Author: Paul_McGaughey

We have had the NBN (National Broadband Network) crew around this last week digging the trench and laying in the conduit for the fibre to the premises connection. They have their little box on the wall and fibre pulled in all the way from the pit in further down the...

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...

​I finally got the door to the balcony removed and everything blocked off and all the new tin up on the roof. There is an issue with the final overlap onto the old roofing as it seems to be a thinner grade of roofing iron and so is flatter than...

I got an email from the guy about the bandicoot habitat, they have been delayed because of staff shortages, etc. but we should get our management plan sometime in January so that is something to look forward to. At the moment it’s very dry out in the area where I...

The guy from the bandicoot habitat program came out on Thursday to have a look at the property. There is one more round of funding which ends in June 2023 and he will submit a case for us to be in it. He seems to think we have a very...

All 4 of the plover babies hatched out and seemed to be doing well. They are almost two weeks old now but we only see three chicks. We saw all four for a couple of days only, but after the neighbour mowed his orchard up close to the fence next...

Down here in Tasmania the Spring rain has started, we had 30 mm yesterday – about 1.25″, and it looks like it will be a wet weekend here. We get a bit of a break Monday and Tuesday and then it starts up again. The weather people say we are...

Our neighbours that own the place up behind our back paddock have been busy planting out a lot of trees and things, all in these tall cardboard plant shields that look fairly official. I talked to them for a bit, and it is part of some kind of habitat renewal...

We’ve has some cold mornings, but otherwise clear sunny days recently, so I thought I’d tackle the remaining stump from the trees I took down before installing the solar panels. Easy peasy. It definitely helped a lot to wait 2 years before doing this as the stump had died and even...

We finally have our wood heater installed after waiting about a month of very cold weather. We definitely should have done this earlier.  This is the Pacific Energy (Canada) Neo 2.5 high efficiency wood heater. Once it’s lit, there is no visible smoke coming out of the flue, just a...

It was a very dry summer and we lost about half the tube stock we put in last winter. This was mainly in the section between us an the neighbour as that seems to dry out the most. We bought about 20 new ones in 14 cm pots, mainly fast...

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, the cluster of trees right at the corner of the big shed are going to have to be dealt with at some time. I made a plan for how to tackle them, and over a couple of weeks I managed to get...

The garden is still going well, the okra is about 4″ tall now. We are supposed to have a warm autumn, so hopefully we get another feed of fried okra out of it this year. I am planning to put more cardboard out between the garden beds but in the...

We have been feeding the wild birds for a while out near the tree in the driveway and usually get a lot of young Galahs coming down before they are chased away by the larger and more aggressive Sulphur Crested Cockatoos. For a while there is one Cockatoo that seems...

We got to see our first ever Echidna actually on the property the other day. We’ve seen a few around nearby, but this one was in our back paddock. It came through from the orchard next door, up along and across the back fence line before finding the hole in...

I nearly have the garden put back together, the new layout with the path around the outside is done, the beds in the lower part are realigned, and all the rest are basically ready to go. I fixed up the trellises where the passion fruit and grape vine are, and...

​I finally finished the new chicken run and it looks almost professional. It was a lot of work but I wanted to get it right being my first fencing job on the property. I still may add some more metal stakes in the old part of the fence, but for...

​I’ve made some good progress on the new chicken run area, if the weather improves I think I could have them there by the end of the week. Only one chicken is laying now, last week the one that has been a bit hit and miss in the past went...

It’s now 17 years since we came back to Australia from the U.S. in 2004 and we have done a fair bit in that time. We have rented twice, owned two homes outright including this place, and have been retired for about 8 years. September this year is cold and...

We took a drive up to a place called Habitat Plants the other day, a native plant nursery about an hour’s drive away and got a variety of tube stock plants. They are in a 3″ long tube and quite a bit cheaper than buying from the retail outlets. We...