Serendipity reigns! The woodwork teacher from the local high school happened to be chatting to me having seen the SWTAFE ad/article of me & my Tardis in the Warrnambool Standard. We got chatting about timber & he recommended I try the good people at Australian Furniture Timbers in Port Melbourne. Fab!
Well, the heavy work is done. The tanks are aligned, and the area has been nicely flattened. Now the fine detail. As I’m discovering in cabinet-making, the construction phase is often the quickest & relatively easiest. The harder and more time consuming is the fine and finishing details.
So, the mad rush is on to connect the house downpipe outflow to the tank inflows, as well as devising a system that connects four tanks and allows for both uphill and downhill water movement.
Mad rush because it HAS to be in place before it rains. It is expected to rain in a few days time…
Nothing is ever simple. Major renovations frequently start as a nugget of action such as “I wonder what’s behind that wallpaper?” I’m leaning more towards aesthetic these days, although I still have no idea of it, even if something fashionable smacked me on the head.
Simple gravity fed water works, but to complete the picture, wed thought to align the tanks to maximise free space, complete storm drainage works (when it rains it pours!) and flattening the remainder of the area for installation of a garden/tractor shed.
What better way to convalesce from shingles than to supervise some earthworks. I’d been mulling over the idea of converting our electric pump based water supply to gravity fed for a while. Four tanks at house level and one tank at the top gate, with the idea of running the fire pump every month or so to transfer water upwards, and have Newton do the work for us downwards. The added bonus of having water when the power went out, if not the ability to boil it for a cuppa, was a bonus.
There completes the edging formwork. Now for some bees.
It seems like that rash was shingles! And then got busy. So on with the updates
Anna wants a bee garden around the biolytix. In preparation for the eventual gazebo I’ll put there and bbq deck I’ll put elsewhere, I thought some planks of timber sounded pretty easy.
The more I thought about it though, the more I thought about how to do it properly. Cement in the posts, bolt the rails, use spirit level to make things straight… It’s amazing how 90 degrees is not what you thought it was…
Plugging in my trusty MB-D10 battery pack into my D300s for some extra power, I set up for a timelapse of the moon setting which I’d seen the day before. There’s always something striking about seeing the moon in daytime blue and white. The stills are from the day before when I’d noticed (whilst constructing the bee garden), and the timelapse itself. The timelapse is made up of pics taken every 30 seconds.
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Some pics from around the vegetable garden. We’d gotten our tomatoes in quite late last season, around Christmas so our cropping was also late. We’d rebuilt this bed using copious amounts of chook poo from the Stoneys somewhere (maybe too nutrient rich), and we those howling hot northerlies which killed our other celery, parsley, coriander and lettuce seedlings.
Still, it’s gratifying to have tomatoes ripening this time of year. The cherry and mini roma varieties are going great guns and very tasty too. Unripe tomatoes from a pile of prunings Anna made have ripened very well. Millipedes and other critters seem to have taken a liking to the larger varieties. And the chooks have made a haven in the undergrowth of the main bushes!
