Someone recently told us that we shouldn’t be climbing up ladders after we turned 60!!!!!That was 8 years ago. I re-roofed the old pottery and re-guttered the barn, both shortly before they burnt in December.The barn is now re-roofed and re-guttered. I’ve spent a lot of time up ladders since then, cleaning gutters and doing all the various maintenance jobs.I own a lot of ladders. Different lengths and formats for different jobs, ranging from one to six metres long. I’m up and down all day. Good thing that I was only just told that I should have stopped all this almost a decade ago.
Recently I have been building a metal frame to hold up the 2nd hand and recycled, plastic, bird-proof netting, that was donated to us for the new orchard cover. This involved burying 100mm dia. metal posts in the ground to 600 mm deep and then installing cross-members between them, also 100mm. dia. I bought a truck load of 40 second hand metal pipes, 5.5m long that were recovered from the HMAS Melbourne before it was scrapped. They had been used as irrigation pipes before I got them. I only needed to cut off the thick reinforcing rings off the end of each pipe to get the joints to fit on the pipes.
Warren suggested that we should get orchard framing made into an olympic demonstration sport! I could see that these old pipes would work OK for my purposes, as they came with an assortment of 90 degree elbows and some ‘Tee’ section joints.The last part was to lift up 8m long galvanised steel beams, 100mm x 50mm. These were quite heavy and unwieldy. Because I’m cautious. I went out of my way to buy yet another ladder, this time a 3mm tall step ladder, so that I wouldn’t have to stand on the last top step of my biggest 2.4m. step ladder, to get those heavy beams up on top of the 3.5m. high pipework frame.
I thought that I was doing quite well for an old guy. This higher ladder gave me a much better and safer working position while I screwed all the beams down to the frame securely.Of course I didn’t attempt do this on my own. I had my best friend Warren here to help me.We got all the beams up in one day! I’m very leased with my new tall ladder. So much safer than standing on the top step of the shorter one.
Yesterday, while moving a little short step ladder in my workshop. I bumped a gas bottle and knocked a steel beam off a tall shelf.It came down on my head, splitting it open with lots of bright red sauce. I saw stars, but remained conscious on the floor. I managed to get myself to the house and Janine drove me to Emergency where I got 10 stitches in my head.Ladders are so dangerous! Especially those little short plastic ones.
Now that things have settle down a little. We have lodged our pottery rebuilding plans and DA application with the Council. It’s just a matter of time now, as we sit and wait.
What could possibly go wrong?
While we wait, I have set about doing a bit of repair work on a few of my burnt out tools. There are so many burnt and buggered tools and pieces of machinery, left ruined by the fire that I will have repair work for many years to come – if I ever get around to fixing them.
I decide to ease into it gently by re-shafting a few of my tools that I now realise that I need to get the project moving. Some hammers, mallets, block buster, sledge and sketch hammer, tomahawk, axe etc.
I found a few old bits of timber in the barn when we were repairing it last week, even a few hardwood tool handles, and a hickory axe handle dating back to the 70’s or 80’s? I set to work re-purposing the split and shattered, used block-buster shafts, cutting the them in half and making shorter handles for other tools out of them.
I get a lot done in a couple of hours of entertaining handiwork. I feel great afterwards. I feel like I have achieved something. Not exactly the feeling I had after spending 9 hours preparing the many, many pages of building application forms for the council building app. But that was last week, and this is now. Something positive, no matter how small, is gratefully accepted and engaged with.
Getting shafted was never so much fun.
These tools were all burnt, rusted and flakey yesterday, just like the axe heads in the image above. They too will come good with a little TLC.
I have a lot of other tools that are on my ‘to-do’ list, all lined up outside on the stone wall.
These few items are the next lot of heads that are on my work bench.
They all look a lot better after and bit of wire brushing. My big problem with the adzes is that I can’t buy an adze handle anymore from the hardware shop. I might have to carve them myself, but I’d rather just buy them, as i have quite enough to do already.
Dawn breaks clear and rosey pink, a few scuds drift over and the days graft begins cold and clear. We sweat and toil till dusk and the day rewards us with a fiery sunset reminding us of our overworked muscles.
