Another Quick Update

Yet another month flown by! I wont bother making excuses for not posting, they're the same as the usual ones ;-)

I've calmed down since my water crisis, and essentially given up on the idea of having a lot of massive dams, at least for the moment. We've decided we'll have a single large dam to the capacity of our maximum harvestable right, situated at the bottom of hill, where three gullies feed into one. It's a nice spot for a dam.

The rest of our water needs we will handle through swales/contour banks. This will help prevent erosion on our very steep block, as well as ensuring any water that does fall takes the long way round on it's journey to the creek. If we can maximise the work it does then we'll be as well off as if we stored it in the first place.

We're still tossing up a lot of ideas for cropping, nothing has been settled yet. Having our water plans sorted out (sort of) allows us to make some more serious decisions, at least with respect to dumping some ideas. We wont be growing a commercial crop of hazelnuts for one, though we may still have a crack at some olives.

We're also toying with the idea of a bit of herbage. The DW really loves herbs, and so do I, so I think they'd be perfect given our inclinations. We will of course have to do a lot of market research before we move in that direction, but it allows an avenue of diversity. One of our axioms for this adventure is "not all of our eggs in one basket".

Part of our building process involves putting in a 5m or bigger stock grid on the council road (it's not theirs yet, and they may be sent the bill for it before they can have it, lol!) and we've been covered a lot of suppliers for prices. Thankfully we found a relatively local supplier who has them for half the price we've been quoted to date, so that is a bit of good news. I just hope we can take advantage of it before steel prices shoot through the roof.

Our other option is of course to convince the landowner on the other side of the council road that it is more economical to fence his paddock off, even though he loses a scrap of grazing land (that belongs to council anyway). This option is half the price of the lowest priced grids.

The new farm is generally on hold until we get the current farmlet officially on the market (it's sort of on there now, but not properly). We're working through the painting, and have finished off the tiling, so it's slowly getting there. One of the major hurdles will be when we want to move all our accumulated resources out to the new place. Storage there is currently nil, so we're going to need to implement some solutions for that. We have contemplated containers, and may end up going that route, they're almost as economical as a shed (floorspace per dollar wise) without the construction headaches.

So many up in the air plans can get confusing and cause an undue amount of stress. Thankfully it's the weekend now and we're planning a campfire out the back tonight (in fact I think it's already lit!). Sausages, coleslaw and fire-taters, with toasted marshmallows for desert. A great way to wind down from the working week before getting into the working (but infinitely more satisfying) weekend.