Someone wise said you shouldn’t compare yourself to others’ facebook highlight reel. However, I’m getting very little time to write long blog stories nowadays, so here’s a highlight reel of late.

Photo above. Normally March is pretty dry in these parts. Like brown, parched earth, with cracks in the clay. Anything that isn’t irrigated just dies. Well we’ve just had 28mm rain spread over 4 days. And we haven’t even touched the March water tank yet – we’re still running off the February tank. It’s a long story about our water storage, there’s a January tank too – they ’re 28 000l each. So climate change seems to be working in our favour for a change. Not too sure about the long term view though…

Our driveway has deteriorated to the extent that you need a 4×4 vehicle to traverse it. So we have to get it redone. In order to prep for that, we’ve had to lift the nets a bit early, as the nets spill over the driveway in places, but it forced me to trim the jungle that had grown there in the last year. That is the price I had to pay for not lifting the nets the previous winter. But despite the kikuyu, we’ve had some fruits off the young treelets. And to imagine I almost had it kikuyu-free, as you can see in this post: Fighting in the trenches.

However, we did home some good fruit from that overgrown jungle (more about that in a next post):

While NSW had a massive mouse infestation and is now getting flooded to the extent that the spiders are crawling up the house walls in their thousands, we’ve also had a bit of a mouse plague of late. But not to that extent! For the last three weeks we’ve been catching between two to six mice a day. Steadily. Of course, the chooks love it! They get a good treat of protein every day. The two young cockerels in Flappy’s area especially love the mice and fight off their mother and surrogate mother to get the mice first. I don’t have photos of the dead mice, why would I? (Ha! Late edit – got a video this morning. Warning, circle of life – not for sensitive viewers):

But here are the two little cockerels, beautiful little fellas they are. But they’re a bit of a problem getting rid of. They’re pure bred scot greys, so some heritage breeder should want them, for free too. But I’ve now advertised on 3 sites, and so far no takers. With our animal ethics, it’s hard to let them go to a meat farm, but if we keep them, they or flappy will eventually kill each other. So what’s to do?

The vegetable garden is also an overgrown jungle, thanks to all the rain we’ve had, and despite the hard work Patricia and Amanda have put in there to try and de-weed and de-grass it. The kikuyu, which has crept in there from over 20m away, through a small orchard, under a mulched walkway, a raised bed and the paved vegetable garden paths, is just taking over!

But despite that, and the mice who are trying hard to ruin our crops, we’re getting some good harvests. That’s, if you know where to look.

I know, it’s time to get that whipper-snipper out!