Month: July 2019

Hello!!
Well… the day started off pretty nice!
Sharon arrived with her daughter, a friend and three dogs. (Two of which were beside themselves with excitement at the outing. Travelling in the back seat was hilarious… child beside me trying to feed me a banana and one of the dogs flinging itself over the seat as far as he could go barking and slobbering and thoroughly hyped!!)

We got a reasonable way around the track when Sharon decided to take the energetic daughter and canines back to the car and go down to one of the beaches to play frisbee and have a coffee. (Apparently Lottie ended up practically swimming!! Children! No nerve endings clearly) haha

Since I plan to catch up with Sharon tomorrow I opted out of the coffee and completed the river loop and walked up the highway home.
I am pleased with getting more walks in lately.

There was time for me to get into the gardening gear and get a few things done. Sadly no photos. I was going to go back and take some snaps but by the time I was done, it was pouring, so I didn’t get back out there!

I widened the area I dug for the raised beds so they will be about right now to install once Jeff is between shifts.
I also got into the main garden and did a bit more weeding and clearing.

Mundane tasks like shopping, cooking and cleaning followed.

I am hoping to get some more goats milk off Sharon tomorrow – I am dead keen to do some more soap. I’ve been watching videos tonight about different techniques of mixing colours etc.

Have a lovely day!
Cheers

Hello!!
The start of another week!
I saw a neat little snippet on making leaf mould compost on Gardening Australia and thought it looked dead easy.
It is.

It takes a while and I am considering finding a spot to do a few or a bigger area – then I can forget about them for 12 months, return and use.

Its not hard around here to find some wire.

There is still room in my basket – will have to collect a few more leaves. They are meant to be watered down if they aren’t already damp. After the torrential downpour of last night… mine were fine.

I’ll trim the cardboard back once I am done. (Translation – I was way too lazy to walk all the way back to the shed for a knife)(Plus we were heading out for a walk) 🙂
I put a cardboard ‘lid’ on it too… but will add some more leaves when I get a chance to find and collect more.

It was a pretty nice day mostly – a few spits here and there. Jeff has a couple of nights coming up at the hospital so we thought we should get out today for a hike.

We went opposite our usual route around Anniversary Bay. I was pleased about that… it just seems a little less agonising going backwards haha

A lot of the tracks up in the hills were like little streams. Plenty of runoff from last night.

Sometimes the water was hard to avoid!

Next time I will wear gaiters.

And heading to the ocean!

It was raining under that cloud – we didn’t notice it until we got to the beach and saw the rainbow

Husband at the end of the rainbow. Apparently no gold.

The tide was coming in but there was enough beach left to see some of the sand patterns -and before I had to put my camera away because of the rain!

So glad we got out! I can feel that winter padding melting away!!

Back home I convinced Jeff to help me put together the first layer of one of the new garden beds.

Pretty easy to do actually. I’ll use this one like a template to get my surface area right before the rest get made and assembled. I have to say… there was a fair bit of weight in this!!

I am pretty excited about it – can’t wait to get them all into place and move on with making the area look nice.

I got a present today!!
Jeff has moved way past flowers and chocolates.
I got a parang!! I’d read about them in my ‘Biggles Books’ but never thought I’d be wielding one!!

He said he was sick of watching me hack away at things with my little tiny axe haha.
I’ll report in at the end of the week to let you know if I still have all my limbs or not!!!
Keen to get out there and test her out!

Nice leather sheath and all!!

Did anyone else get a big sharp tool to start their week??
Lets face it. A huge improvement on the cat-wee incident!
This week is looking good!

Cheers!!

Hi!! A bit of blue sky peeking through late afternoon!
The rest of the day was mostly dark and gloomy – but very little wind or rain so it wasn’t a bad day to be out hauling wood about.

Jeff cut up a stack more wood and I moved and stacked most of what he had worked on before.

We will have a bit of work splitting ahead of us too:

Jeff made a temporary boardwalk out of the pallets!! Seriously.. the walkways are treacherous underfoot at the moment!

I also thought it was high time to give the poor chooks a clean bedroom. So out with the old pooey hay and in with the fluffy fresh stuff

Someone got comfortable pretty quick in the nesting box.
Mind you… it didn’t take the rest of them long to work on kicking a fair bit of it back out the door!! Pests.

The compost bay got a nice big top up of straw and chook poo. I then added in the latest load of coffee and it really smelled quite fantastic!
I also think its about time to set up compost bay #2 and leave this one to break down and do its thing.

Most of the white garlic has sprouted!!
It will be good when it is all along far enough to be mulched and then I can pretty much forget it for a few months.

Of course I couldn’t help stop and admire the purple garlic patch. It looks so perfect 😀

The rhubarb that Jeff mowed (eek, I know!!) looks like it will all be fine. In a couple of months I am sure they will all spring back with a vengeance!

My one broccoli that is developing is much too slow for my liking! I know its doing its best…. but… Maybe I should dowse it with some worm wee.

Surprisingly – still getting capsicum off the outdoor plants in mid winter! How does that work?? Its not for me to question. Its for me to say “Thank-you garden, this will go nicely in the spaghetti Bolognaise sauce tonight.”

