A Year at the Farm

Well, the long awaited holiday at the farm had finally arrived. We arrived at the farm at about 1pm on 31 December, in time to set up, relax, do a bit of work and then enjoy the next year. I was only at the farm a few days earlier, but Kath hadn't been for a few weeks.

With the floor all finished, the next step was to lay some carpet - to give it a bit more of a cosy feel. No, I'm not facing Mecca! This took less than 10 minutes to complete- thank God for carpet squares.

The next small job was to fix a minor leak in the roof. During the torrential downpour a few days earlier, I noticed a small leak in the roof. It was only because of the heavy downpour that the water was coming in. Nevertheless, it was an easy job to fix with some screws and silicone.


No farm is complete without a water gauge. Kath actually bought this when we first got the farm. It's only taken us 10 months to install it. It was a 1 minute job!


Here's a storm brewing over the horizon. While the weather looked threatening during our stay, it only rained a little bit during one night, so we hardly noticed the rain.

While the sky was cloudy and the sun wasn't out, the UV index was "extremely high". Kath ended up quite burnt on the first day of our stay.

The latest project, the water tank cover continues. Here it is about 80% complete. All I need to do is reinforce it a bit to account for the wild winter winds and then it's ready to install corrugated iron on the outside.

Fonzi builds up quite an appetite at the farm. No home luxuries here, he has to eat outside.

One of Kath's jobs was to plant some trees near the shed. I'm not sure what they are but I think they are drought tolerant. I wonder if they are kangaroo tolerant?

Here are the trees all planted and protected by the water reservoirs. Hopefully, they'll have enough time to become established and have a fighting chance next summer.

While clearing some rocks from around the shed and cabin site, we had a good (unplanned) idea to build a little garden surrounded by rocks near the entrance of the shed. We had previously planned to build the garden using treated pine sleepers. However, it doesn't cost anything to use the rocks already on the farm and hopefully they will give the garden a nice natural look.

Here's the rock border ready to be set in concrete. That's a job for another day as the sun was already getting low in the sky.


Here's Kath a bit before midnight on New Year's Ever. It was a bit cool so Fonzi is warming her lap.


One of the other simple jobs I wanted to complete was to finish off the last fence post. This would mean that the next fencing job would be to knock in the star pickets and wire up the fence. Easier said than done. That's a job for the Australia Day long weekend I have planed.
I was a bit warm on New Year's Day and we were all tired from a late night before.

My next job was to fit some moulding around the shed door. This serves two purposes; to stop any draughts from coming in and will hopefully stop the mice from getting in.

Here's the moulding just under the door. If the mice were able to squeeze under the door before, hopefully this will stop them now!

Well, that's all the work we did at the farm. We spent the next couple of days just relaxing, napping and looking around the farm. My next big stay is planned for the Australia Day weekend when I will try to make some progress on the boundary fence. I'll be glad when that project is finished!