More little things

I don't know where the past week has gone since my sister left - we were looking forward to her visit for ages and now we have to face the chores and other events. We went into Canberra last Saturday for a christmas in July lunch and overnighted with friends, which was very social and involved a lot of food. It was a beautiful morning in Canberra on Sunday - as we left (to go grocery shopping) our friend went off  to walk her dog and that is the one thing I miss about living in the country - going for a walk in a park! We get plenty of fresh air but it's not the same.

Painting of the art studio continues. It is taking forever and we are sick of it. The floor did go in on Monday which is progress - it is commercial vinyl and I haven't taken a picture yet because he left logs on the floor holding down patches until the glue dries. I don't think he normally uses logs but they were lying around. Speaking of logs, this photo is of the gum tree that had to have a few branches taken off it so the concrete truck could get in. The tree looks much better for it, and it took me five wheelbarrows to get that tiny pile of logs off to the woodpile. It looks much tinier in this photo than it was.

We've had two mornings of minus six degrees which were unbelievably cold. Our ute got left outside and refuses to start now so we have to figure that one out. Our pipes froze over so my husband went down the hardware first thing to buy some lagging and they didn't freeze on the second cold night, so it must have done some good. Apparently he wasn't the only one in the shop buying it. Some of my broadbeans are looking a bit sad but I don't think it's the frost. We haven't had any rain so I better give them a water. 

The electrician spent all Sunday here (he is young and has deeply overcommitted himself) installing our new EV charger. So now we don't have to use a very slow plug in the garage but can park it outside the house and charge at about six times the rate of the outlet plug. Very exciting. I have programmed it to charge during the day when we have that free electricity window ... our solar panels are still producing three fifths of nothing. We shall see if it improves in summer.

I have started pruning the roses - slightly early but it's such a massive job that I may as well start. It's so much easier than last year! I am dealing with roses and not demented prickly trees. I think I am being a bit less ruthless this year too - I still have no idea what I'm doing but I'll see how this goes.

And I have been keeping toasty warm in this glorious woolly cardigan. No, I didn't knit it, my mother knitted it for me when I was at uni. I haven't worn it in thirty years but I couldn't throw it out - not one of mum's handknits! - so I'm now wearing it. It is super cosy, and I did not brush my hair for this photo.

Visitor, concrete, painting

It's all go round here at the moment - the best bit has been my sister visiting for a couple of days. She was on holiday in Sydney with her family but ditched them for a couple of nights to come and see our part of the world. Which was just lovely, although the weather was AWFUL. Freezing and super windy; so I'm not sure if we showed our little patch to its full advantage. 

Not much to do round here as a tourist - we wandered round the town (half hour max) and otherwise sat by the fire, went for dinner at the pub, and paced the garden, briefly. Monday morning the hydro-trenching guy came back to make an electrical trench and an enormous amount of mud slurry ... super cool and absolutely showed the network of tree roots and unexpected pipes that exist round our house. Normal digging would never have got through it, so I'm glad we went with water shooting guy. My husband mapped all the unexpected pipes for the future, although we don't really know where most of them go.

Tuesday morning we had our concrete pour which went well. No Dad, we didn't smooth the top of the concrete to make it too slippery, and we are already enjoying the luxury of having somewhere to stand while hanging the washing.

The floor of the lavender shed also looks much better - we are going to concrete in a ramp so we can park the mower and chipper there. They took the back panel off to get the concrete chute in but didn't need it in the end. 

My husband is also a historian who is annoyed by a lack of date documentation ... so he dated the concrete. Why not.

Other than that there is endless painting of the studio. Windows, doors, walls, ceiling, inside and out, fascias, eves, beams. They have to come back and do the step, then stain the deck and the steps. It was horrible on the windy days but rather lovely on a day like today when it was sunny and still and frosty in the morning. 

This is the colour I've gone with on the walls - the photo is after I've cut in the corners and the grooves between the boards with the white of the undercoat showing in the middle. I took this because when you've painted the whole wall it just looks like an off-white, but when it's next to an actual white you can see that it's a very soft grey-green. I am very pleased with it, and with my ability to pick a muted colour when every instinct wanted something much much stronger. The floor is another story though, and should be installed next week.

