Rainfall this week : 2mm

Our morning walks now give Chilli ample opportunity to muster the macropods.🦘With absolutely no shortage of them on the property at the moment it seems that every walk starts and ends with ‘Chilli stop’, ‘Chilli no’ and ‘Chilli heel’. (And yes she has had training 😳) After having the neighbors stock on our property for the last couple of years they had well and truly mowed the paddocks down which seemed to keep the macropods over at all the neighbouring properties but now after moving all the stock back to Reg and Pete’s and after some rain we have acres of green new pick for the wildlife. Hence the Macropods have decided to move back in and surprisingly there is quite a variety of them:

-The Wallaroo: The Mike Tyson of the species.

-The classic Eastern Greys.

-The Pretty Face Wallabies: My favourite, they are petite and pretty 😍

-The Brush Tailed Rock Wallaby.

-The Swamp Wallaby.

-The Red-necked Wallaby.

I’m sure there are probably other species that we have yet to witness, and even though we realise that they are quite a pest out here in the country, they are still super cute and it’s always entertaining to see the Eastern Greys have a round in the ring🥊. And they definitely keep Miss Chilli busy, 🥴particularly when the neighbour calls in for a 🍻 and we bust her in the back of his Ute gnawing on a macropod leg that he had in a sugar bag for his working dogs😆, no wonder she didn’t finish her dinner.

While it may not look like we have made a lot of progress this week from the outset, we have been busy I promise. We have finished installing the wire mesh on the roof of the shed. This did take us longer than anticipated and boy weren’t we kicking ourselves for not doing this whilst we had the scissor🥴 (Lucky we had trestles and planks). This was completed so in the future it will prevent the insulation from sagging which seems to be a thing in large shed roofs. The flashing has been put on around the slab edge so as to keep those little nasties like mice and rats out of the shed, which is always a bonus🐀🐁.

Jason and his trusty Yoshi have spent quite a substantial amount of time re trimming and scraping and track rolling the house pad to perfection. Husband goes alright for a novice👍.

The profiles are in and now we are ready to start marking out and dig out the footings and piers. ( Whilst in between sheeting the shed🥴) We’ve also been cleaning out all the love grass clumps from around the boulders close to the house area and creating some garden beds which I will fill with a variety of succulents as they seem to survive any kind of extreme weather out here. What is this African Love Grass you mention? It is a highly invasive tussock grass native to South Africa. Originally introduced as a soil stabilizer and pasture grass it is now an environmental weed across Australia. Whilst it is noted to have negligible nutritional properties for stock they do eat it as long as it’s kept short. Therefore we try to keep it under control with lots of slashing which then also allows the native grasses to grow alongside it. We won’t ever be able to completely rid the property of Love Grass but we will slowly have more and more native grasses covering the paddocks in years to come.

Yet another week has flown by and finally this morning we saw the first decent frost of the season ❄️. Winter has certainly been mild thus far and with our fozen fingers crossed for some more below zero mornings and more visits from Jack Frost we are currently warming up beside the diesel heater holding a steaming hot cup of coffee and waiting for eggs on toast.🍳

As we are trying to fully get over this damn cold, our mornings have still been a little slow and our motivation hasn’t been at its highest. But we are soldiering on and keeping warm and are looking forward to our visitors arriving tomorrow 🔥.