Such is our current ‘new’ life. One remarkable thing that happened today was that we saw a plane fly over.
It was a bit of a surprise, as we used to see and hear them many times a day in our previous life. There were so many that we didn’t bother to look. In fact we didn’t really notice them at all. They were omnipresent. Now they are a novelty.
6 months ago we had them thundering slowly overhead at low altitude, flaps down and roaring, just above a stall speed to deliver their pink fire retardant all around us. But that was then and this is now, so this solitary plane was a notable surprise.
A lovely event this week was the appearance of a clutch of baby wood ducks grazing in the Chekov orchard. For decades, we had wood ducks breeding here in the cherry orchard and on the dams. At that time we had a big eucalyptus tree with a hollow branch hanging over one of the the dams. A perfect breeding site that was used every season by many generations of wood ducks. Tragically, that tree blew over in a huge storm 10 years ago. Since then, the wood ducks haven’t bred here. They are apparently quite choosy about where they nest. Since the catastrophic fire. All the old trees with dead, hollow branches considered suitable by wood ducks as a nesting site have been burnt. Their choices are very limited now. The fire removed all the forest around here. There is no under growth or shrubby nesting sites for small birds, and no hollow branches considered suitable by wood ducks to breed in. So they are not so choosy any more. This pair seem to have lowered their expectations and managed to raise this batch of babies somewhere closer to the ground.
They usually hatch about a dozen little ones, but they loose almost one baby duck per day to predators in the early days. These ducklings seem to be about 3 weeks old and are now too big to be taken by curawongs, but hawks, powerful owls or a fox could still take them. So they are still very cautious.
At the moment, we have seven survivors grazing each morning. They are particularly shy of people, even after over 40 generations of breeding here on this little farm holding. You’d think that they would have got used to us by now, as we always keep our distance and never chase them. Once their kids have fledged and gone their own way, the parents will be a lot more tolerant of us walking around in their orchards, amongst their cherry trees and on their dam banks, or walking on their grass.
It’s nice to see them back. I can only suppose that, because of the total loss of grass and suitable sites due to the fire, our grassy orchards and partially full dams are now the best option for them to breed in again. We keep out of their way and give them plenty of space to graze peacefully, as we want them to return permanently. These pictures were taken through our bedroom window, as we can’t get close enough to them to photograph them outside.
When I get a bit of time and energy, I should look into what kind of nesting box wood ducks prefer, then get a couple set up in trees somewhere near the dams. Then hope they like it.
Life goes on. But in the mean time, I have a pottery to build and a new orchard to plant, and so we graft from dawn till dusk.
It is half a year now since the fire on the 21st December, right on the solstice. We have been in clean-up mode ever since. All the black from around the house is now cleaned up and dead with. Be that cutting up into suitable lengths for fire wood for later, or piling up and burning in bonfires. We have almost finished the burn piles. We started with 16 big tip truck loads of stumps, twisted branches and blackened gnarly undergrowth, all too difficult to deal with in my damaged and exhausted PSD state.
The house is now clear and no longer dangerous to walk around, as we were always wary of falling dead and burnt branches. We haven’t even thought about dealing with the burnt bush further from the house. It will have to wait. I have a couple of years work ahead of me just around the house here. We just won’t go there without a hard hat.
So now it is the solstice again. The winter solstice this time and we have passed from high summer through into deepest winter. Something to look forward to is that the days will now start to get longer, although the coldest days (and nights) are yet to come. A full six months has passed, half a year, I have been working hard every day, but not much seems to have been achieved. We still don’t have a pottery. I guessed, with no real evidence or insight, only the past two bush fire events that burned our previous potteries down, that it would take at least a year to rebuild. That was based solely on past experience. but I was a lot younger then and had so much more energy. Now i’m so much older, I can’t keep up the pace I want to achieve. I’m smart enough to know when to knock off. No more working with torches or under lights. At least not very often!
