A Bit More Soap and a Lot More Tree

Lavender this time! I know its a bit ho-hum but so many people (including me) love lavender soap.
I put a bit of the mixture into my dragonfly moulds and I might have let out a girls ‘Squee’ of excitement when I saw the result.

I left the soap in the mould two days this time – I wanted to give it more setting time before disturbing it and possibly breaking the pattern (like in my first attempt.)

Its a hard mould so its a bit more iffy getting the soap to drop out. I ran a toothpick around the edge and exercised some patience and small pressure and they dropped out beautifully. Later when it hardens up I can run a potato peeler around the back edge to tidy it up.
If I was selling them I could imagine these looking very pretty and special boxed up! I might invest in another mould of these as I can only do four at a time.

So – since Jeff spent yesterday on my raised beds, it was only fair to get stuck into the tree today!
The wind was blowing the right way which was handy… and it hardly rained at all.

I moved and stacked a fair bit of the chopped wood

I set aside a lot of ‘awkward’ wood to put into the raised beds as well.
(and chucked some wood ash in just for good measure)

I love my parang! I started slow… just using it to strip some of the needles off the branches into the barrow to dump in the muddy chook yard. I wanted to get the feel of it before going too hard and losing a favourite body part. (I am fond of all the bits really)
Still… I used it to chop through some bigger pieces and its lovely to use. A bit heavy so I had to give my hand a rest every now and again, but I’ll get used to it.

The fire was fabulous to work by. Smokey but toasty.

Jeff was a machine today! He got through so much stuff.
We sort into usable piles as well as burn – we’ve got a pile for the chipper, a pile for using in the garden, one for cutting to fire sized pieces etc.

Clear ground again!!!

The chooks usually stay clear of the fire – or if the chainsaw is out.
A couple do a runner and escape up past the open fence to dig worms in the old compost. Pretty funny.
They are enjoying the nice long grass… no hope of cutting it for a while. Too wet and boggy.

A mere handful of tomatoes left! Not bad for mid winter!

Hope you’ve had a lovely day too but a lot less sore than we are!!
Cheers!

PS – had a chuckle when a friend noticed a comment of mine from a facebook article was pulled out and used in a newspaper article!!
Pet hate of mine is ‘photographic competitions’ where the fine print basically says if you enter, win or not, the people running the event get to keep and use your images forever. To me its just an image grab.
This bit appeared in the article:
“This is how so many places – businesses, councils etc get practically their own free catalogue of photos,” also wrote Lisa Maree Millar. “Very few competitions nowadays lack this clause of ‘we are stealing your photos to use as we please’.”
Ahhhh – nothing is sacred online!!
Link here if you are interested in whole article 🙂