05-29-03

We are eagerly awaiting the cheque for the sale of the Friesian heifers.  I think Brian already has it spent!

 

Brian and I borrowed a Gerni from our good friend and sometime adopted son (unofficially, of course!), Craig.  The Gerni is a high-pressured washer.  Now, Brian actually wanted it to clean down the Fordson tractor and the new-except-it's-1991 ute.  My immediate thought was, "Yahoo!  Now I can clean down the footpath near the kitchen that has the algae growing on it."  It didn't matter if I was wearing gumboots (rubber boots) or hiking boots (yes, I do have an unusual wardrobe, but no deep-sea diving or moon landings), I would still be skating along the footpath rather than walking because of the carpet of nice, green algae.  Oh, it is such a joy now to be able to have safe passage and not wonder if I can make the Ice Follies.

 

So Brian is in clean up mode.  As I haul stuff around, to get it out of his way when he cleans the bits I haven't quite managed to get to yet, I keep thinking that this is Autumn, not Spring.  So I weed the Herb Rockery, and find out some interesting facts about couch: it's a bit like that poem by John Donne, "For when you have Donne, you have not Donne, for there is yet more."  He was talking about God forgiving his endless sinning, and I wonder if he counted bad punning amongst them.  All I know is that bamboo is supposed to be the only chlorophyll creature that you can actually watch growing, so maybe couch grass needs to be moved in its nomenclature.  A couple of months ago, if that long, I had gently removed one of the larger versions of what passes for a spider around here (more like something out of the Addams Family, but less friendly, and they don't pay rent) in what seems now to have been a Char Sui jar, and dropped the said spider, probably a Huntsman, and probably medium huge, in the jar, very carefully minus the lid, one dark night into the Herb Garden.  Yesterday I found the lid, no rust, mind you, which proves either that that lid is of fantastic durability or that it has not been there long enough to garner a frock of decay.  It did, however, have the most phenomenally convoluted internal crown of couch grass that it has ever been my amazement to unravel and give to the pigs.

 

So, I pruned.  Now, when I give my husband a haircut, it's a Number Two.  I think, I am ashamed to admit, I did the same to the Herb Garden.  But today I happily planted some lemon thyme and a pink rosemary.  I also put in some strawberries before the Farmyard Mafia munched them into extinction and a nasturtium plant, both between the rocks and the concrete of the path.  

 

Then I tackled the large Succulent Patch.  This was originally an area done out gloriously in 70s black plastic, catmint and other Really Useful Vaguely Domesticated Plants.  Have you ever come across the ubiquitous black plastic, used to hold down the weed population and encourage that which was desirable in plants, usually with the opposite effect, weeds being the great survivors, up there with termites (don't get me started) and computer viruses (shh...).  Brilliant for harbouring a variety of arthropods from garden snails to slaters (pill bugs, think about the slate grey colour) to ant colonies and earwigs.

 

Before my Mother-in-Law, God bless her, vacated her Farm at Allansford and moved into a unit in Warrnambool, I had her permission to grab a few very large and prickly succulents along The Track, as the long driveway was called.  I planted them in the Succulent Patch on the basis that they were easy to care for, stunning (especially if walking unwarily backwards), and a memory easily seen.  Well, they throve, they have a reasonably shallow root system, at least here they do, and the reflected warmth from the black plastic was a wonderful nurturing tool.  Today, I weeded, arguing with the succulents that seemed most reluctant to be parted from their house companions of various metre high clumping grasses.  Brian had to deal with one that seemed bent on world domination, and then the way was literally open for three new varieties I purchased at Op Shops and that have been sitting in my shadehouse for months.  As in, I can't recall having bought them.

 

Tomorrow, I go to visit a glasshouse for sale for $60.  I'm praying that it will be what I want and that Brian stays in a good humour from the moment I tell him the great news to the last screw being in place.  Miracles still happen. And on a daily basis.

 

Oh yes, when I found the recipe for Apple Butter...it came from... my daughter Alice's teacher's Mother (confused?  You're not alone.) ... she had loaned said teacher the book with the recipe in it.  Needless to say, it is an Australian book, which is probably why I had such trouble locating the recipe in the first place.  Another bit of useless information to crowd into your day: did you know that there are more books printed in the English Language in one year than can be read full-time in a lifetime?  Unless, of course, you are a speed reader, like John F Kennedy, who had to get his staff taught so that they could keep up with him.

 

We had the Red Shield Appeal this past week.  Brian was too tired and Alice wanted to stay with her Grandmother, as Betty has only just come back from some weeks away, and, as I told you earlier, she is a wonderful lady.  So I did an Area by myself.  Volunteers are getting few and far between these days.  The poor Captains have done more kilometres than an exceptionally gifted International Rally Driver.  The great thing about Red Shield, aside from the wonderful people one meets, is the fabulous gardens and houses one gets to see.  My mouth was watering when I saw the pomegranate tree laden down with fruit on the point of ripening.  Actually, that's really weird, because when I lived in Adelaide, my Mum's pomegranate tree fruit were ripe as I went back to school after the Summer holidays, around February.  And here it is nearly June.  Wow.

 

We have the most wonderful system with the Laundry, which Brian calls the Washhouse.  It is a separate building to the house.  Brian has arranged for the grey water from it to go first on ground and then it leaches out to the septic system.  So it is great for washing the veggies that come from the garden, as the soil is not lost to the drains.  I also put either the bin for the pigs underneath it when the washing machine is going so that it cleans out the bin or I do the same with a large white bucket that originally held fat for frying chips (French fries), and I can wash my gumboots prior to going on to the path with them.  Bloomin' beautiful!  I've got brains I haven't even used yet - now, how's that for a scary thought.

 

Somehow, within the next two years, we are going to have to come up with enough money for a new house, as Brian guesstimates that will be the maximum before the termites chew us out of house and home.  I just pray that when the white ants do munch through a load bearing wall, that it is whilst we are out.  I don't know that I will even be able to shout "Timber" as there is not much of that when the little darlin's have been feasting.

 

 

 

 

Being Rural

 

Today the black headed ibis were back

The most austere of legal inquisitors

stalking around to the indifference of

my other, larger, farm life

 

They make me stop and smile and wonder

I do not want to move, the better to appreciate them

and to pray that I do not startle them into emigration

 

I often wonder at the sights and sounds that were my backyard

before Europeans visited these shores, before even the Aborigines

changed everything, before anyone could talk history.

 

Sometimes in my mind's eye, I see a multi-coloured feather

drifting slowly down to earth and I hear a chorus

of voices calling to each other

 

 Never again. 

 

But at least the ibis are still here.

 

 

 

 

Dominus tecum

 

Leonie