A studio!

We finally had two days without any chance of rain and the guys came out from Queanbeyan to put my studio up. I thought it was pre-fab but it was actually planks of wood - cabin style I guess - and I watched it grow over a couple of days.

The wood looks really lovely all natural but it's not robust enough to leave - especially on our western edge that cops the wind and the sun and the storms - so we are painting it inside and out. The roof is colorbond which is good and tough. We thought we'd do the painting ourselves to save some money but raw timber is a bit of a pain. And the inside was giving sauna vibes until we put the undercoat on. We are leaving the ceiling timber though - so just a couple of coats of clear varnish, which is much easier.

Double glazed tilt / turn windows and doors are a double pain to paint; but we will do it! How hard can it be. We have a deadline of next Monday when the flooring goes in, and I think it should be fine. This is the undercoat going on.

This is the view from the inside! So pretty, even on a 9 degree day when it's blowing a gale.

And this is what colour the outside will be. I introduced myself to the lady over the road down the coast who had painted part of her house this colour and got the name of it, because I thought it looked fabulous. Interestingly, I would never have picked the paint sample in the store, but I love it now it's on, even after just one coat.  Much of that white is still undercoat, so will be yellow, and there'll be a dark grey steel skirt the same as the roof. Imagine, a little fairy house in your garden to peruse your arts and crafts! How amazingly wonderful.

Gardening trivia

Here are some of the tiny gardening things that we have been up to. This is mostly for Dad, I don't think anyone else is very interested ... other than me! It will be the only way I remember what I've done, although my husband is keeping an any year diary of what we do each day. He's already making entries under old entries, which is very exciting ("this time last year we had already pruned the buddleia! What we were thinking!" etc). 

First up is the first (and so far only) planting in our new garden cage, and it's in a pot, so probably cheating. A woman at quilters brought in some "planting garlic" so I snaffled a couple of heads and planted twenty fat garlic cloves in this pot. They should be ready in February, and require very little care until then, allegedly.

Here I am sweeping the rocks. I don't plan to make a habit of sweeping the rocks, but I'm in the very very slow process of clearing this overgrown garden bed. We didn't know there were rocks in there, and they are actually quite lovely, and form natural tiers. So I'm sweeping them off this once, to see the shape, and then we will contemplate planting around them in the fullness of time. It was completely overgrown by rosemary, so I've cut that back to almost ground level and we will see what survives.

This is something I'm calling "baby's first formwork" because this is, indeed, the first time I have ever prepared formwork for a concrete pad. We're getting the floor of the lavender shed reconcreted so we can store things in there, which requires a concerete truck, so we may as well get some other little things done too. This is under the clothesline, which was worn into bare dirt, and it took a fair amount of swearing, digging for tools in the shed and googling youtube videos. But you have to start somewhere and it is level (despite appearances). My husband provided guidance but he has been busy with his compost beds (on the left hand side, fabulous colorbond, nobody's burning those down).

I also cleared off the front of the garden shed to put a path in there, but there are water pipes half way down and electricity conduit near the shed, so we have decided against concreting in case we need to get into it at some point. Of course we discovered this after we'd sledgehammered up the old concrete path and made a big dirt mess ... we are thinking of putting concrete pavers down. We have some from the old house and they're robust enough; it's just a bit more work. At least it was a good job to have tidied it up.

I also used my weed tea on the new bed before putting mulch down. It smelled like the very breath of satan but I diluted it 1:10 as recommended on the internet and poured it over the bed, to improve the nitrogen. Does my bed need nitrogen? I don't know. I put the decomposed weeds on what remains of the compost, where apparently they will not spread weedy seeds, and I made more tea with new weeds. 

And lastly we have a truly terrible bird photo - there is an owl in there. A very lovely, very well camouflaged owl, that watched us carefully but didn't fly away. That's its favourite spot and he's quite obvious once you see him ... but you can't. Not in this photo.

