Oh god. It is the year of the dog, after all. We have lost another flock of chickens to dogs. The worst of it is that it was probably our dog. The entire dome is vacant but for mulch and feathers. If it was Bono, he killed them all, and carried them all off to some secret hiding spot. No doubt the smell will come up in a couple of days and we'll get more clues.
In the meanwhile Bono is tied up in the tractor shed, and Lorinda is asking around to see if anyone wants to a adopt a big black dog, who is actually a lovely dog when he isn't being genocidal...
Of course it may not have been Bono, but all circumstantial evidence points towards the big brute...
So, what to do? We have sort of decided to circle the wagons so to speak, and make one really solid chook pen that hopefully will be dog proof and will prevent the chooks from escaping, where the current flock is preparing for the microcitrus orchard. It kind of sucks to design in reaction to such factors, but there you are. It will necessarily mean a reduction in our overall poultry flock, but they'll breed again I suppose...

The earthquake the other day brought rain with it amazingly enough. We've had some pretty consistent heavy falls. The main tank which was getting dangerously low is back to over half full, and the Iruka's pond while not full to the spillway is looking more like a pond than a puddle which is great.
I finally managed to find the disk with 2005's rainfall records, and comparing them to this year is interesting to see how much drier this summer was.
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep
156 131 380 197 113 197 239 137 490 2005
174 249 315 137 294 59 97 76 124 2006
Of course, those figures are in millimetres. Interesting how the year started out much wetter and then tapered off eh?

I've been continuing to plant peanut cuttings and seed down there in the Salak zone, and I spent some time adjusting the shade cloth to cover the salaks... Also whacked in one of the grafted Canistel's or "eggfruit", on the berm further down towards the ginger terrace... I think the very inensive peanut cutting planting is going to do well, it is nice and low and gets pretty good afternoon shade. If we can keep it weed free it will be a good source of future cuttings I am reckoning...
Today I planted the pomegranate, across the lane from the chook shed, a little below the swale, so, its neoighbours will be the abiu and the frangipani... I have been pulling weeds in that general area, there is a spot there that was never really well planted with peanut, so I think I am going to go back in there and replant it once I get the weeds pulled.
So, nothing momentous to report, just chipping away slowly slowly.

weLL, after the earthquake I figured it was high time I planted out the 1 gallon legume trees that are left over in the nursery. they were actually overdue, but due to various constraints I have been holding back. the old thing of having all the ducks in a row... so, the bali salak palms were also looking like their roots wanted to come out of their pots, so I made the decision to pull up the scraps of pond liner which have been killing off the grass/acting as extra catchment just above Iruka's pond... This in itself was sort of a compromise, as it really was nice to have the extra runoff contributing to filling up the pond. but... it was time to get those plants out of their pots, you know?
Of course, the salaks need some shade for their first few years, and the calliandra's, flemingia's and sesbania's won't quite do it for another few months, so I messed around stringing up some shadecloth from the Java Plum to the worm farm guava tree, and in the end really only covered enough to be good for one salak... This morning it rained really hard, bowing down the trees and slacking down the shadecloth, so I am glad that I didn't go ahead and plant the other palms yet, which would have been buggered up.
I planted hundreds and hundreds of peanut cuttings, since I will be watering that zone a lot anyway, and the shadecloth should help them establish and with a grass kill right now, it only makes sense to strike while the iron is hot...

earthquake!

Not sure where it would register on richter's scale or whatever they use these days, but this morning here at like 7:08am, approximately, we had a fairly severe little earth tremor. My first thought was that the dogs were all running together along the lanai, but then realised the lanai isn't quite long enough to sustain that amount of dog tread, and wait, how did the dogs get get into the roof? We bustled outside and felt the ground shaking under our feet, and listened to the house buckling and groaning a little under the strain. It was kind of cool, and yet really horrible. The spare gas fridge that is sitting next to the glass doors in the back of the barn was rocking back and forth, and the house was actually rumbling, as though it were generating thunder. About 10 minutes later, as I was beginning to write this post actually, there was another little aftershock, but by the time I could say, "Fuck!", and we were on the lanai, it had passed. Oh, yeah, the first one set off a car alarm somewhere up on Ula Lena... Nothing appears to have broken, I guess I will go and check gas lines and such. Crikey!

Rainfall in September was better than August, but our tanks are still pretty low and the ponds are about half full or empty depending on how you look at such things.
We have been going ahead and putting in Pheasantwoods (Cassia siamenensis) more because they are ready than we are ready...
The other main focus of activity has been cutting mulch (yes, with a weedwhacker - the 8N is this far from being consigned to the scrapheap) and throwing it into the chicken yard that is going to be a dwarf citrus orchard one of these days...
I've been tilling patches, since the soil is unusually dry enough to be workable, and have thereby been wittling away at the paddock above the barn, putting in bits of this and that. pineapples, perennial peanut, sweet potato, cocoyam, ginger, green onions, capsicums, beans, greens etc. will soon do another big planting of sugar cane for windbreak and cash, and more of the peanut and sweet potato thing...