We had a bit of a look at the timber in the spot for the raised beds. I need to make them a little wider, but that shouldn’t take too much effort. (Famous last words)

Oh – the latest batch of soap – the espresso actually did go ok. It just took a bit longer to firm up. And wow – it looks like chocolate fudge.
I have to get out to Sharons and purchase some more milk. I am totally hooked and need to do more!
Hope your weekends are really fantastic!
Cheers

Yup! We got to Bunnings today.
Its treated pine but with a nice dark stain so a bit different to the normal look.
We’ve gone for slightly shorter lengths – I can make it work in the area and it made a fair difference on the $$ (as in over $70 better)
They were pretty heavy.
We bought 4 of the 3mt lengths and got the shop to cut them into 1mt pieces – they are the side pieces and it was easier to get them in the vehicle. (Plus we don’t have to cut them at all now.)

I am looking forward to actually building them. I hope its as straight-forward as my imagination says its going to be!!

Luckily I took Jeff into town to collect the coffee grounds! The little bin was full to the brim! No way I could lift that myself into the back. I should have gone in Monday but somehow the week disappeared.

So… here is some of the soap I made solo.
The light isn’t great, so the colours aren’t quite right, but nevertheless… you’ll get the drift.
This batch has almost a mauve swirl… I thought it was going to be more brown, but the clay colours do different things.
The fragrance used is ‘Rustic woods and Rum’
It was so strong when I first did it. Happily its calmed down and I really like it now.

This batch’s fragrance is Meyer Lemon. Its quite a sweet scent.
I am liking the swirls.

I tried out putting a loofah in a couple. I will have to do it slightly differently next time but it wasn’t too bad

The batch always has a bit more than the one set of moulds can take.
So I have some random extras. I like the dragonfly pattern 🙂

I think I made a failure tonight. I was so keen on it too 🙁
Espresso. It wouldn’t reach ‘trace’ for ages and the cheap little hand mixer was about to blow up I reckon. I finished using my other one and it seemed to go ok… but its not setting as fast as the others have done so sadly it might be a washout – without the soap!! I used a better olive oil – pure virgin cold pressed, but I wouldn’t have thought it wouldn’t work!
And I am out of goats milk. I’ll have to get in touch with Sharon!
I am not daunted. I am keen to try more.
Should smell the library! No more old book smell… haha. (Which is a bit tragic really)

Hope your day has been great!
Cheers

Hi!
Back out actually doing some work! Yay.
Jeff got through a lot with his chainsaw. We’ll move that all down to the main pile and do some splitting sometime.
We also worked our way through burning a bit and sorting out pieces to keep or put through the chipper

We got rid of one pile and made another!!!

Cough cough – smokey! Luckily the wind (low today) was blowing across the paddocks so hopefully we weren’t annoying anybody too much.
Bit sad not to have marshmallows…

My Mum (the pyromaniac) will be jealous. 🙂

Got one barrow load of fluffy tree bits and dumped them in the entryway of the chook pen.
Makes a fabulous difference. If the weather is ok tomorrow, must make the effort to get more of this down onto the slippery muddy bits.

Have you noticed that so far, I’ve done NOTHING that I said I was going to do yesterday??
In the spirit of going off course – I got to and wove the little garlic fence I’ve been wanting to do for ages.

I was pretty chuffed at its final look.

Now I am all fired keen to get enough branches piled up to get the chipper going and I can put the woodchips on the path that is currently mud.

Hope you’ve had a lovely day too!
Cheers

Hello!!
Sorry to be so neglectful of you all!
I am still kicking about but didn’t have a lot to say 🙂
The weather has been brilliantly feral – so the camera hasn’t been out much, nor have we really done anything super blog-worthy!

I am just decorating this post with some random photos from 2015.
I have actually been working quite intensely on a project that I finally sorted out today.
But I can’t tell you what it was yet! Its hopefully going to be all finished in a week or two, then I can share.

Jeff decided today he needed a new tattoo (as one does)
Its quite big and it took ages – that is he was gone for three hours longer than I supposed!
Someone is a sore boy right now!!
I have been amusing myself also by making my first couple of solo soap batches.
Perhaps tomorrow I might get a snap of the ones I did.

Sharon brought me around some goats milk and I have enough to do one more batch before I need to go get some more. I also need to buy some pure virgin olive oil too – the one I have is part virgin and part refined. Honestly.. I have no idea what that all means but it will be good to see if there is a difference.
I also would like to buy some coffee beans because I am dying to try out the espresso fragrance. I wanted to add some crushed beans as an exfoliate (??) and pop a bean in the top of the soap just for fun.

Jeff made a bit of a start on cutting up the tree – just waiting for a decent day to get out and really get our teeth into it.
The ground is super muddy and slippery underfoot – especially in the areas we walk to more often – like to the chook coop.
I am going to collect a lot of the needles from the tree to lay down on those areas. It worked in one spot – time to sort that out before someone falls in the mud!

So did anything gross happen to anyone today?
I put Pip out on his lead for a little while when the sun came out. He was super interested in sniffing one of the crocs (garden shoes) that was out on the back veranda.
I thought maybe a stray cat sprayed??
So – clever me picked it up… (this story doesn’t have a happy ending)
yah… some rotten cat dexterously FILLED the shoe with wee. And I tipped it on myself.
Sometimes country life is just not glamorous!!!

Anyway – you can all stop laughing now.
Fingers crossed tomorrow we get to buy that timber and make a start on the raised beds so I can make the back area look less like a rubbish tip zone!

Hope you all had a super weekend and a great start to this week!
Cheers!