Solar panels and a battery

Another project knocked off - 28 solar panels up on the roof and a 27KW battery hooked up to them on the side of the house. In theory, for the amount of electricity we use, the battery should soak it up during the day and cover what we use at night ... although the theory has been falling down since we had them installed because it's been cloudy and rainy. 

Our contribution was to admire the balance of the young people doing the installation (all over the roof, didn't even blink, utterly unafraid) and fork over vast sums of money. In theory it should pay for itself in eight or so years but we will see. It's nice to have protection for the blackouts that we get once or twice a year and our bore pump runs on electricity so it's good bushfire protection too. 

We were a bit worried that it would spoil the look of our cute little house, but it's much less intrusive than we thought. A nice low profile on the roof and the black isn't that different from the tin. We have six facing east, six facing west and sixteen facing north - all shaded by the pines but between them they should give us enough juice if the sun is shining. 

The battery has an app that shows how much electricity we use, how much the panels produce, how much the battery has and how much we are pulling from the grid or putting back into the grid ... it is one of the horribly mesmerising things like a weather station or flight radar that you get obsessed with even though it is objectively very dull. 

More projects

 Unsurprisingly, one of the projects is to build new compost bins. In a way it was a good thing I destroyed them - they weren't big enough and were in the wrong spot - so now my husband is happily engaged on some Very Serious Compost Bins made out of metal roofing sheets. Again, from our wonderful friend who is moving to Western Australia and can't take much of anything, and was a bit of a collector of "might be useful one day" items. 

This is not compost bins, this is much more exciting - the floor of my art studio!!!!! Can you believe it, despite having a quite large house and a dedicated room I am building a shed in the garden to do my arts and crafts in. I can't quite believe it, but there is proof, a steel subfloor concreted in. 

There is still a long way to go and we are doing the painting etc ourselves (aaaaargh) but that's the first thing done. I made them angle it to exactly due north :) It is going to be tucked in quite nicely behind the pines to the west of the house.

I had some dye leftover from the quilters' dyeing session so one of the ladies came over and we splashed some dye about under the last of the oak leaves. It was lots of fun and only rained a little bit.

Number two came home for a visit last weekend to break up two weeks work in Sydney! Paid work too - as a notetaker in the writer's room for a new TV series. It's a great opportunity, hard work concentrating all day (and definitely not there to give any input, that was a bit of a struggle) and an eye-opening way to see how TV operates. Quite different to the theatre world.

I drove up to Goulburn for the train pick up - it has the cutest little train station. With an open fire! The photo doesn't show the flames but there were definitely flames. Needed too, it's been very cold and frosty.

My broad beans are looking remarkably healthy. I didn't plan for any sort of crop; they are really just there because they are hardy and will grow in winter. But I may get some broad beans!

And this has to be the last of the roses. This yellow rose is unstoppable, I love it.

I burnt down the compost bins

Soooooo, I had a little oops yesterday when I emptied the ash bucket into the compost bins. As you normally do, but it appears that some of it might have been still aglow. It was about a week's worth, and it needed emptying, so I didn't think too much of it and just dumped it in the compost and wandered off. 

And this is what my husband found when he went outside this morning - two bins completely destroyed and my hot compost pile reduced to nothing! It certainly got hot enough, briefly, before it burned down. The most damage is near the rubber mat I was using to hold the heat in, rather than near the ash, so we're thinking a coal got too near the rubber and it caught alight. 

Absolutely reduced to nothing, the leaves have completely burnt down. As a reminder, this is what it looked like last week.

The little compost tumbler to the right is reduced to a few bits of steel; the rubber mat is a smouldering shadow of its former self and one of my brand new weed tea buckets has melted. Not completely though, just around the lid, and the weed tea is actually looking pretty good. 

Anyway, another learning experience. It was directly under several very old and very flammable pine trees, and about three metres away from our garage, with all our stuff including our brand new car. We are going to take the opportunity to relocate the compost bins and build new ones, and I've already got a larger ash bucket that all ashes are going into from now on for AT LEAST a week before they go on the compost. 

