Dug some holes for the citrus, and hoed out some furrows for planting peanut cuttings. Harvested some cocoyams and sweet potato and a pumpkin for dinner.
Made more peanut cuttings. Started to run out of light so I ripped the overhead light out of the dead VW and connected it to the solar charged battery and so was able to finish the rest of the cuttings I had to do...

Hives have mostly gone today. Still kinda itchy but no longer horrible.
Tried to char some wood shavings today, but you know, it was causing such a lot of smoke that I just couldn't help it and I prematurely killed it, again, and so only got a partial charring. Of course when this happens and you have a big mixture of uncharred and charred material, you don't have a soil amendment. So, I thought about using it as mulch somewhere and then I just thought, fucket, I've got some goat shit over there and some other shit over there, and I ended up spending most of the day making compost. Actually made two piles by the time I was finished.
Cut down the dead coconut by the garden and tried to burn it, but I had used most of the handy fuel trying to char the woodshavings, so I don't know I didn't have a hot enough or big enough fire I guess. Of course, a freshly cut palm is basically a bunch of water, so I shouldn't be too suprised I guess. Hopefully roasting on the coals over night will take care of any fungal spores. Man, the rotten core really stunk... Gotta get some rock phosphate and spread it around...

self disgnosis: acute urticaria.

hives all over my shoulders and middle back area. very, very itchy.
reaction to chook shit? to some organic compound in the weeds? fuck it.

One of those cloudy, showery sort of Huelo winter days today. I had some luck trapping the chooks in the longhouse and most of my work was in that general area, laying out cardboard over the area that the chooks had been and then planting up the extreme corner of the paddock with cane and peanut and some cocoyam in a minute after I've had my afternoon tea.

Oh, I harvested a couple of good cassava roots to eat with Ace & Shelley tonight too...

OMFG what an afternoon.
I realised half way through working on the chicken paddock (well at lunchtime anyway) that if I didn't get the truck checked out soon it would probably get a lot worse, and that I really need the truck to haul mulch that doesn't grow back here.
So, I got the phone book out and called the mechanic and asked when would be a good time. They said, yeah, we'll check it out this afternoon. So when I told Lorinda I was gonna go she's like "well, do you think you should charge up the mercedes in case you have to leave the truck with them?" and of course she was right. But when we got it to start it made this incredibly evil noise, and after some head scratching we realised that the fan on the new alternator was bigger than the old one, and the metal on the fins was getting ground down on the alternator bracket! So with much cursing we wrestled it off and I took it into town with me.
The mechanic said he couldn't really tell unless he pulled the belt off and checked all the components, but that I could probably keep driving it for a while. He had a gross boil on his face. So we made an appointment for tuesday when they'll do the valve cover gaskets and the rest of the list and hopefully figure out which part needs care. The alternator shop guy was a bit sheepish when he realised that he'd given us the wrong piece. He took the old fan off and put it on the new alternator.
By now it was too late to get any mulch from the dump, so I got another bail of cardboard from Sears, and did some grocery shopping.
Back home we managed to catch the chickens in the long tractor and we threw them into the dome. I had to take the rooster out though, because he was being an arsehole.
Then we dragged the long tractor into the chook yard, and cut the broken end off. It was too long anyway!
It may take a little bit to get all the chooks in there, but at least we are getting these chooks a bit more into line.

Well, those photo's didn't upload in the order intended... The first is supposed to illustrate the peanut cuttings planted in the last week in the areas that have been longest sheet mulched in the sesbania land. The second shows the attempt to reclear the current chicken paddock. The third shows sweet potato cuttings in the sesbania land, and the fourth the new gate into the chicken paddock.

Yesterday I spent most of my time clearing out the lower chicken paddock, trying to figure out how to make use of the fertility the chooks have lent the area. Unfortunately, despite adding lots of manure they just haven't managed to prevent the weeds from growing back... So a fair bit of machete swinging to remove the woodiest weeds and the grasses that will not succumb to the weedwhacker, and then a fair bit of weedwacking, and a bit of actual hand weeding in the bits that we had thrown in a good layer of mulch, just to you know, see how easily the weeds could be pulled. The thing is, the mulch that we threw in there has actually grown... Probably one half of the area is hono grass, which perhaps isn't too hard to remove, but then there is enough actual grass that is just too much to try to hand pull over too large of an area...
Oh, I transplanted the best looking mango seedlings into pots and put them into the nursery...
And I put in a new gate, which will make it easier to access the area, and possibly we will get that long chook tractor in there and concentrate the chooks over smaller areas and get better, uh, traction.

So, I am trying to insert the rainfall spreadsheet, but everytime I try I lose the format and it is a bit hard to "get it".
Anyway, overall, I guess 2006 with 2125mm hasn't been that much drier than 2005 which gave us 2573mm. But the distribution was quite different, which is where the spreadsheet would be instructive.
Basically summer was much drier. Spring and Fall both had some fairly heavy falls which brought the yearly totals up, but at both ends of the year we did have longer periods of no rain than in the previous year, where the falls were more evenly spread out.
Just to show the marked difference between summer 05 and 06, I will manually give you the breakdown;

Jun 05 - 197mm. Jun 06 - 59mm
Jul 05 - 239mm, Jul 06 - 97mm
Aug 05 - 137mm, Aug 06 - 76mm
Sep 05 - 490mm, Sep 06 - 124mm

In other words, summer 05 had 1063 mm, summer 06 had 356mm...

In October it starts to balance out, and November and December have actually been somewhat wetter this year...

Given that conditions are likely to get more and more extreme, it would be great to put in more storages, both tanks and ponds. A big "turkeys nest" up there on the ridge which we could fill with the solar pump in wet times and via roof catchment from the eventual structure that will go up there, and more swales obviously. I know I am repeating myself, that you are well aware of what I am saying...

Xmas day I made more peanut cuttings! I think I really could go into full time peanut propagation for about a year and it really wouldn't be a bad thing. Mostly they went into old tin cans, which can't be seen in the above photo, since they are in the nursery proper, where they'll get put in pots and actually grown on in potting mix. Most of the ones above will go straight into the ground I guess. Bathtubs are full of worms. Hopefully these ones will be more productive than the others have proved to be. The worms I mean.

We were going to walk all the dogs up to the falls, but it was kind of a cloudy, rainy day. Looks like the sun is out today (boxing day) so perhaps we'll do the family dog walk thing today.

Yesterday I potted up some peanut cuttings, watered the nurseries and pushed the lawnmower on gulch trails and some of the driveway up here. Realised I still had about 5 gallon jugs of "long" peanut cuttings to plant out. Tackled the Mercedes again, got the old alternator out, got the new one in...
Today I planted out those 5 gall's of peanut cuttings, and made 5 more, and finally got around to setting up bathtub wormfarms in the old bamboo prop house. The fridge farms haven't been the greatest success, mainly due to being in the sun and not easily accessed by hose water, so they have been drying out. In the shade they will dry out less rapidly, and I will put peanut pots over them so that when dry they will get watered anyway.
Harvested a big dioscorea yam in the process of clearing the area for the tubs. One planted probably yielded about 5 pounds of tuber. Of course, I couldn't get it all out since they go so deep, and hopefully it will come back again in the spring.

Planted peanut cuttings. Made more peanut cuttings.
Tried to replace alternator in the car, but still haven't gotten the old one out...