In these last few weeks of late winter, we have been picking loads of citrus for both juice and marmalade.
The avocado season is also in full swing with quite a good crop on this year.
I have finally finished building the car port shed, Started in March 2020, completed August 2022. It’s only taken me 2 1/2 years. Slow but thorough.
One other reason for the long time interval from start to finish, was that apart from the initial frame, everything else was scrounged, re-cycled and repurposed.
The last job was to fame up the East wall and clad it with poly carbonate sheeting. We were gifted a couple of very large recycled glass doors, by a lovely friend who had them taken out of her house to do extensions. I designed and built the wall out of left over steel sections that the pottery shed builders thew out on the scrap pile to go to the tip. I couldn’t bear to see such waste, even to see it go to the re-cyclers was a great waste of embedded energy, so I welded all the small section of scrap together to make long 6m. useful beams. I designed and built this last wall around the donated glass door sizes to make a snug fit.
I’m glad that it is finally done, as there was a lot of 5 and 6 metre high ladder work. More than I was comfortable with. Luckily, I had my very good friend Warren to give me a hand for a couple of days to get it completed. These beams are just too long to lift and fit one handed on a ladder by myself.
You can read the story of re-purposing the short steel off-cuts from a previous blog post here;
I started framing this wall last December. I’ve been working on it on and off since then as time permits.
Winter is also the time for fruit tree pruning. It’s been an on-going job for a few weeks now, on and off, as time allowed.
I didn’t do a lot of pruning over the last 3 years, as most of my orchard trees got burnt. Those that survived, just got ignored, as I was way too busy doing other more important jobs at the time.
So this year was a big year for catching up, reshaping and thinning out.
The small chain saw got a bit of a workout as well as the usual range of secateurs and hand saws.
We generated quite a pile of prunings by the end of the work and had a good bon fire to clean it all up last week at the end of the work, but before the fire bans come back into force.
Recently, it was our sons birthday, so I made him a panforte as a birthday cake.
With all the usual ingredients and a lot of love.
You can read about the recipe on my blog here;
Happy gardening and cooking.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 