Planting Update

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 here. I have had the wood stove burning almost day and night for about a week now. I usually go down in the morning about 5:30  and stoke it up so it’s nice and toasty when we crawl out of bed. I am keeping an eye on the wood supply and I think we will make it through winter OK. The garden is looking a bit sad now, the remains of the okra that are less than 12″ tall and never bloomed are truly pathetic.  We still have the sweet corn and I need to pick some green beans very soon. The ones in my grow tubs are also ready to pick so I should have a couple bags for the freezer soon.

On Saturday I mowed down all the remaining spots under the trees and on Sunday I finished planting the last of the 300 tube stock out. The guy Steve from the conservation dept says he will be organising my remaining 50 late this week or early next, so maybe a week after that. In the meantime I have those half dozen or so on the nature strip that I want to move into the yard between us and the neighbour. I mowed those areas on Saturday as well so they should be OK for planting any time. The next job is to get some of the mulch from my big pile up behind the annex and put it around the plants out there. I will fill up my trailer and haul it out there with the lawn tractor to apply it. 

​The little WiFi logger attached to the solar inverter seems to have been fixed, I think they pushed out some update to the inverter to fix the communications issue. I am getting some very nice graphs now on the web page and it seems to match up pretty well with the daily update I get from Aurora, the electric company here. We are using almost all the solar energy we produce either in the house or charging the battery to use later when power would normally cost us $0.33 per kWh, instead of just getting their pathetic feed in tariff of $0.08 per kWh. We are still getting almost daily faults on the inverter, something called “frequency derating” that has something to do with the power coming from the electricity grid. I’m hoping to get an answer back this week if there is some setting I have to change on the inverter. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be affecting anything too much so I’m pretty happy with everything apart from that small annoyance.

Eva and I finally got our winter Covid-19 booster, the Pfizer one for the BA4/5 variants which is also supposed to help with the XBB variant or whatever. I also got my quad variant influenza shot, it was the higher dose they give to over 65’s. Eva is planning to get hers next week. I think by next winter they will probably have just one shot that covers everything, flu, covid, and whatever else. It’s nice to have that out of the way for another year anyway. Neither of us have had any reaction to anything, which is good.