Wilder and wilder!

Here’s a quick late-night update on what we’ve been up to:

Monday night last we went up to Bonorong for a meeting and a night tour, and got to have up close and personal time with various wild friends including a baby wombat! Fascinatingly, the wee ones follow you around if you start walking – it’s unbelievably cute. We had extensive scrumps, and part of what made it so delightful was the very fact that it’s a time limited phenomenon: even handreared wombats with lots of human contact get to a certain point and “go wild”, making them very easy to rerelease into the wild.

I will say: coming home from Bonorong at 10pm was rather more exciting than one might like. WIth the warmer weather (something like late twenties today!!) driving is becoming something to avoid, as the wildlife seems to be gormlessly leaping out from behind every tree and bush these days.

What else has been going on?

Lots of playing and singing, not only at the top pub but also at various exhibition openings and the St James fair

Hanging out at Robyn and Gerard’s place with their ridiculously cute Russian Spitz doglets

Making a run for Teesy so that she’s relatively comfy and has a bit of space to roam about in if we have to be out. This became urgent due to the:

Chainsaw course completed over two days last week(!) – we’re now both eligible for a chainsaw licence, if you can believe that!! It was great fun and hugely informative, which is good because it was not exactly cheap!

More inroads made into finally acquiring a solar power system – now if I can just get close some sort of deal…!

Chin-scratching about ways to get a shower happening up here (anyone care to comment on the feasibility of a thermo-siphon-operated combination wetback and solar hot water thingamijig?)

Got five large bales of hay delivered by Ray (poor guy made three failed attempts and eventually had to be guided up in convoy by us!)

Christening the chipper / shredder – she works a treat. Tell you what, a huge amount of brush amounts to sod all in the way of chippings! At the moment, the procedure is that the chippings go in the chookhouses / runs, and then, once they’ve all been activated by chook poo, they get cycled out to one of the compost piles.

Better draught-proofing in the container done by C

Also by C – lots of tool organising in the shed (photos to follow… promise)

ALSO by C – drystone terraces with lots of organic matter trapped behind them, the idea being that this catches the rain instead of torrents powering down the Hill causing erosion.

Our insanely ambitious seed order came in, and today Chloe sowed the first seeds: clovers and comfrey next to a big hole that will be the duck pond.

Got various compost piles started – our humanure pile in the one bit of the Hacienda that’s actually worked, and also a goodly and growing pile of the Lotus Eater girls’ lovely organic waste, now layered with straw and with a view to getting a few windrows happening

Tiny bit of knitting here and there.

Volunteering at St James, where the vegies are really starting to get underway

Buying a chainsaw, a brushcutter, and with any luck a 24,000 litre water tank at a significant discount – byebye to another chunk of seed funding, hello to a chunk of infrastructure!

The big news(es) on the business front are:

C’s in the final design stages of the Pizza oven and Superadobe benches that we’ll be doing for St James. We may be able to get underway with that in a matter of weeks!

It’s now confirmed that we’ll be co-operating with Theresa from Nala Pakana on a weekend Adobe Floor workshop in November! Our first participant signed up today – w00t! Want to learn how to prepare, pour and finish an earthen floor, all in a single weekend?? Watch this space for details!

And possibly most exciting and in a similar vein, we’re going to be co-operating with Bonorong Nature Reserve to create a number of buildings and enclosures at their Sanctuary. Again, we’ll be running quite a few workshops there, so if you want to get involved, give us a shout – learn SUperadobe techniques AND support wildlife conservation – we love multiple outputs!