Little projects

When we started with the garden I thought it was not much work at all - you do what you feel like, it doesn't matter about the rest - but now I have about a hundred little projects on the go. And several big projects that need tradies / other people to do ... and the maintenance as well of the things I've already done! I am not bothered by any of this because I can just leave it; but it's interesting that the more you get into it the more ideas you have and the more you want to do. 

We are contemplating doing beds towards the creek - the grass doesn't really grow there and we could mark it out more formally and plant. I have started with raking the leaves there and letting them rot down.

I have also made a few leaf towers. I think I'd like to try a hot compost pile but I'll have to read up a bit more, and make sure I have enough bulk. I am going to buy a compost thermometer.

Our friends who are moving to Perth are very generously giving us a ton of their outdoor stuff that they don't want to move. I have put many of my seedlings into this little shadehouse, which is much better than the dodgy frost cloth structure I had built (chicken wire and star pickets). 

We have elegantly put their table and chairs under some autumn-leaf trees. There is a project there to restore and repaint.

The elephants have gone on the sheep ramp but I don't think that is good karma. You can't be sending elephants off to the abbatoir.

And here is the finished bridge! This wasn't at a little project, this was a very big project but it's fabulous to have it done.

This old table came out of the lavender shed (which has the boxing done for the floor and the aggregate down! Progress indeed). It is quite solid so there is a project there to fix the top. According to Elizabeth who did the gardens 25 years ago that was an original from the sheep farm days and smelled of lanolin from the fleece. I did sniff it, in the interests of science. It smelled like old shed. 

Star pickets

Pam asked about star pickets - be careful what you wish for - because the answer is quite simple but also star pickets are the life force that holds the universe together. Like duct tape, or command hooks.

Star pickets are steel fence posts - this is our western fence and a fairly typical agricultural fence anywhere in Australia. They have four points so look like a star from the top, although these might be "Y" ones looking closer. I don't know anyone who has ever bought star pickets, they just appear, and you always have them, but never enough, and they are completely indestructible. We have some that we pulled out of the creek, and many more that were just lurking in the corners of the sheds. They come in short and long versions, and you can get little plastic covers for them with star-shaped insides if you want to use them as supports (or not impale yourself).

A common way of building compost bins is pallets and star pickets. You put the pickets in (we have a star picket driver, very useful) then thread the pallets through them at the corners.

When I made my ad hoc green house out of frost cloth I put in smaller star pickets to tie the chicken wire to so it wouldn't blow away. Here they are holding up the old gate that forms the end of the big wood pile.

And stuck into besser blocks (also known as breeze blocks, concrete blocks and grey bricks) for the smaller wood pile so they won't roll away. 

And for marking out the site of our future vege beds in the vege cage ... in preparation for making a layout decision. Someday, maybe. So there you go, just a small fraction of the wonder that is the star picket. I didn't include any that were holding up sapling trees because that is Bad Gardening (too destructive when you remove them or something).

Resting at the beach

I took my cold - and my husband took his bung knee - and we spent a quiet rainy few days at the beach this week. It was a good idea to have nothing much to do (although I did finally join the local library down there! Access to another library full of ebooks, I'm very excited) except some sewing and making airplane models. I went for a couple of short walks and that was about it. The cat was very excited about my sewing and jumped up to lie on the material and help me cut it out. She still has all four paws but it was a close thing.

Speaking of paws, Fred the failed service dog came to art class again. He is very gorgeous and an absolute snuggle tart. 

The rain didn't last down the coast - just a day really - but there was still a big swell. 

Before we left we cleared out the lavender shed in preparation for concreting the floor ... it is a very old shed that we want to store things like star pickets and chicken wire in. Bulky, random things. 

The uprights are mostly quite solid and the tin isn't bad but the floor was completely broken up. 

Of course to get somewhere to put things we had to clear out the potting shed (which was very satisfying, I have been meaning to do that for ages) and there are still piles of stuff everywhere. If it is OK outside then we are leaving outside for now, until the concreting is done and we get ourselves sorted. It's a slow process.