These last few weeks we have insulated the new car port walls with earth wool insulation and then lined the walls with fibre cement sheeting (fibro). I installed it back to front with the textured side out and left it untouched with it’s slightly pink mottled face as the finished surface. It looks OK. I have been trying to make this brand spanking shiney new industrial shed look somehow slightly softened and more comfortable in these rustic surroundings. I think that it’s working. I’m trying to do it without spending very much money either. That’s a challenge.
The wall cavity has been stuffed with 100mm of recycled beer bottles as brown fibreglass.
Since lining the carport I have been working with my friend Colin the environmental builder. We have dismantled the burnt-out north western corner of the barn and rebuilt it with my new square peg post and another recycled one that Col had in his yard.
We removed the roof and walls and replace all the timbers with new ones that we milled from one of the old stringy bark eucalypt trees when we hired the portable saw mill a few months back. It’s a very rewarding feeling to be able to rebuild this old barn using timber grown here on-site and personally milled and adzed into shape. I really like the concept of embedding something of the old native plant garden into the new shed. it’s all good quality hard wood, so theoretically it should last a hundred years. as long as we can keep the next fires at bay.
We removed the two burnt out posts, then placed the new adzed post in position. I lifted it with the little crane that I have on my truck and raised it up to about 45 degrees, then pulled the post up into place using my chain block.
I will reinstate the 4 water sprinklers on the western walls once the building is finished next week. I only need to install the guttering and replace the polycarbonate. Then I’m done. This old barn now has it’s own 2 new water tanks and will have it’s own high pressure fire pump to run the sprinklers. I decided to reuse all the old burnt corrugated galvanised iron wall sheets. They look suitably rustic and appropriate. The new gal roof sheets look a bit too shiney just now, but as they are old fashioned galvanised zinc coated, they will age to a dull grey, non-reflective surface, just like the old sheets that are next to them.
The half dozen burnt roofing sheets will be re-used on the new pottery workshop walls where it won’t matter if they have a little damage, as they won’t need to be totally waterproof.
On Friday, we got our DA approval for our plans for the new pottery building from the Council – with 9 pages of conditions attached! It seems like a lot of fiddle and extra work, but I’m pleased that we have approval to get going with the new building. This is a big step in the right direction. And after only 6 months! I had a few discussions with the inspector who kept asking for more detail. I eventually had to redraw the plans and colour them in, with a colour code ‘key’, to show all the different materials that I intended to use.
Everyone that I have had to deal with at the council has been incredibly helpful and supportive. We are so lucky!
The trees are just starting to make new shoots since the rain, but half of the rees are dead and will need to be taken down for safety – sometime in the future.
Over the last month I’ve been slowly working away at squaring up a big stringy back log that was burnt in the catastrophic fire that swept through here in December.
Our barn was badly burnt in that fire and we lost one corner, completely burnt out. As I stayed to defend our property from the flames. I was able to put out the flames after the fire swept through and I managed to save the barn. God knows how! The immense energy of the flames from the fire burnt everything in its path, but the roof and wall sprinklers on the barn were just enough to keep the building from bursting into flames, However embers lodged in the corner of the tin walls and set fire to the massive 300 x 300 mm. hard wood bridge timbers that I used as uprights.
It’s more or less impossible to set fire to a 300mm. square old hardwood timber post in any usual circumstance. However, if you have a once in a lifetime catastrophic fire fanned by 70 to 80 km/hr winds from the dry north, at 50 to 60oC , then anything is possible. The main fire front swept through burning almost everything in it’s path, I had taken refuse in my kiln for safety and didn’t dare emerge until after the main fire front had passed by. The yard and all the garden was ablaze. Every tree was on fire, thick smoke was everywhere. I come out of my kiln-like bunker. It took me some minutes standing under the house’s roof and wall sprinklers spray to cool off sufficiently to get my thoughts back in order. I realised that both the railway station and barn were both on fire fanned by the roaring wind.
