Firewood

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 2×30 metre hoses that I can join together and from two different taps can get all of the plants in the front yard and the back paddock watered. This will be the third time I’ve had to do it but the other option is putting in a vast drip system. I’m hoping that most of the plants will be established with roots down to where there is still some moisture before it gets too dry. I have lost a few more of the bandicoot plants 45/350 so far. I did lose a lot initially to the frost, but these latest were planted in clay so when it cracks the roots dry out and the plants die. I am still below the 20% acceptable attrition rate.

Eva put up another few jars of pickles and then did all the beetroot I pulled up last week. She was able to get 8 jars from the 16 beetroots, and I have another 13 plants still in the garden that should be ready in a few months time. We are still getting lots of tomatoes and button squash, but the zucchini, cucumber, and gherkin are about done. I picked 5 good sized okra the other day and there looks like at least one ready this morning. We may be at the stage where we get one or two every day. Eva plans to make fried okra with what we have now so that should be a treat. Some of the plants are 18″ tall and looking very healthy. The next issue is what to do with all the tomatoes. I may try to make “sun dried tomatoes” in the oven on low temperature, fan-forced which is just the same as a dehydrator. I think you can put them in a jar and cover them with some olive oil to keep.

I got two deliveries of firewood and have everything already stacked up and put away. It was a total of 10 m³ which is close to 10 cubic yards. I have about 6 m³ in the shed and the other 4 m³ stacked next to where the last delivery was dumped and covered with a tarp. I built a platform with concrete wall blocks and old boards to keep it up off the ground so it should stay nice and dry, and maybe bandicoots and things can shelter under it. I see lots of signs of bandicoots digging everywhere and occasionally see a brown bandicoot when I go out at night, but I have not actually seen an eastern barred bandicoot for a while. They are the ones that this bandicoot habitat is all about, the one I got the 350 tube stock for back in May last year. On the other hand, I have been a bit lazy about going out to look at night recently. The last few times all I see is wallabies, wallabies, wallabies.

It’s been very warm upstairs at night and we have had to sleep downstairs a couple of times recently, that is until I came up with a brilliant solution. We put the AC on in the living room and then the pedestal fan at the bottom of the stairs blows the cold air up into the bedroom. Instead of it being 29 or 30  Celsius up there we can sleep comfortably at about 24 degrees. The only trick is to not use the ceiling fan as it pushes the cooler air out. With the amount of solar we are getting and the battery, it’s not costing very much at all.