More before and after

We have finally finished the last edging and mulching in the south beds at the front of the house so here is the transformation. In our defence, a lot of this is just summer vs winter, with the leaves off the trees. So before is overgrown, beds full of grass and trees just randomly doing whatever they wanted with their branches.

After is a lot more orderly, even if a bit stark.

Honestly, those trees and shrubs were suffering with crossed over branches and sad twisty bits. We did them a favour. Honestly. At least the hellebores on the bed we mulched with fallen leaves are incredibly happy and covered with new growth. Although that might just be the month of frosts we've had.

And here's the last before and after - we have spent a couple of days repainting the kids' rooms in our old house in a futile attempt to get someone to buy it. Removed the child-chosen brights including extra-bright feature walls and painted over them in off-white. It's very sad, but the rooms do look bigger now ... this turquoise took three coats! Most of that was remediating the short-lived but sooty scented candle phase.

Height of ruralness

On Wednesday we reached the pinnacle of country living when we finally put a match to the Burn Pile. The Burn Pile has been growing bigger and bigger with all the logs and branches that have been pulled out of the creek and other stuff that is just too enormous to chip and no good for firewood ... and that has just been down in the lower forty too far from the house to do anything with easily. So it's been put in a pile for Burning, and on Wednesday we Burned.

It was a perfect day for it, freezing cold with frost, then clear and sunny and absolutely no wind. We had to tell the local RFS of course (who then made a facebook post to let everyone know but giving the wrong address, eye roll) and warn our neighbours 48 hours in advance which was an excellent opportunity to say hello to the neighbours. Which we have been  meaning to do since we moved in but have only done friendly waves so far. 

It started off with a solid application of diesel then it was a couple of hours hauling branches to chuck on, then a couple of hours making sure it kept burning, and then a couple of hours staring, raking, playing with the coals and burning random twigs on the ground. It was awesome, I love burning things at the best of times and this was massive. It was all out by dinner time and our four huge piles of branches have gone. 

It was nice just to stand down in the lower forty and admire the view. It's a fenced paddock next to the road, over the creek bridge but we have no use for it at the moment so I never go down there. It's very pretty and people wave as they drive past because nothing says rural togetherness like Burning. 

And the other advantage is that the neighbours over the back said they would pop in, which they did, while I was in the shower, so had to do a dressing gown run past them to get some clothes on ... but once that awkwardness was behind us we had a good natter. They've been here 15 years so could fill us in on the last two previous owners, and the other neighbours, and the weather, and useful things like that.

We were chipping the next day and Mr Neighbour came up to examine our chipper that had been the topic of discussion the previous day - Mrs Neighbour had thought we got people in to do our chipping because 'one of them was wearing high-vis'. No, one of them was not wearing high-vis, one of them just got another pair of amazing gardening overalls in a colour that appeared on the website to be burnt orange.

It is not burnt orange, I look like a traffic cone, if traffic cones were spheres. But I don't care, they are so amazing, and after a day's burning it was kind of greyish anyway. We have finally got some pallets to store next year's firewood from everything we are chopping down ... but we need some more, that didn't really make a dent in the chop pile. Peak Ruralness. 

Choppity chop chop

The joys of a neat and tidy twig-garden have gone to our head and we have turned into chainsaw wielding maniacs. It's gone from careful googling of tree types and thoughtful pruning to two options - "head height" or "knee height". We are clearing out crossed branches, dead branches, ugly branches and any branches that stab us or clip us on the ear. Then we take those branches and run them through the chipper while staring at the remaining trees.  Chip one, teach a hundred.

It looks SO much better. We are nearly done mulching those beds and I even spent many sad hours trying to dig the periwinkle out. With very limited success - much like the grass it will be a process of dig, smother and poison. And burn, we haven't used our flaming weed gun yet and it's always very satisfying. 

We bought a little wagon for the ride on mower. It has already been super useful - holds about three wheelbarrowsful - and is wonderful for moving heavy stuff like firewood. 