I hosed out the station fire for the first time and ran to the barn carrying buckets of water, as the pump delivering water to the wall sprinklers on the barn had stopped working. There was no other pump or hose system over there on the opposite side of the property to use, so my immediate thought was to run there carrying buckets of tank water from the station tank. Each time I returned to the station, it was back on fire, as the insane wind had fanned the remaining embedded embers back into flames. I would put it out, then return to bucketing water to the barn. This cycle went on for an hour or two, until the station was well and truely out and although the barn was still smouldering, I had stopped the fire from spreading to the whole building. I eventually got it out, but the big corner posts, were almost completely reduced to charcoal.
So one of my on-going jobs over the past couple of months has been to set aside a large stringy bark tree trunk. I cut it to length and start to square it up to make a replacement square post for the corner of the barn. I got one face done, then I fell into the electrical cable trench and sprained my leg. That was the end of my timber milling efforts for a month or so,
I’m mostly well again now and this week I have come back to the job of squaring off the massive hardwood post. Extracting the square post from the curved, round log. I can only manage just one face each day, as It’s hard on my ageing back and shoulders.
Today I finished the last face. It’s pretty ugly, not exactly square, or smooth, but I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time to get it perfect. I have left most of the chainsaw depth cuts in the surface, as this indicates how it was made and is an honest surface for such a huge square post extracted from a curved round log.
While I was working today, adzing the final surface mostly flat. I was drawn to think of the timber cutters that worked these ridges and gullies 150 yers ago. I’m not a pimple on the arse of one of these hardy pioneers. They really knew how to work hard. My wimpy efforts are an embarrassment compared to the excellent quality of the sleepers that were snagged out of the Bargo gully behind us here in the 1850’s. All of their beautiful handiwork is gone. The last of the hand-cut sleepers have been replaced with steel sleepers now. The white ants and time took their toll. But what an achievement, these 50 kms of hand-hewn sleeper-laid train tracks that were felled, cut, adzed and broad axed into perfectly square clean shapes are just a memory. The snigging tracks that wound down into the gullies are all over grown and lost to memory now. But I remember them, Janine and I walked them in the 70’s when some of them were still visible, simply because some of the older locals still used them to get down into the creek.
My efforts don’t compare in any way, but hewing this square post into existence with just a small salute to the past has been a rewarding effort. The new corner post will hopefully tell someone in another generations time of the way in which it was made.
I have booked my friend, the local carpenter and environmentalist, Col McNeill to help me with the rebuilding. It will be a big effort for us to man-handle this massively heavy post into place, but that is next weeks job.
Our Hyundai Ioniq plug-in hybrid electric car has surprised us and out performed our expectations once again.
Last month, we achieved 593 kilometres to the litre fuel economy. But now, because of the lock down and the fact that we haven’t driven any long trips, where we would usually drive out on the battery and return on the petrol engine, we have found that we achieved 655 km per litre in May. Quite unexpected, but very pleasing.
This exceptional fuel economy is of course due to the fact that we have only made short trips to the shops for the last coupe of months. We have been limited to the 150 km. district from Campbelltown to Moss Vale for our basic needs.
The other good news is that we got the solar panels back on our roof last month, so we are now recharging the car directly from the PV panels on the roof during the day and from the battery at night. These days, we only connect into the grid to sell our excess. We have micro inverters on each solar panel, so we generate 240 volts directly into the house/workshop micro grid, we use the power from the PV panels directly into whatever appliance is being used at the time. If we are not consuming enough, the excess is then directed automatically to the battery to top it up if necessary, and only then is any excess directed to the grid for sale.
Shortly after re-installing the new solar panels on the new carport/workshop roof, we got the electrician to wire in the new fast charger for the car. This doubles the speed that we can recharge the car, as we were previously forced to use the standard 10 amp, 3 pin, outside power point to charge the car for the past 5 months. Things are starting to happen now.
Next, we took delivery of two new water tanks to go on the new shed. These are 10,000 litre tanks, bringing the storage capacity for theses two sheds up to 32,000 litres. Enough capacity to supply a high pressure fire fighting pump for about 4 hours at full volume. I have to install wall and roof sprinklers on these two sheds sometime in the not too distant future, so that we will be prepared for the next catastrophic fire event.
