This weekend we spent Saturday over at the Village Hall, helping out with the clean-up, maintenance and garden building.

Janine did a lot of pruning and mulching of the existing garden beds, while I helped with the wheel barrowing of several tonnes of road base , then gravel to create new paths, followed by filling the new garden beds with another few tones of topsoil and mulch. The final part , was to plant out all the donated plants to fill the new beds.

A terrific effort from a lot of the Village residents.

Janine shovelling mulch

Road base spread to level out under the gravel paths along the tennis court.

Next we filled the garden beds with top soil and then covered it with a thick layer of mulch before planting out the flowers and shrubs.

Janine watering in the new plantings. It’s a lovely feeling to be part of a communal group activity.

We finished up with a BBQ. A great day of work, that wasn’t too onerous, because everyone turned up and got stuck in.

Many hands = light work.

Today, Sunday morning,  Janine and I spent time communing with nature.

Janine engaged deeply with nature by walking into the muddy dam fully clothed to hook some very heavy load chain around the dead tea trees bushes that were killed by the fire, and have been sitting in the water, standing dead and ugly for 3 years now.

We decided that today was the day to snig out as many of them as we could reach safely, and drag them out of the water and up onto dry land, then cut them up for fire wood for next winter.

It has been raining so much for the past few years since the big fire, that we couldn’t even get close to the dam bank without getting bogged. This has been our first opportunity to get this long-term job started.

We have cut about half of the wood that we will need for the next winter so far. Cutting and splitting fire wood is an on-going job all year.

We have achieved as much as we can at this stage. We will come back to it when and if the dry weather continues, so that we can walk further into the dam safely to get to more of the branches.

This small dam used to be our most reliable swimming dam in summer, because it was the deepest, and therefore held water the longest. The largest dam is beautiful to swim in, but only when it is full, as it is quite shallow and the water soon seeps and evaporates down to a waddling level.

Once the dam dries out once more, we will get all the dead tree branches out of the small dam, we will clean it out, so that we can swim in it safely on the hottest summer days once again.

Everything worth doing takes time. This is a long term plan.