Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Some Important Spring Farm Work

My old friend Stirls came down for a few days to help with some farm work.
The most important job was a complete revamp of part of the southern boundary fence that had been bush fire damaged back in 1999/20 and temporarily repaired.
It had also had suffered further demise by a number of flood incidents and major tree fall over the last 3 years.
It was quite a big job. Chainsawing tree debris, resetting strainers, installing new posts and straining and attaching new barbed wire. But for two days it was pleasant working in the bush in cool spring weather. 
No snakes seen the entire time. The noise and activity must have frightened them off. 
A minor job was to fix the main cattle yard gate. It hadn’t swung properly for 20 years but now it does. Just needed the post it was hanging off straightened and reinforced.
Our northern house paddock boundary fence needed some rotten posts replaced which was easily done. But then we decided to restrain the wiring to make it look a bit more presentable to the outside world which took another half day.
A number of bushfire burnt trees from 3 years ago still remained along our western house paddock boundary fence.
It was time to remove them.
There was some reasonable fire wood amongst it all so we sorted that out from the rest which was then taken to the ever increasing burn pile which can only be lit up in April next year when fire restrictions come off.

The co driver wanted those burnt trees replaced with some screening plants so instead of paying through the nose at the local nursery, I thought we’d try transferring some small native plants (lilly pilly), that would eventually do the job, from our bush. There’s plenty of those that have sprung up after the fires along the creek banks.
Transplanting native plants is always fraught with ‘danger’. They just don’t like it but I felt that if they we small enough (max 1m) and we got enough root ball it might just work. Anyway we did that, traipsing up our big hill a number of times with the selected plants, dug suitable holes and planted, watered and staked them. I expect a 50% failure rate but we’ll see.
Our endeavours were not helped on the last few days by an unseasonal howling westerly wind with gusts up to 70km/hr. These caused a lot of damage other places to our north so we got off a bit lightly I think. Gusts up to 100km/hr were recorded in our major town Nowra.
We experienced one short blackout which didn’t interrupt our life much.

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