Lastly, we finally finished the north end of the new gabion stone filled wall. I needed to increase the height of the wall where it terminated at the battery shed and the power pole where the Tesla ‘gateway’ and the electrical meter box are located. The gateway and meter box were destroyed in the recent fire, with all the plastic components melted and electronics ‘cooked’.
This new wall height extension should help to elevate this in the future?
We started on the south end, but haven’t achieved much so far. All the poles cemented into the ground and half of the wire frame completed. It’s keeping us busy.
It’s almost 5 months since the catastrophic fire that cleaned us up and changed our life forever.Shit has Happened!Next! So Let’s move on. Get over it. We have to get on with being in the here and now. The new normal will now be massive fires at intervals set by the new hotter climate. We need to acknowlege this, internalise it and re-build appropriately. We have decided to re-construct eveything in Steel frame and steel cladding. This won’t eliminate the risk or reduce the wild-fire exposure, but when the fire returns – eventually, as it will, in the next catastrophic event, we will be better prepared with buildings that are less likely to burn. Our first attempt at building something new – a car port. A galvanised steel structure, is now complete. The council has been out here to inspect it and given the final approval and ticked it off. We have had the solar electricians out here this week and installed the 6.6 kw of solar PV on its roof. So we are not buying any of the ‘green’ wind power from the grid any more. We are now back to using our own self-generated solar power. It has taken 5 months to get back here. It’s a nice feeling to be getting back to self reliance in electricity and food. We decided to use re-cycled galvanised iron to clad the new building.
It makes the rather bright looking new building a lot less shocking. It blends in with the charachter of all the other buildings on the site. The inside is still rather bright, a bit ‘2001- a shed oddesy’, but I intend to line it in times to come when funds and time permit. That will tone it down a bit.
Because my leg is still healing. I can’t do too much – especially on ladders and up on roofs. So I have been grounding myself with working on the stone stairs leading up the retaining wall to the new pottery. These stairs will link the new pottery to the wood kiln shed below.I have found a lot of my stomemasons tools that went through the fire. Luckily, being mostly wrought iron, thay survived the fire in reasonable order, just very rusty.I have enough ‘gads’ to be getting on with, so I can cut up the big stone slabs into smaller sizes more suited to stone step treads in a set of steps.I’m not up to lifting big lumps like this anymore, so I’m using the tractor’s bucket to do the heavy lifting these days.
The weather is holding out, only a few frosts as yet, so we are still harvesting all our green food from the garden. We are making a lot of stir-frys at the moment. Ones that use a lot of capsicums! We make a big double batch and make gyoza dumplings from half, then stuff capsicums the next night with the rest.
Every big project is composed of many small steps. This week we took a few more small steps on the way to the completion of the bigger picture.We got our 2nd semi-trailer load of stone blocks. We are now almost finished building the retaining wall, and back filling. Tomorrow, I’m expecting the the last few truck loads of crushed rock dust. While we wait. I have been digging down to re-expose the old 3 phase cables and conduits. It requires digging down where I think that the cables ought to be, sometimes it’s there and other times it isn’t. I have spent a lot of time digging in the wrong places. I eventually find them, it’s just a matter of time. I remember where they used to run. After-all. It was me who burried them, but it was 30 years ago and the landscape here on this block is now completely different since the fire, without buildings, fences, trees, and other reference points. I found this one;
And these two, where they crossed over. Once found, it is a matter of digging all along the edge of the conduit, exposing it on the side, so that it can be pulled out of the embedded soil and out into the open trench.
I want to expose and re-use all the old wiring. There are 3 lines down to the old pottery site. The original single phase line, the newer 3 phase line and the solar power line. Installing new wiring and conduit is very expensive. I just had to pay $400 for just 25 metres of 16mm copper cable to do a short extension. Copper is so expensive these days. That makes the original cabling that I have spent the week digging out, worth about $5,000, and that doesn’t include the value of the 40mm. conduit and the cost of digging the trenches. Then there is the electricians service fees/labour costs. As the site is about 70 metres from the power box up at the street, I estimate that I have saved myself $30,000 all up. I paid $5,000+ for the initial 3 phase line in 1998. Things have gone up since then!
