Chipper

I’ve been hacking back the old apricot and plum trees, and removing the large 100 mm suckers that were coming up from the root stock. I don’t know if these will survive or not, but I am left with huge piles of branches to dispose of. Do I haul them back to the brush pile, or, thinking completely outside the box, buy myself a lifestyle grade wood chipper for my birthday? What would you do?

That was a trick question. Behold the Hansa C7 self feeding chipper/mulcher with 6.5 hp Honda engine. This is a real beauty, takes up to 50 mm branches, and is solidly made. Apart from this I have a lot of other jobs I can use it for.

Apart from the chipper, I got myself a really nice, heavy duty raincoat jacket and pants. Last time it rained I was just wearing my light wind breaker and got pretty soaked cleaning out the gutters. Now I have some proper Tasmanian wet weather gear.

Things are starting to tighten up here a bit more, anyone entering Australia has to quarantine for 14 days at the point of entry, and they have hotels set up for that. Then if they travel to another state, e.g. Tasmania, they would have to quarantine for another 14 days because of state regulations. This is after 2,700 people were allowed to disembark from the Ruby Princess in Sydney last week and many of them travelled back to their home states and overseas. Of those, at least 54 were from Tasmania. So far there have been over 300 cases nationwide from that cruise ship and it is expected to rise. There are also a lot of cases of wealthy people ignoring the orders and then going on to infect other people. A bunch of rich arseholes came back from Aspen, Colorado and thought that they were just too important to follow the same rules as the plebs. 
Tasmania now has over 50 cases, mostly in Hobart, but no deaths yet, all of them related to overseas travel or the Ruby Princess. Things are a bit weird at the supermarkets, you have to leave 1.5 metres between people, groups more than 2 people cannot come in together, and you have to hang back at the checkout till you go up to pay. Lots of things have closed, and a few businesses have already gone under, and the unemployment is rising. We may have to put up with this for at least another month before it burns itself out.