’, sliding out of alignment and the mortar slumps. As testament to this the brickie tried powering through one day and ended up having to pull it back down. Now in winter with precious few fine days, we have to waste half of them waiting for the bricks to dry out. This is all in stark contrast to many standard bricks which are so absorbent they must be wet before being laid.

We are meant to, fingers crossed, touch wood, whatever takes your fancy, have a few days of fine weather coming up. The brickie thinks with decent weather he should be done this week and after yesterday’s failed steel work installation, rain again; some fine weather would be much appreciated.

Yesterday I was home to watch the steel being installed. Like pouring the slab or putting the roof on it is one of the big events during the construction of the house. In some senses it feels like the house is the real deal now we have some steel in it. But…it rained. After a string of nice clear days with the ground finally dry enough to work on it rained. It rained the night before hand and right through to lunchtime. The crane driver was sick so the steel workers brought a hired cherry picker. The cherry picker weighed a tonne and a half and had skinny, what some might call pizza cutter wheels. This all culminated in bogged.

It was lucky I was home because I had to use the tractor to pull the cherry picker out which then almost bogged the tractor for my efforts. In the end we needed a combination of five pushing and a tow chain hooked up to the tractor on safe ground. As far as things go this is not too bad. A couple of weeks ago on a neighbors property I watched tandem tractors with a hundred meters of tow chain pulling out a Land Cruiser that was bogged up to the ‘top’ of its front wheel. That took them all day, we only lost an hour but with only one column half installed it was not the day off I had hoped for.

It is now quite timely that the trusty earth workers were back today to banish the mud with a layer of rubble around the house. In fact at this stage the build cannot proceed without it.