Southern View

Just one of the reasons we live here - view to the south across the Lockyer Valley early on a cloudy morning.

Slab for the New Shed

Progress on the new shed at last. Here's the site levelled - the house site is to the left of, and behind the trailer.
Formwork in place - though it took a bit of pressure to get them to put in all of the holes for the piers under the columns.

Plastic moisture barrier under the reinforcing - also helps to control termites.

Pouring the concrete - all done in one day - all 15 cubic metres of it. The slab is 100mm thick, with a 200x200mm beam under all edges, and piers 300mm deep and 350x350mm square where each of the columns will go. It's 12m x 9m overall.

These two guys did all of it. Very hard work.

Nearly finished. It started raining gently just after this, then got heavier as the night progressed. We had to put covers over the two awning slabs around 7.00pm.

Most of the material for the shed was delivered the same day. The erector expects to start putting it all together around 11 June - should take about a week to put it up, weather allowing.

Our Green Frog is Recovering!

Remember the Green Tree Frog with the major wound on its face? There's a posting about it in the January 2008 archive.

Well, we got an email from the frog expert in Brisbane who took it in to see what the "disease" was and what could be done with it. Pearl is amazing - she knows so much about frogs and is so caring. She figured out soon after we left Frog with her that it was most likely a severe wound, and not some rampant virus eating into its face.

Here's the latest news Pearl sent on 17th May:

I still have your frog she is doing well and still eating lots of crickets. She will probably be getting ready to “hibernate” for winter soon. Just a recent photo- as you can see the face is still crooked but has healed in the upper jaw and there is a large area on the lower that needs to heal over still. I will leave her alone til it gets warm again.

And here's the photo that Pearl sent - quite a change in just a few months.

Solar Power System Installed - at last!

After many delays our new solar power system has been installed - where before we had three panels (total of 290 watts at 12 volts), we now have 12 panels (total of 1980 watts at 48 volts).
Hanneke cleaning the dust off the panels before we connect them up to the control gear. That's the satellite broadband dish behind her.
A view of the panels on the roof - taken from the roof of the shipping container we are using for storage.
Gordon spent about four days helping Dave (the designer and installer) put the system in, as well as another 4-5 days lining the walls where the internal controls are mounted, and building a box to house the 24 batteries. One day the whole shed (to become our office) will be lined.

Both Dave and Gordon ended up with "battery back" after lifting all the batteries (32kg each) into the box one evening and positioning them accurately so that they could be connected up. Those are (some of) the batteries in the box at the bottom of the photo.

It is amazing to have so much power available, after years of limiting ourselves to only two lights at a time and not being able to run things like power tools, washing machine, or iron unless we turned the generator on.

First big test was to do a load of washing in our antique, $100, washing machine that uses gross amounts of power and water. We tried it in the afternoon when the batteries were near fully charged - it didn't even take any power from the batteries, just some of what was coming from the panels on the roof, with some left over to go into the batteries. Wow!

The generator will retire now, until we get at least three days of no sun, when it will be needed to charge the batteries - maybe. Not sure just how many days the system can go without reaching a critical level, could be up to five.
You can see how the panels sit down low on top of the eastern and western awnings - to keep the wind loading down as much as possible.
All the bare ground is from the levelling for the house and new shed sites. The two steel pegs in the foreground with the yellow tape on them mark the western end of the house (one day).
[photos by Dave Keenan - system designer and installer - contact me for his details]

News - late March 2008

Our secondhand shipping container arrived on Thursday afternoon. The truck that brought it could only just squeeze around the bends and between the trees on either side of our 2km track. When he got to the top of the hill the driver wasn't in a particularly happy mood - unlike most people who arrive at the top and immediately exclaim "Wow! What a great place!"

But then, he probably realised that he had to get out again.
Anyway, he put the container down with the most amazing precision - within a couple of centimetres of where we wanted it.
On the way out the truck had a lot of trouble getting up out of our creek crossing - a combination of lack of weight over the back wheels and the track still being damp from the rain that morning. Took him four tries before he got out, and then it was only because he tipped the tray of the truck back so that it increased the weight on the back wheels.
It looks kind of huge alongside the shed, and takes quite a bit of getting used to. We are eventually going to move it a bit, so that it is parallel to the shed and then put a roof over it that will extend to the awning of the shed. This will keep the container cooler, and make sure it is weather-proof, as well as giving us a carport alongside it. Maybe one day when we have finished the house we will put some windows and another door into it, and make it into guest accommodation. But for now it is much needed storage space.
We spent Friday moving the stuff that came back from Holland out of the rented storage in Gatton (the cost of that had gone up 40% in six months). Then on Saturday and Sunday we sorted through the boxes and got out things that we needed, and put back stuff from the shed that we didn't need to have access to for a while.
Also moved some boxes into the container from the shed - these boxes came back from Cambodia two years ago and we were very glad to have them out of the shed. Quite an effort, and by Sunday night we were both exhausted.

Our Red-necked Wallabies have been back around the shed every evening - the new grass in the forest is probably getting a bit older and tougher and they seem to prefer the new growth on the grassy area that has been mown. They are obviously the same ones that were here before the rain, because they are so used to us and our noises. Strange to see them sitting not far away and taking no notice of us talking or moving things around, but then stopping and pricking up their ears and looking toward distant noises from down in the valley. Feels great to know that they are so accustomed to us.
We think that this group is an older female, with a quite young joey (we haven't seen it out of the pouch yet, though it feeds on the grass it can reach as its mother bends down to eat), and a male that is probably her last offspring from then end of last year.
We had a fight outside our bedroom window in the middle of the night last week - we could hear the loud "thump" as they kicked each other in the body with their back legs, while balancing on their tails.

