A very busy week

February 24  2019

We are all exhausted. It has got hot again too. Suddenly we feel lost without Bo’s restaurant.  Normally we would head into Yarra Glen at this stage and sit at the tables out the front and talk to  family , friends and neighbours over leisurely drinks.  Sadly, we had our final  party there last Sunday and Yarra Glen is no longer our gathering point. On Monday Edd and I spent the day helping clean and sort out inside the restaurant, but Beth still had to clean out the fridges and cold room. Her final act was borrowing the big ladder and painting out their sign at the front of the building.

This week end she has been able to spend time with her family. It is the first time for years that she has not been working as chef or floor service. Yesterday she watched Silky have a riding lesson and today she has gone down to the beach.  She certainly deserves the break, so we will just have to suffer over the loss of a much-used amenity.

We have had a busy week. 23 Permaculture design course people arrived for a tour on Saturday morning and left after breakfast today having camped here for the night. Some brought tents and the rest found places in the house and donga.  I had to provide morning tea and cheese testing when they arrived ,an evening meal and breakfast before they left.  We used the ruins because it has all the tables and other gear needed but I had to have most of the food prepared in advance.  Indi helped with the cooking and made a cake for the morning tea and Bo cooked deserts for the evening. We must have done OK as everyone ate a lot and looked happy. Thank goodness I had family help and Dan to help with the farm work.

To make things more complicated we had 62 students from the Montessori program for the day on Thursday.  They wanted to show the new intake kids the farm before the camps start so they organised activities.  Only one gate was left open and we got the goats back in before they did too much damage.  The school has got very good at cleaning up when they leave, so there was not a huge amount of work we had to do.

It is forecast to be hot this week, but we are getting cool nights.  The Autumn glory sedum flowers are turning pink and the Virginia Creeper has just started to show red on the leaves. The zucchini glut is slowing but there is no sign of mildew on the leaves yet. Pumpkins are swelling, and we have some huge, odd, knobbly, green ones that do not look like anything we planted. The silver beet seedlings I rescued are beginning to shoot up as are the snow peas.  Plant life is definitely going into Autumn mode. Indi is also sporting a very pregnant shape, so we wait and wonder what our first great grandchild will be like.

Dan has started to put up the outdoor furniture I brought at Seymour show last weekend.  It is all very exciting. Edd found the lost water pipe and is now connecting up the dam to the green tank by the shed. Once this is done we will have dam water available at the house and we can plant out Toby’s garden.