I finally “finished” the new hen house and they have been in there two nights now. The first night I had to catch a couple and put them in but the rest were already there. They laid 3 eggs the next morning and seem to be happy using the automatic door last night and this morning. There...

Work continues here on the new hen house/chicken coop, it now has a roof that does not leak – we had nearly ½” of rain the other day which was a good test for it. I bought some more lengths of non-structural timber and some plywood to fit out the inside...

We had our 5th feed of fried okra last week and I have been picking a few more since but I think it’s slowing down a bit. We have 16 so far and there are still a few blossoms and smaller ones out there so I’m hoping we have enough...

It’s still warm and windy here with no real rain to speak of. We are expecting a fairly warm, almost hot day tomorrow and then there is a very slight chance of rain. We had a nice little feed of fried okra last week, and I have been picking a...

We have been having warmish weather here and mostly dry, normally around 88° F or 31.5° C. It’s been slightly cooler the past couple of days which is nice. It’s supposed to be dry and windy for the next 7 days so I have started watering everything again. I have...

We are still waiting for the electricity bill from December 10, but it looks like we will be around $83 in credit after adding on the $32 credit from the previous month. according to my calculations it may be July or August 2024 before we will actually have to pay anything....

Down here we had what I hope is the last cold morning of the season on November 1, it got down to 3°C and we had our “last” fire in the wood stove. We have had two days of about 24°C/75°F with over 45 kWh on the solar panels each...

I finally finished moving all the dirt from the old garden and have been trying to get some grass seed to grow there using a sprinkler, but haven’t seen any results yet. Hopefully some of it will start growing after this rain if the birds don’t finish eating all of it first....

We have has 3 plover chicks hatch out, and that must be all of them since the parents didn’t go back to the nest. All three seem to be doing well, they are very active but still stay fairly close to the parents. They like to hang around all the...

It’s been quite cold here and we have been using firewood at a faster rate than I had anticipated, even with the improvements like the double glazing. I ended up getting another load delivered back in July and stacked it all up. I’m hoping it will last through this month...

We had our first actual power cut since getting the battery backup and it worked pretty well. It started 10:30 AM and lasted 3 hours, and during that time all of our power was coming from the battery or the solar panels. The circuit that runs the hot water and...

I went out and checked on all the plants in the paddock and it looks like half a dozen had some frost damage but everything else looks OK. I think we will probably lose a couple of those. At least everything is well watered, we had 12.6mm/.5″ rain yesterday. I...

I got the last 50 plants from the conservation guy last Thursday and had everything planted by Sunday, so now all I have started put a bit of mulch around all 350 plants and water them for a bit longer until we get some decent rain here. So far the...

It has been a bit colder here in Legana, we have had several mornings close to freezing, and on Monday it was -2 C/28 F and I think we got a bit of frost out of it. The average lows for May are 5 C so this made the news...

​There are only two types of bandicoots here in Tasmania, the brown bandicoot and the eastern barred bandicoot. The brown bandicoot is also over on the mainland, mainly the east coast. Some of the other kinds are in more desert regions and they may dig burrows, but not the ones...

​I got the 300 plants on Friday last week so of course Saturday I got right into it, but only managed to get 10 planted. The grass was dead where I had sprayed it but it was still fairly long, making it hard to dig out, so after doing those...

On Wednesday I picked up all 350 plant guards and stakes, etc. for our native plants we are getting. Today I picked up 300 tube stock plants, 21 different species, so quite a variety. There were three boxes each with 100 plants. I should get the remaining 50 sometime in...

​The guys from the phone company came on Monday and completed the installation of the FTTP (fibre to the premises) connection. They ran a fibre from the box at the front of the house up through the roof space and over to where the modem is upstairs. There is a...