Week Two

On Saturday I was invited to one of the locals birthday party, good opportunity to meet everyone. So Ipassed on the opportunity of sacred ceremony with friends to try and make new friends. Iwas pleasantly surprised. Seems everyone up here is really lovely and generous. They all seem very encouraging and willing to offer advice and assistance. And they like to party! It took me days to recover. I remember now why I dont drink. So I lost half the week to being completely useless. It’s actually been a tough week I guess it is to be expected. This is the first time I’ve been solitary in a long while with just my thoughts for company. All my anxieties doubts and insecurities about what I am doing came bubbling to the surface. I didn’t have any answers to them and they ran rampant for a day or two.

I knew it was coming but it still came as a surprise. I have tried to reframe my thinking about what I am doing. It is a holiday and an experiment. There is no failure, just learning. That keeps most of my anxiety at bay.
Other than anxiety I am quite enjoying the solitude. Plenty of birds to keep me company. Lots of work to do. I have managed to get things a little more controlled now so I don’t have to drive to town every day for something else I need or have forgotten.

Onto some photos.

So here is the balcony shot now there is actually some cactus in the ground.. most of the big cactus is in, but I am running out of room in this patch and there is just endless amounts to plant. But definitely more than half the cactus is in the ground now.

Here are some shots of the terraced cactus beds.

Some are a bit lopsided and scarred up but they made it. No deaths in the family so far!

Idont know if you can see it in this photo but Ihave fruit! It happened so fast. There is now lots of fruit, new ones coming up every day. So the next generation will get started soon.

All the plants that go in pots.. ARE IN POTS! And most of them have a lovely coarse sand dressing on top to keep the weeds out – Im saving the task of dressing the pots for when Im hot and need some time in the shade but still want to feel productive.

Look at that big happy crested cactus in the background, what a beauty.
My potting mix currently consists of: 1 part perlite, 1 part coarse sand, 4 parts high grade potting mix.
For the lophs I have been doing 1 part perlite 1 part sifted coarse sand 2 parts potting mix. (Loosely based on Interbeings suggestion. Idont know what ratios he uses)

So the field behind those is where you will later see my bamboo discard pile.

This is one of my freshly mown patches. Note the nightmare bamboo forest in the background that Ineed to remove.

Also note the completely rundown pile of caravan I dont know what to do with yet.

Here is what will one day be a lovely bush clearing once the bamboo is defeated

Promising looking bushland, just a bit of lantana to clear…

Here is a pile of bamboo I have recently defeated. I really wish I had a nice samurai sword to chop it all down with, it would be so much cooler than hacking it down with a machete.

Here is the promising clearing now that I have cleared it.

It even has birds nest ferns! And rocks! Lots of rocks.

Here is the view from the nice clearing. Bloody bamboo. Ican tell I am going to get sick of clearing bamboo before this is done. The trouble with bamboo is.. it grows back. Any clever tips for eradicating bamboo would be most welcome. It is looking like I may have to use some poison to get rid of it.

So.. what else?

Icaught my first rat and had to drown it. Im using live traps outside so I dont kill any wildlife and I hadn’t actually thought through what to do when I got one… drowning seemed pretty traumatic and not that efficient, so I am going to devise a small projectile thing to euthanise live caught rats from now on.

I have a cold, I feel pretty average, so I am taking things slow. I work til I am hot, then I read in the shade until not, and repeat. Still trying to get over my feelings of everything must be done in a rush and feeling like I am a lazy uninspired slob, so I am deliberately not working so much and spending a lot of time reading whilst not feeling guilty about it.

Jean Auel Clan of the cave bear. Good read. Yummed it up. Theres another 4 or 5 books in the series but they will go fast. Suggestions welcome.

Week one

17 hour drive to get here, so we had a rest day before getting stuck into everything.

Slight complication in that the shipping container did not make it onto the property. Truck too big for driveway. So we had to unpack everything into the trailer and drive it to the house and unpack it all again. It took a while. we had to lay all the cactus out on the lawn while we sorted the house out.

These are the before pictures: 

So that actually looks quite neat.. it wasn’t. Dust and crap everywhere.. dog hair on everything.

We did a lot of house cleaning to make it habitable.

This is the view off the verandah at the cactus carnage before we really started any gardening.

We got about 7 tonne of material so far for repotting (see jess below hard at work) landscaping and fixing the road – there was so much rain that the constant back and forth of us moving in and the truck bringing us garden supplies dug the road up quite badly.. it was dangerous for the truck so we had to do some road remodelling. (photos to come)

Heres my lovely driveway looking all smashed up

So first priority is of course the cactus. HAve to get them all in the ground so they dont get rotten laying around on their sides in the wet. There has been varying degrees of damage during the move.. but I think every plant will actually survive with a little care.

The following photos are the slope next to the driveway where most of the cactus are going to end up.

We are developing a landscaping method I call ‘impulse gardening’ we haven’t yet got any cactus in the ground, but the ones that are going in pots are in the pots.

So, it was a mess. I haven’t taken the update shots yet, but it almost looks like something you would put plants in.
Below are some photos of damage to my poor babies…

Heres is a graft that was cut up like butter through a cheese slicer. The majority of the graft is just gone. I believe it will survive but there goes more than two years of growth.

I don’t suppose it looks too dramatic but a whole chunk on the lower left side has been smashed off. This plant was pristine so I was not happy, but I am putting on my zen face with all cactus accidents, at least they are alive.

Another poor graft that was cheese gratered. Another few years of growth gone.

So that’s all the photos I bothered to take this week. It’s been a lot of fun. Theres been lots of little hiccups along the way, phone didnt work at first but I got that sorted, at first I couldnt get the hot water to work, but I have just been having cold showers, and now I know how the hot water works, but I dont want it anymore. Hooray for Iceman skills. Besides, it got to 27 today, most nights have been 12 degrees or above. It is lovely.

What else? my 20 year old generator just died along with the battery inverter.. so I am running off a car battery tonight until I can get some light to try and fix it all or get into town tomorrow to buy another.

The stove started shooting flames out where the on off knobs are, so thats off limits. I am using a camp stove for the moment, that works just fine. Stove is a later problem. First cactus. Then vegie garden. Then figure out house renos.

There is heaps of wildlife here. The variety of birdcalls I hear is amazing. Seen some lovely big black cockatoos and some kookaburras. Definitely heard owls about. Seen lots of skinks, been finding snake skin on the front verandah each morning so I guess theres one up on the roof. Seen some wallabies and paddy melons about, they are very cute. There are definitely lots of bandicoots around but Ihavent seen one alive yet, just roadkill. Rats/mice are a problem I have to sort out. Ihear them prowling about in the night.

So thats it for now, more update next week