Friday, June 05, 2009

Time flies when you're having fun!

Another busy week.. just not much to take pictures of! Today is World Environment Day, and we attended a Seed Savers meeting in Stawell. It went quite well, and we both look forward to further dealings with the group. We were given some rare seeds; White Bush Marrow (looks a little like this) and Pfalzer carrots (I can't find an online picture of these, but they have a large yellow root, and it's quite rare).

We have found ourselves a trailer and had to order a towbar for the little Daihatsu - we won't be pulling anything too heavy though.. just horse manure and mulch. The next task is getting the towbar attached to the car.. easier said than done so far. Hopefully we'll have it done by this long (Queens Birthday) weekend.

Progress on the Baker's Oven has been a little slow. The stone hasn't yet been cut by the Stonemason.. but we have cleaned the chimney. We followed some advice and used a wadded-up piece of chicken wire tied to a rope. :) Believe it or not, it worked quite well. We've chosen a colour to paint the inside of the fireplace. We will tile in the summer when the Baker's Oven isn't quite as urgent.

Remember these old copper pipes?



They use to be part of the old wetback system, and we have since cut them off, took out the mortar between the broken bricks and removed them.. found a couple of whole bricks to replace them with, and knocked-up a lime mortar to put them in with. Sounds easy, I bet. ;)

See?



It's hard to tell where the bricks were replaced now! Not bad for an amateur. (You can tell I'm bragging!) hehe

In a couple of days, after the lime mortar has dried, we'll give it a paint. I'm not telling you the colour yet, you'll have to wait and see! So, it's getting closer to installation time, but we're not only waiting on the stone hearth, but also the cowl we ordered specially from Ballarat. That was weeks ago now.. we'll have to step-up the hassling. :)

The rain has finally slowed-down a little. The tanks have been full for a week now, so that's nearly 15,000 litres (3,962 gallons) of water for the garden this summer! Hopefully that will carry us through the worst of it next year. We'll find out soon enough, the year is flying by!

Until next time.

2 comments:

  1. Good on you all for all your hard work. Isn't a blog great for documenting the progress?

    Lovely picture -great smile!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Again, good work. glad to see all your progress.

    ReplyDelete