Author: Paul_McGaughey

We finally have our PV panels installed, all 22 of them. They are 300w Q CELLS G5+ panels, total is 7.26 Kw. The inverter is supposed to be a 6 Kw SMA MPPT Single Phase, but they installed a 5 Kw. The 6 Kw is on back order and will...

We’ve made a pretty good start to the garden project where we are going to have a screened area off the front patio next to the shade room. Eva finished trimming the roses back several weeks ago, and I moved some up from below the old retaining wall to where...

A frosty morning on September 1, but things are clearly starting to warm up here. It was 9 degrees overnight, and we briefly hit 18 yesterday, although today is a bit windy.I finally have everything cleaned up from all the snow damage, apart from a couple of piles of brush...

​We have had a bit more rain here over the past few days, and it is too boggy to take the lawn tractor and it’s little trailer out the back to haul some of that wood in. I did pile up a bunch more of the branches into a stack...

The cleanup continues here after the fallout from the snow event. I managed to get all the branches that were down or hanging around the front and side yards into a couple of big piles, and then started in on the back. Most of what was hanging over the fences...

​​There are trees and branches down everywhere in the parks, walking tracks, and the bush around Launceston. Some businesses like nurseries lost a lot of stock when all the shade cloth structures came down, and parts of the roofs at Bunnings and Officeworks were damaged. They don’t really have to...

A big Antarctic low pressure system coming up from the South this week, and we have been expecting some cold nights. We woke up this morning and we were in a winter wonderland, snow covered the entire property. This is the most snow here since the early 1970’s, and the...

 We have has some cold mornings for the past couple of months, and have been using the old IXL Classic wall heater in the living room for a while now. We were warned that it used a lot of power, and I had been checking the meter regularly and plugging...

The weather has been generally quite cool, with a fair bit of rain, but there are enough sunny days that I can get out and do stuff that needs doing, even though I have to wear my big gumboots when I go out in the back paddock.I have been working on...

Our first winter here together in Tasmania, and we have had a few cold nights. It’s definitely colder than over on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, but I would much rather that than being too hot. We have had a couple of below freezing mornings and even a bit of...

I made the rash decision to tackle one of the stumps up behind the shed a few days ago. Man what a beast! It’s taken me 3 days on and off to get it down to the central root. This one was a lot greener, wetter, and twist grained than...

Well, not actually a bonfire, I’m just burning off the remains of the stumps and tree roots out in the back paddock.It’s been 10 days without any Covid-19 cases here in Tasmania, 10 active cases remaining, 4 of those in hospital but not in ICU. All cases are still in...

I’ve been doing a bit of reading about the Sars-CoV-2  coronavirus, designated Covid-19, and the prospects for a vaccine, and apparently it’s not that straightforward.  Coronaviruses don’t trigger a long lasting immunity, and like the common cold, which is sometimes caused by a human coronavirus, we can get infected repeatedly,...

I’ve begun a new activity to keep me busy here on the property. I’m calling it “stump busting”. It’s where you remove old tree stumps in their entirety including as much of the roots as possible. It’s mostly done by hand using a shovel, mattock, block splitter, crow bars, wedges,...

Now that the brush pile rehabilitation project is sort of finished, I decided to tackle the dead tree that was at the side of the dead stumps. I managed to bring it down fairly neatly between the other trees and start taking all the broken dead branches up to the...

Fire restrictions for this part of the state have been lifted for a few weeks now, and after about a week of dry weather I decided to burn the brush pile we were left by the previous owner. I had been slowly consolidating it for a couple of months, picking...

The credit card has just clicked over for a new month, so we decided to go all out and buy 4 avocado trees which had just come in at the local nursery. We have 2 type A’s and 2 type B’s, Bacon, Hass, Reed, and Fuerte. They are all supposed...

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...

Eva wanted some nice lemon trees, so we got one seedless variety, dug one up from the yard that wasn’t doing well, and got a double grafted lime with Tahitian and Kaffir limes one it. Now that I have the big pots I have them in a sheltered area of...

It has rained heavily all day here, just starting to ease off a bit. The pond liner on the balcony seems to have done it’s job, we have had no leaks through the eaves. We have had a total of 80.39 mm recorded in our weather station, that’s just over...