Tag: firewood
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BSP #48 – Cold Snap
Philip Duncan, my go to weather guru, said the polar boundary was going to creep up over us early this week. He wasn’t joking. We’ve had an energetic Spring, he said. That’s one way of putting it. When the wind swung round to sou’west last night and the rain started in earnest, I knew we…
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BSP #46 – A Move, A Tidy, A Discovery
First up today was a paddock move for the sheep. They’ve nibbled their current one down enough but not too far as to rule out it producing a few bales come haying time and were very happy with a move to pastures new. The fallen tree has been turned into next year’s firewood. It was…
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A Touch of Shakespeare
With apologies to The Bard, I feel a nod to his Sonnet 98 is in order – with a twist: From you I have been absent in the …autumn With two long weekends (Easter and ANZAC Day) taking care of a couple of Fridays, the first world horror of shopping for a Homestead Mobile replacement,…
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What’s May Thinking?
This week, with phone camera at the ready (mostly – if I remembered), I restated and restarted my aim to document the Homestead humdrum everyday. We all know I’m one for getting caught up in the action to the detriment of documenting, but I tried to keep my eye on the prize and have managed…
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Getting Moving Again
It’s been wet here. Really wet. We knew it was going to be when the squadron of heron (our personal harbinger of deluge) touched down in the macrocarpa trees, but even then we didn’t suspect the magnitude of this omen. At the height of it, our full-to-overflowing, plastic duck pond floated around the chicken coop…
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Acting All Autumnal
As we’ve already mentioned (should that be whinged), autumn has arrived at Union Homestead. The nights are cooler, the mornings darker and the produce is slowing down. Where we were harvesting armfuls of courgettes-come-marrows to steam and slather with homegrown basil pesto just a few measly weeks ago, now we’re watching the pumpkins inflate and…
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A Weekend Off
It’s overcast and grey outside and we couldn’t be happier; it’s been a week of hard graft. East wall painting: finished. The blue of our windowsills makes our hearts sing. Our muscles are groaning, our hands chaffed and blistered, and we’re finding it difficult to string coherent sentences together. ‘Twere it sunny we’d be honour…
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Setting the Bar
It seems like all winter long we pass our days adding items to the “When It Warms Up” list. When you’re in the depths of winter passing your days coaxing reluctant goats around hock-deep wallows, solid molasses into the feed bowls, vegetables (anything will do!) to grow, and the collection of ramshackle Homestead outbuildings to remain…
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Finking ’bout Far-flung Family
Last Saturday marked the Winter Solstice for us southern hemisphere dwellers and that can only mean one thing. Well, if you want to be picky, it means a variety of things of which the need for the artful layering of clothing, employing a torch for the final paddock check of the day and answering the conundrum of…
