raiders

24.6.2010
It is heart breaking. The garden that I have spent a year trying to revive is under heavy attack. Last week our cows got loose and raided everything and then the neighbours bulls made their way over. Worse though are the night raiders. Everyday a new plant has been sabotaged. Yesterday my beautiful new orange trees were decimated and today my coloured grasses are all eaten down. I have put new high tree guards round the surviving trees but it is not possible to protect the smaller plants.

In some ways we are lucky. Human type raiders have been at work in Dixon’s Creek and stolen all sorts of machinery and other goods from fire-affected properties. These can be daylight raids too. Several times I have seen vehicles parked outside our property looking in that drive off extremely fast when I emerge from the donga to see if I can help them!
We had better experiences at the weekend when old friends from the NT came to visit us. We are very lucky to have such amazing friends. Sunday was particularly cold and miserable, Bo came to visit with her three young kids and then Eva and Craig dropped in with new baby Kiki. This just about packed us wall to wall but we managed to keep the kids entertained and have some conversations. Not much else to do on that sort of a day.

In contrast today it is sunny and warm. I have planted a chestnut tree. I have more trees to plant but it takes a long time to rig up their guards afterwards. It is also a good thing that deciduous trees do not look very edible at this time of year. I believe wombats, rabbits and deer are my main enemies but with the sort of damage done maybe we have feral giraffes!

The wicking bed is proving useful as its height deters some low life. We have started to eat the lettuces and I am replacing them with baby spinach. I need to build more wicking beds but with all the distress my garden is causing me I have decided to change tack and concentrate on restoring our egg production system. Over the next week I will buy point of lay chooks and I have already brought heavy earthenware pots for their food and water plus another roll away egg box. The latter are essential to stop the wild birds grabbing all the eggs.

Josh has started his new semester’s work and says he has been told he needs to learn the international phonetic spelling system. We googled it last night and goggled at it. I have tried to send Josh a message using it but to make it work one needs perfect pronunciation. It is based on English but there are a million ways of pronouncing that. Helpfully it goes through mouth shapes, may be if we new it we could learn lip-reading as well. As Josh is still floundering with the present spelling system why not confuse the situation a bit more. He has nothing to loose.

More to the point, tomorrow is Edd’s last day teaching for a while. How I wish we had the plans done and could start building our house. Al is off over the school holidays with his family to build bark huts or something in an Aboriginal community so I have little hope of any help from that direction. Edd is getting very cranky about things.