 The electrician had our power off at lunchtime on Wednesday so we went into town for a bacon and egg roll and took a detour up the road above our house. The main water supply for the town is up there, and the overflow goes down the valley and is the creek that runs through our place. It's very rare for it to flow, but with all the rain this year we've only ever seen water in it. Not normal. 

You can't really tell from this photo but we're looking down a fairly steep hill. The water dam is up to the left, and there are trees in the little valley that lead down to our place, which is where the big clump of trees is. It gave us a good sense of the geography that we hadn't had before ... the countryside is looking very brown and wintry! It was cold. Our visitors went skiing for a couple of days with low hopes of snow but ended up having heaps including heavy falls on their last day. They stayed another couple of days at the snow then overnighted with us on their way back north.

The selvedge quilt!

Sorry Pam, but here is another finished quilt. Yes, I do make them quickly, but it is amazing how much quicker you get with practice, and also what else am I up to? Nothing, that's what. And it's great. 

In my defence, I have been working on this one for about 15 years. It takes a LOT of selvedges to make a quilt, and I'd do a few blocks every now and then, when I felt the urge for mindless sewing. I found them in a drawer, realised there were 100 (actually 102) which is a nice 10 by 10 quilt, sewed them together and quilted it up.

Strictly speaking I didn't quilt it, I tied it with embroidery floss. And there's no batting because it's so heavy - strips sewn over strips onto a backing fabric - so I just backed it with a flannelette sheet. Although I stuffed that up a bit because I bought something I thought was a flannelette sheet but which was actually some weird synthetic with a slight stretch ... I liked the colour (pale pink) and it felt soft and fluffy but the fabric was a bit of a disaster. It was from Kmart though, so I probably could have predicted it.

But I ploughed ahead, made 100 little thread knots, put some binding on it and who would know? It looks like a proper one. It was lovely to put it together because of the trip down memory lane with all the fabrics. Some of them people had sent me which was even lovelier! A group effort. 

The pretty

For the past two years - when we described our retirement place to increasingly incredulous friends who wondered why we would do such a thing - at some point we would just shrug our shoulders and say "we bought the pretty". Because we did, we bought the flowers and the blue sky and the embroidered tablecloths and the hammock. But, every day, I look around and admire the pretty. Even in the depths of winter. Here is fog this morning just starting to burn off down the driveway.

But still misty over the back, towards the creek.

Here is the other end of the day, as the shadows get long and it starts to get cold.

But still sunny over to the west, until the sun finally hits the hills.

Or the west this afternoon, as a big storm rolled across. We were enjoying the sunshine and thinking about doing a couple of hours chipping when we heard thunder and saw the black sky. About half an hour later it bucketed through with lightning so close we checked out the windows for burning trees. And there was hail! Just little peas luckily.

Our visitors have left to do some skiing - it was so lovely to have them stay and show them our corner of the world.

Scrappy stars

Here is a little quilt I made because the scrap strips were getting a bit out of control ... and I do love a scrappy quilt. I called it "pruning and mulching" because that is all I think about other than quilting. It was a fun make. 

I tried to do a floral theme but I didn't have quite enough florals so some are just floral-adjacent. I did capture the sunset on the washing line though, it was very pretty.

We have Brad's brother and 11-year old niece staying at the moment, which is lovely, to have visitors! Unfortunately we have had the worst weather with serious rain all up the east coast. They managed to get a bush walk in Monday but Tuesday was a Canberra day of museums and yesterday was wandering around Braidwood (ten minutes max) then driving to see the floods. It's clearing now thank goodness.

The most exciting thing was watching our wombat discover that its burrow was completely flooded and it had to find somewhere new to sleep. It rampaged around the front lawn for a bit (wombats are super cute when they run) before disappearing over into the cow paddock next door. I refused to go outside to take a photo so this is a wombat through the window. They are quite big ... it's called Chonky. 

Here's the creek beside our road into town. It runs behind the properties that sit behind ours, so our house isn't likely to be flooded but our only way out is the bridge just before town and it was sitting pretty close to the water for an hour or two.