Tube Stock

We now have the signed contract with the Natural Resources people for the bandicoot habitat grant, so I just need to start planning a bit. According to the timeline, by April 17 I should start spot spraying with roundup or something to kill all the grass and weeds in the areas where I’m going to group clusters of plants. At the end of May or early June is when they deliver 350 tube stock that I have to plant out, around $1,575 worth that they supply from a local native plant nursery. It should be fairly manageable as they have already broken it down to the various areas and how many plants approximately in each area. It’s mainly either side of the drainage ditch that runs through the property, which I think I can divide into three lots of 50, another 50 under and around the existing trees in the south of the back paddock, and then another 50 clustered in the other open areas. I think each cluster would be three to five plants. It looks doable. 

In the meantime I’m in the process of putting in another drip line at the front of the house between us and the neighbour with the car workshop. I have a few plants ready to go for that and have identified maybe another 20 or so that I can dig up from the nature strip and other areas for free. Of the 10 or 15 of this I did last winter, all seem to have survived so far which is a good sign. One sticky wattle tree I dug up and moved over two years ago is now over 10″ tall. They grow incredibly fast. I have a few more just like that I want to move. I never did much with the ones I moved, just dug them up and stuck them in deep and they are all fine. I’m actually starting to get a bit enthusiastic about this, having so many plants surviving the summer because of my one drip line, and now anything else I put in will be OK as well. Soon we will have an absolute forest between us and the neighbour.

In more news, we had a letter from the national broadband network a couple of weeks ago saying that fibre to the premises broadband was now available in our area. We currently have fibre to the nearest node and then a regular phone line from there. We still get 60 megabit downloads with that, but with this other we will have well over 100 megabit speed. I thought it best to go for it now as you may have to pay extra for installation later. Currently installation is free but we will have to pay a little bit extra for a higher speed plan. A guy was around last week and it looks like they will have to dig in the fibre about 100 metres from the road, since the existing phone line was just buried in the ground rather than inside a conduit they could reuse. They will have to identify where the water line comes across the front yard which will be useful for us to know anyway. This is all supposed to happen on March 10, so lots of excitement around here.