Wild Hope Homestead

I knew it! One night when I went out to shut the chickens away, something suddenly crashed around in the trees along the edge of The Cedar Pen. I shone my phone light around a bit but couldn’t see anything. I told The Husband I thought there was a possum out there. He said it was probably a cat. Cats don’t crash around in the trees at night. They are creatures of stealth. How would they catch so many things if they made that much noise? The next night, I heard more rustling around in one of the trees when I went out there. Then, a few nights ago, I saw it with my own eyes. A disdainful, fuzzy creature jumped from MY apple tree onto the fence, scuttled along the top of the fence and disappeared into the bay tree or cedar tree before I could say, “You thieving scumbag!” I bet he’s been having a great time with our fruit. Now to figure out how to get rid of him. Possums are a scourge in our country. And this fellow is a scourge to our homestead.

You may notice that chickens are conspicuously absent from this post, because we’re having chicken problems at the moment, in a certain faction, and I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

We have said goodbye to the trampoline, which I am quite happy about. The Little Fulla wasn’t using it much and it was really in the way of my plant growing area. I am REALLY enjoying looking outside and seeing a better view of the garden and chicken pen. I feel like I have my space back again.

I dealt with the pile of branches that had gathered in front of the back carport, above. I chopped them all up for firewood or kindling for next year. I was feeling so pleased with myself and the weather was so nice, that I went and pruned the grapefruit tree. I pruned it hard. I wasn’t intending to prune it hard at this time of year but it had a lot of citrus tree borer damage that needed to be gotten rid of, plus it was shading part of the Vege Garden, plus we actually barely use the grapefruit. We just haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. Now, there is a GIANT pruning mountain of grapefruit branches in the chicken pen. Oops! Making more work for myself. But more firewood. I am still deciding whether the tree is worth keeping with its damage plus lack of use.

Do not do this to your citrus tree, unless it’s damaged or you don’t care too much if it lives or dies. This is a harsh pruning.

I made another pile…

All the frosted capsicum plants were pulled out of the Vege Garden, which made more space for the brassica seedlings, that I was really supposed to plant before winter, but, you know. I’ve planted cauliflowers, savoy cabbages and broccoli. I haven’t yet counted how many of each, but the cauliflower label said 15 seeds had been sown, so you get the picture. Why did I sow so many brassicas all at once? Probably because I was already behind. Anyway, they are in the garden now, so that’s that.

I have also planted the garlic. I planted 20 cloves of elephant garlic saved from last season. I was a bit of a stinge with the amount of elephant garlic that was allowed to make it into the kitchen. I had also stored two bulbs of common Printanor garlic. While the common garlic crop was a disaster thanks to rust, for the second year in a row, the two cloves I planted in the Herb Garden last year were actually ok, although they were small thanks to not enough sun and nutrients. Now, I told myself that I was not allowed to plant common garlic anymore, because it was a waste of space, time and money when it kept getting stunted by rust. But then, I found a loophole in my plan. I planted six cloves in the Herb Garden. They aren’t stealing space from any veges there! And, actually, they’re kind of a herb anyway…

The huge elephant garlic cloves and the tiny little Printanor garlic cloves.

That’s my finger pointing at a hulking great big clove.

A few other things that have been done recently are:

The Husband got out the sewing machine and spent a good deal of time fixing up holes in a few pairs of his jeans. I didn’t notice what he was doing until I saw the finished product. He sewed the patches on the inside. I found this hilarious. Points out of 10 for execution? Points out of 10 for making you laugh?

Something about the frosts we’ve had made the spiders hang their webs all over the plants one night and they were quite a sight in the morning.

And then the heavy rains came back. And we’re back to a very soggy mess.

But we did have a beautiful sunrise this morning.