What’s going on around the traps? Glad you asked…
Days have turned to that beautiful in-betweener season: postively Autumnal. Crisp, almost frosty, mornings with chilly evenings and a bite in the air. Warm sunny days to stretch out in and try and soak up as much of that vitamin d as we can before our long Winter hibernation. I want to shove as many of those sunshiney rays into my bones as possible…
…because here it comes. The long dark Gippsland Winter. Which means only one thing if you’re my husband: firewood. Lots and lots of firewood. Because his wife likes to burn wood. A lot of wood. Poor Matt dislikes chopping firewood immensely, or rather the time it takes to do it. He remarks every year how amazing a self-replenishing woodshed would be, take a block of wood out and poof! Magically another one appears. Can you imagine?! Yup, we’ve got big dreams. Until we find that genie in a bottle though, we have a fair stack of wood in the shed (albeit half is green for next year). Satisfying for the moment, until I start hooking in to burning it all!
We just had the big weekend of Farmworld here, traipsing up and down those Lardner hills pushing a double pram, seeing lots of familiar faces though and feeling the ag-love for our Gippy cows and crops. The last few years at Farmworld we’ve come home with a jacaranda tree, and each year they have inevitably died in our frosts. Husband dearest has been determined to grow one though (insert eyeroll emoji) and built a little shadecloth tent around the latest attempt last Winter…and I’ll be buggered, it’s survived! So now he thinks he’s some sort of tree genius and has this year brought home an avocado tree to have a crack at growing that through our Winter. Pffft. Good luck to him I say (although when we’re laden with avocados next Summer he may be having the last laugh! Stay tuned…)
Speaking of some Gippy love…I am loving the latest Gippslandia newspaper. There seems to be some good, soulful, hearty, big creative stuff going down in our neck of the woods. And I love it. How good is a creative community? With clever people with big ideas and the guts to go for it? Amazing, and encouraging for this little farmer’s wife sitting knee-deep in Motherhood but with big creative goals. Grab a copy if you see it, it’s delicious, quite literally, with an ag and food production focus this edition, which totally floats my boat of course.
Autumn rolls around and so too does the spud harvester, still going up and back, up and back in our paddocks over yonder. Around our house this year (and the next three years) we have spuds planted, but this paddock is one of the last to be harvested, so Eleanor is still awaiting all the big tractors and trucks to come closer. It will be soon though, the potato plants have died off now so it’s all looking a bit depressing as they do the last of their growing under that rich red soil. I must say I am enjoying the ease of hopping over the fence and digging up some spuds for dinner though! Eleanor has been filling her wheelbarrow with ‘Grandad’s tatoes for dinner!’ If you’re in the supermarket please grab some brushed spuds, from January to June – they’ll be ours, and they’ll be delicious!
Next to my desk I have a myriad of to-do lists. I am a list writer, ever so satisfying when I highlight them off. But one of the lists is ‘to sew for Eleanor and Harriet’ and it’s killing me slowly. Waaa! So many pretty patterns and fabrics taunting me from my lovely new sewing room. But where to find the time?! I have a small window in the afternoons when hopefully both girls sleep, but of course there’s a million other things that get bumped up the precious childfree time to-do list than sewing. Hmph. The irony of not having time to sew for my girls while I have small children to sew for is not lost on me either.
Has Autumn arrived in your neck of the woods?
Got your woodshed stacked and ready?
Any tips on growing avocados in a frost prone region?!