Tragically, as I was just threading the new copper cables through the new conduit. I went to step over the trench, lost my footing , as the side wall collapsed. I went down with the cable. I fell in, twisting my leg as I went down. I ended up back to front, but my leg didn’t follow. I twisted my leg right around. I thought that I had broken my leg at first, just looking at it all the wrong way around, I went into shock. I couldn’t feel my foot, but slowly came to realise that I could still move it OK. It is just very painful to move it. I had to crawl, limp and shuffle back to the house with Janine’s help. I went to bed. I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have the energy or motivation to do anything else.Today I’m very sore, but can limp around, we had booked the excavator to come back, so had to be out there to organise things, but didn’t do very much at all. I can see that this will take some time to heal. it’ll slow me down somewhat.
It’s been a busy week! Last Friday we spent the day digging two trenches to act as footings for our planned stone walls. The first will be to support a stone retaining wall to level out the new pottery site which is being built over the old orchard. With the trench dug, I ordered 9 tonnes of gravel to fill it back in. Crushed gravel cost $35 a tonne plus $50 delivery, the delivery charge works out to be $11 per tonne from Tahmoor, just 15 kms. away. I needed 2 truck loads. I spent the weekend shovelling and wheel borrowing the 9 tonnes of gravel back into the hole in 75mm. layers. Intermittently stomping, compacting and watering the layers, until I got back to ground level, to make sure that all the material was packed down very firmly. I finished that job on Monday. It seems that I’m OK with shovelling about 4 tonnes per day, before I run out of steam. I finished the last tonne on Monday. The soil that we removed went to ‘top-dress’ the old ruined pottery site, which was just a mess of rubble and broken pots and bricks.
Having considered all the options available to us and canvassed a few opinions, we have decided to raise the level at the back of the new pottery building site up 1 metre to bring it to level with the front driveway. I had originally thought that I could save money by lowering the front down and doing what is called ‘cut and fill’, where half of the site is dug down and lowered, and the soil that is removed is used to build up the back of the site. All very economical. However, this would make the front of the building below ground level and prone to flooding in extreme storms, unless we had very good perimeter drainage. I asked my friend Dave the engineer, he told me that such drainage eventually always fails.
The old pottery was built this way with the front of the building 600mm. below natural ground level. I made a contour drain out in front with a 200 mm embankment then an ‘agg’ drain below the stone retaining wall to deal with any seepage. The pottery flooded twice in its 36 years! There are rain storms big enough to override any drain and small embankment. Or so it seems.
The person that I trust most in these matters is Ross, the plant operator who is doing all the earth works for us here. He has been really helpful, fitting us in, in-between his other jobs. When I suggested the cheaper ‘cut-and-fill’ option, He shook his head and simply said to get it up above ground level. You won’t regret it.
That left me with a problem. Where would I get all the fill? I considered de-constructing the wall of the largest dam and using all that material, but I don’t really want to do that. My construction certificate says that if I bring in fill, it must be certified ‘clean’ natural material from a registered and certified quarry. So I was snookered.
I did a quick calculation that the site is 25m. x 15m. so to raise it up 1 metre at the back, would take around 300 to 400 tonnes of gravel fill. The unbelievably resourceful Ross rang around his contacts for me. Beyond belief, he managed to find a batch of 400 tonnes of ‘sub-prime’ road base, crushed gravel from a quarry. I could get the 3 to 400 tonnes for free, but I would need to pay for the cartage. Such amazing synchronicity! It’s a huge number of truck loads. The cartage will take around 4 to 5 days to complete. I’m being charged $16 per tonne delivery from the quarry, about 70 kms away. I can’t believe our luck. It’s a really good deal. I just paid $46 per tonne for the local gravel yard to bring in 2 loads of much the same thing last Saturday.
When we built the last pottery, we decided to make it out of mud bricks. The soil onsite here is very good for mud bricks, but we didn’t need or want a 100 tonne hole across our land. We hunted around and found a local small quarry that was mining sand and gravel, but there was an overburden of clay that they needed to get rid of. We could have it for free, but had to pay for the cartage. Same story, just separated 35 years in time.
