Child of the Planet

Got lots done today. Now it needs to be bolted together. Broke one of my rules during the week. Chainsaws can be pretty accurate, but use a new chain. Got a new chain and the cuts are much better. I cut down to the cardboard on the lower level of timber. Cutting into the cardboard was great for keeping the chain clean. Inserted cardboard between the layers so I didn’t cut into the timber below. The front yard has a ‘fall’ so I had to cut into the turf to get the two layers of timber close to matching up with the end pieces.

So I've put jackets on the lemons

The hole that was dug a couple of weeks back is now full of green waste so I covered it with a layer of unbleached cardboard which was waste from a local cafe.     Not going to impress anyone else, but this was a small victory for me.  Got the chainsaw sharpened so I can attack the raised garden sleepers tomorrow.

My main problem is boredom. I really need to force myself to do work on this job. The weather looks like it’s going to hold for the next week so I’m doing a bit each day. The cardboard layer is to slow the grass down. Hopefully it will also smooth out the bumps in the ground. The last two beds I built were ‘a proper hassle’ to line up before screwing together. I’m laying out the beams to work out positions. They are a bit of a rough cut so I need to work out which is better on the bottom, and what I can lose when I cut to shape. Next step is to sharpen the chainsaw. Another exciting job :-(

I spent the morning attacking the grass and clearing up debris. This is what the front yard looked like a couple or years ago… Back then it was later in the year and the lemons had their winter jackets on. The raised beds were made of pallet wood, and there was a huge compost pile over in the right hand corner. I took this photo today. The intention over the next few days is to install a third raised bed, using the timber piled up on the right side of the frame. The lemons still have their windbreak up which is detailed here .

Last week I blogged about some grape jam I was experimenting with ( read about it here ,  And here ) I ended up with two jars, one thickened with apple butter, the other with extracted apple pectin. For lunch today, I cooked up some toast to give the results a try. The apple butter was much thicker than the pectin, which was still a bit too runny (as you can see from the dribble that was left from scooping out of the jar). I want to give it another go. The pectin I used last time was itself a bit runny. I extracted more pectin a few days back, and properly dehydrated it. Looks a bit like gelatin now.

During the lock-down, each day there are a couple of things I really look forward to. In the mornings Munro post a gradual dismantling of the Tesla Y. In the afternoon, the anti-vaxxer folk jump onto FB so I get to have a bit of a giggle. I’ve noticed that the augment that ‘the flu kills more people in a year’ has evaporated? That might be because in four months, Covid has now killed more people then the flu.. Google reckons that as of today, 67,046 people have died in the U.S. from this virus. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html I think that this is going to be my last daily post. Everything seems to be getting back to normal. Roads are filling up, and people are going back to work. There were no zombies, no riots. The whole CV19 thing has been a bit anticlimactic. The most interesting thing about the pandemic these days is watching the U.S. spiral out of control. The N.Z. government paid a wage to everybody that couldn't work from home, to stay home, so we did. I was

I scored a bucket of apples today Boiled up a load of pectin Strained it out Below is a jar of apple butter, and some pectin I extracted last week I defrosted some grape juice out of the freezer and made up a jar, mixed some with the butter and some with the pectin as an experiment Also made some apple muffins