Two New Trees

I began the weekend without any real idea of what I was going to get up to. The family is all away on holidays, so I had to take into account that I needed to be around to feed the animals at the FSF, so spending the whole weekend camping at the new block was out of the question. In the end I decided I'd nip out to the block on Saturday and plant a couple of trees and chop some firewood.

Planting trees out there is quite an involved job. Not so simple as digging a hole and bunging the tree in, that's for sure. That's part of it, but once that bits done then it's a matter of preparing an apple bin by removing part of the base so that it can fit neatly over the tree. Then a couple of posts are hammered in around it, and then mesh is strung around the posts. Finally a row of rocks or timber is laid against the two sides of the bin that aren't enclosed all the way to the ground.

The Stone Pine

What all this effort? Well, goats and hares of course. Both would make a quick meal out of the young trees, and at this stage of the game there is no point fencing off large swathes of land for tree planting as we'd never be able to keep up with the maintenance. So for now we're going to stick with a few strategic trees in apple-bin safety systems.

These are the first trees we've planted out there since just after we got the block, when we planted the commemorative oak. The two new trees are placed in strategic positions. Another oak has gone in, this time in the spot that is going to become the oak grove, just down the hill from the house. The other was a stone pine (Pinus pinea) and it went in the spot where we're going to have a grove of, well, stone pines...

They're not much use on their own as poor isolated trees, but they are intended to be symbolic more than practical at this stage. In future, whenever I look at, or wander past those spots I'll be thinking to myself "there's the stone pine grove" and so on. It helps cement the idea and the vision in place in my mind, and that helps make the reality so much easier to create.

The only features that actually exist on this plan are the boundary fences,
and even they're not necessarily in the right place...

Had tea in town on Saturday night with the parent's in-law, and arranged to pick up the next day a load of bent and rusty old star posts that were on offer. When I arrived to do this the stack turned out to be a lot bigger than expected, and there was a concrete strainer thrown in with it, which would have been a bit big to be unloading at home and then reloading to take out another weekend, so Sunday was spent with another drive out to the new block to unload the bounty.

All-in-all a great weekend, though perhaps not as productive as possible given most of it was spent driving around. Seems to be the common theme over the last few months, more time driving than working. Still, with the number of posts gifted to me I should be able to put a fence around the orchard out there, and then some, which gets us that one step closer, and that's always a good thing!

In other news we've got our construction certificate for the shed now, so we can begin whenever we please. Problem being that I've got to go to Sydney this Friday, to return on Saturday arvo, and then will be spending Sunday with the family for the first time in almost two weeks. Maybe I can convince them we need to be catching up over some nice hard digging out on site :-)