Dad and family have been here *on holiday*… a term they will probably laugh at… more like a week long boot camp hahaha. In the week they were here a lot of progress was made…
Piles of trash were sorted, shipped out to the dump and to the scrap metal dealer leaving the space under the walnut tree virtually bare…(and far more kiddy friendly)

and behind the garage now only holds small piles of junk, instead of the HUGE piles of junk previously residing there….
Hubby has finished splitting the wood from the wattle and gum trees we had felled, just one last pile to stack in the wood shed. This is the spot where the Avery once stood, before it started it’s epic journey to the bottom of the paddock.

And Dad fixed up the raised beds in my vege garden area. The area at the back fence line only gets a little morning sun, so he shortened the beds for me. We’re going to pave the area along the back there and put in a potting table and seedling raising shelves… and maybe a nice bench seat or something so I can sit and watch my veges grow!


My stepmother (a good farm girl!) shoveled what must of been ten years worth of chook poos and old rotted straw out of the grotty old chook house and dug it into the garden beds … and because the new gardens looked very bare we trotted off to the garden centre and bought dozens of plants – beetroot, silverbeet, leeks, lettuces, spinach, zucchini etc to fill them up!
While they were here we had a classic *Canterbury breeze* come through… snapped a huge tree in the front corner of our neighbours section and sent it tumbling onto the phone lines outside our house…

I had to go out in the wind and do a little happy dance… it was a monster of a tree that we had worked out was going to be a real problem in winter – it’s position was going to block a good portion of our afternoon sun! We had been pondering how to approach our *very tree loving* neighbour about giving it a hair cut… and then mother nature came along and gave it a #2!