So we are on our way and the site is being filled and compacted to a level just above the natural. So now I will not have to worry about flooding in extreme wet weather events. I even get a certificate from the quarry for the council inspector, guaranteeing that our fill is natural clean crushed stone as specified on our construction certificate.
Up until last week, I could never have imagined trucking 400 tonnes of anything onto this block. It still seems surreal. On Tuesday the trucks started arriving and the they are huge!
They keep on coming 3 to 4 per day over the week until on Friday, at the end of the week we have 370 tonnes in the ground and are almost there, up to ‘natural’ ground level across the site.
On Thursday, the 30 tonnes of stones arrived just after dawn. We spent all day Thursday and half of Friday lifting and lowering the huge 1.2 tonne stones into position to make the retaining wall. These stone blocks are 2 metres long by 500mm. sq. I have managed to find some ‘C’ grade seconds rejects for just over 100 dollars each. They work out to be the same cost as those huge concrete blocks that are cast using all the left-over concrete returned to the mixing plant. I tried to buy some of these, but there is a waiting list of 2 months, and then ,no guarantee that there will be any or enough of them available on the day, as it all depends on the amount of returned excess concrete that makes it’s way back to the mixing plant, and needs to be gotten rid of. By Friday afternoon the stone wall is almost complete and the ‘crushed granite fill’ that has been delivered at the rate of three x 30 tonne truck loads per day, the gravel was spread and compacted as it was delivered, in-between placing the load of large stones. Ross and I wrangle them into position over the compacted gravel trench footing. The site is almost full. We will need just another 60 tonnes to make the site completely level. That material is ordered for Monday morning.
In just one week we have completely changed the nature of our block of ground, from a sloping orchard site into a level building site with a substantial stone retaining wall.
So, after 16 tonnes, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt, or so the song goes. In this case it’s 400 tonnes and I get the satisfaction of seeing the site of the new pottery becoming a reality. Luckily I’m not in debt, but it has cost me about $12,000 to get back to our new elevated ground level, money well spent on this occasion.
A big thank you to Claudia Citton and Rochelle Johnson who organised the GoFundMe page that has allowed us to get going on this project while the insurance company sat on their hands.
We have spent this Easter long weekend digging trenches and laying plastic ‘polypipe’ all around the perimeter of the property. We used to have a complete circumnavigation of the block, but it was largely destroyed in the recent fires. I laid about 1000 metres of polypipe in the 70’s, but having chosen to live here on a very low income, I buried all the pipe by hand using a mattock. I dug and buried about 6 metres every summer morning before breakfast over a few years.
My big mistake was that because the ground was very dry and hard, I only managed to bury the pipe just below the surface, possibly just 100 mm. deep. Over the years with mowing and soil disturbance, erosion, etc. some of the pipe was just visible in places. It wasn’t such a big deal for the first 40 years, it only turned out to be a mistake when the catastrophic fire roared through here.
When the fire came, it was so hot, that it melted the pipe where it was exposed, or even if it was close to the surface. After the fire we found 2 complete melt outs, and 15 leaks in the system. We spent a couple of days with our friends Warren and Trudie helping us, to locate and patch all the holes. Each day driving back into town to buy more joiners, junctions and piping. We were haemorrhaging a thousand dollars a day for the first few days. We knew where the holes were, because whenever I started up the pump, we could see a fountain appear out of the ground. So I would switch off the pump and dig out the wet soggy site, then cut out the damaged section of pipe and install a couple of joiners and a new length of pipe. It worked as a stop gap measure, it got us through a tough spot in the dangerous, hot, dry, summer. But now it has become the time to do the job properly.
I decided to re-route the new pipeline right around the extreme edges of the land, whereas previously, it had cut around the edges about 20 metres in from our boundary. Now I want to move the pottery up onto the orchard site and move the stone fruit orchard up to the front of our land close to the street. I don’t want to have to move the polypipe again. I need it to be out of the way, but accessible. This time I have dug the trench 300 to 400 mm deep. Not deep enough to have to worry about cutting through the electricity conduits where they criss-cross the block, 600mm. down, but deep enough not to melt in the next fire that will come through here in the coming decade.
Eventually, I got back to the old pipework and joined the old 44 year old imperial agricultural pipe into the new blueline metric piping. There have been 4 different ‘standard’ joints for this poly piping system and 3 different standards in pipe sizes and wall thicknesses over the years. My under-ground water system has elements of all 7 different parts. It’s a hotch-potch. Whenever I dig up a part of the system to add on a spur line, I have to try to match the parts and pipe sizes.
I used to have stock of all these different parts to get me out of trouble in 1inch, 25mm., 2 inch, and 50mm. sizes in both male and female formats. These days I have to drive down to Mittagong to buy each new part for the circumstances at hand. I usually buy one extra spare part to start to replace my parts in stock.
We will be safe for the next 4 years, as it takes 4 years for the leaf litter in the forest to build up to a level that will sustain a bad fire, somewhere from 5 to 10 years on, there will be another very dry, prolonged period, but global warming increases the likelihood that it could be worse than this last time. When the fire comes again we need to be better prepared. This is how we are thinking & planning, and how we are responding to this disaster. I need to make our property defendable in the next very bad fire.
While I was concentrating on digging and laying the 130 metres of new 50mm. dia piping, Dave the concreter turned up to start work on the concrete slab for the new metal framed car port. I thought that would give him a hand, but I soon realised that the best assistance I could give him was to keep out of his way. He has done this all his life and is very quick and efficient. One day to dig out the site and frame it up, the lay the steel rio mesh, and another day to cast the concrete and polish the surface. Straight after Easter, the builder turned up to start erecting the metal frame.
It’s all going so quickly now. We have finished excavating all the beautiful rich dark top soil from the orchard and spreading it on the new top site. We spent a day raking out the roots and stones from the top soil and loading the truck to take them to the burn pile.
I want to get this new orchard site ready for the arrival of the new dwarf fruit trees by June/July. The site has to be completed by then because these new fruit trees are going to be bare-rooted, and will need to be planted pretty quickly. They are already ordered and paid for. I won’t have time to be doing all this prep when they arrive. These little jobs have to be scheduled in all along the way as the opportunity arrises. I couldn’t bare to build the new pottery on top of all that hard earned, self created, beautiful rich top soil. I had to remove it and use it productively.
So now the site is prepared, we still have to lay in the irrigation. One of my new poly pipe spur lines terminates just inside where the orchard fence will be. I am still trying to figure out the cheapest way to build a fence and frame to support the bird netting. This is a work in progress. The next immediate job is to build a stone retaining wall to hold back the lovely deep bed of soil. Actually I need to build 2 stone retaining walls over the next few weeks to prepare for other stages of the new pottery build. The old orchard site that will house the new pottery will need to be levelled, what’s called ‘cut and fill’ and that soil will need to be retained. Whenever I can get around to that.
And the good news is…. Our Hyundai Ioniq electric plug-in hybrid car has returned the performance figures for the first quarter and we have raised our average fuel consumption from 500 km. to the litre of fuel up to 505 kms to the litre. It’s an amazing statistic that I find hard to comprehend, but I have only been to the service station one this year so far, and the fuel tank is still over 3/4 full. Very pleasing!
Lastly, we have been trying to find ways of using up our huge excess of capsicums. First they were roasted by the fire and lost their leaves, then recovered by the heavy rains that followed. Now we are having to deal with this huge harvest. Fortunately, capsicums are a favourite of ours, but everyone has a limit. We use them in every soup, salad, stew, and stock. I have roasted them and pickled them, this week I stuffed them and baked them. Last night I cut them into chunks and used them on kebabs with zucchini slices and some fresh tuna off the fish truck.
Janine made a baked pudding using 2 jars of our preserved berries from the summer.
As the weather has turned cooler now, this warming and very satisfying desert is very welcome and delicious .
I have made some sourdough bread. I rescued the sourdough starter from Geordie. Now that his restaurant has been forced to close. I thought that I might keep the sourdough ferment alive here for the duration.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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