Rainbow

Life and Death on the Garden Path

Was walking back from the path gardent the other day and, just as I was about to step over a patch of longer grass, a lizard (skink) about 7cms long dashed into the grass. There was a sudden movement, the lizard disappeared from view, some thrashing about in the grass, then the lizard appeared, belly up, in the jaws of this monster.

It's a Burton's Snake-lizard (Lialis burtonis), and specialises in hunting and eating other lizards. Doesn't have any legs, just a couple of "flaps" on its sides where the hind legs used to be.

See the line above the eyes? It's a "hinge" that allows it to take big mouthfuls of its prey, and to bring the tips of the jaws together when it has something big in its mouth. After grabbing the skink it adjusted its grip until is was putting pressure on the lizard's lungs, and kept this up until it stopped struggling (i.e. dead). Then it quickly flipped it around with two bites, till the head was in its jaws and proceeded to swallow it head-first. Took only about 3-4 minutes to swallow the whole thing.

Boring, boring, boring

The digger / excavator / post-lifter-outer. Drilling here to check the depth to bedrock under where the slab will be for the house (one day ....). The post behind me is the corner of the house, and the other corner is in the vege garden in front of me.

The pumpkins are taking over the world - they not only grew all around the outside of the garden but are now climbing up the trellis which is supposed to be for beans and tomatoes. BUT when they grow on the trellis they produce far more pumpkins. Can't figure that out, but it is good news. We now have about ten small pumpkins and one that is bigger than a soccer ball - by about 50%.

Hanneke figured the other day that we are producing about 80 percent of our vegetable requirements. We are talking about where to put the chicken yard, but that may be a few weeks yet.

Praying Mantis Egg Case

Was up by the top tank the other morning very early - after a night of rain - to check whether our repairs to the pad the tank is sitting on had been affected by the rain. Thought I saw a new kind of pale blue flower in the grass, and when I went to have a look it took me a while to realise that I was looking at a praying mantis making its egg case (called an ootheca). I was actually holding the praying mantis in my fingers at one stage, thinking it was the stem of the "flower". Duh!

Flying Ant Migration

We had a flying ant migration the other night after a very warm and humid evening. Lots of them coming into the shed.

The next morning the water barrel at the tank overflow has masses of them floating on top - an amazing sight against the dark deep water in the barrel.

Sad Green Frog Story

The other day when it was raining (it has rained pretty much every day since Liz left - so the rain frog she gave us for Christmas is proving its worth!), two of our Green Tree Frogs were out and about near the water tank. One, which was sitting in the leaf-excluder, was fat and healthy. The other, which was down near the tank was looking a bit thin, though it had a good colour - unlike when they were really starving during the drought, just skin and bones, and their skin colour was dark and unhealthy looking.

When Hanneke had a close look at it she realised that its face was a mass of raw flesh - looked like it had poked its nose into a cheese grater - with large red and white raw patches, one of which looked like a growth on the bottom jaw bone. Looked like the sort of thing one sees in reports about the cancers on the faces of Tasmanian Devils. It was really heart-wrenching to see. She caught it and brought it inside while we thought about what to do with it.

We have had at least one of our green frogs with a growth on its face - since a few years ago, but we can’t be sure it was this one. And that growth wasn’t open and raw like these, just a raised, warty-looking ridge above one side of the top jaw.

A search on the internet led to items from the Cairns Frog Hospital that seven green tree frogs have been recorded with cancerous growths on their faces. This is being studied by a team from James Cook University, along with other frog diseases such as a fungus that seems to be very widespread and that really weakens its victims.

Hanneke contacted the manager of the Cairns Frog Hospital, who asked for some photos of our frog. When she received these she thought that it might be a combination of cancer and flesh-eating bacteria, but she wanted the frog taken to someone who could take some samples to confirm what it was. She and Hanneke discussed sending the frog via Qantas air cargo to Cairns or Townsville (or to a NSW university, but NSW has a regulation banning the sending of diseased frogs into that State). Eventually they decided on a PhD researcher at Queensland Uni, who is working on frog diseases.

We made a special trip to Brisbane (actually Manly West, the other side of Brisbane, two hours away) to deliver the frog to her, and she will take samples of the wounds to try to identify the problem, as well as trying to nurse the frog back to health. She is obviously very much a frog lover, so we felt great about leaving the poor thing with her.

Will let you know when we have more news.

Crikey Leaves Home - and Returns

On Christmas night we decided the time had come to allow Crikey (the Short-eared Brushtail Possum - often called a Mountain Brushtail) to have his freedom. He had been reared by a wildlife carer from the stage when he was hairless and helpless, and we had now had him in a cage on our place for over a week, to acclimatise to the new surroundings.

He was showing many signs of being “at home”, and was spending a lot of time at night pacing the cage - suggesting that he was now finding it too small.

Two “bridges” made from dead branches were secured from the open door of the cage to nearby trees, and before the last of these had been tied in place Crikey was trying out the first one. He quickly made it to the tree and climbed confidently to the first branch, less than two metres above our heads. This looked so thin and bent so alarmingly as he put his full weight onto it that I said to him “You haven’t done this before, have you?” At the sound of my voice he let go with both front paws and dropped his head downward to look at me, casually looping his tail over the branch.

After giving me a pitying glance he arched back up the branch, but now pointed toward the trunk, and climbed quickly back there and upward.

We left him to it, thinking that he clearly knew what he was doing.

Later that night Hanneke and I went back to look for him, and found him in a tree only a few metres from where he had been before. When he saw us he came down the trunk and reached out toward my shoulder. When I moved toward him he climbed onto my back and across my shoulders, then started running his claws through my hair and examining me with his nose. When he tried a gentle experimental (I hoped) nibble on my ear I put my hands over both ears and asked Hanneke to get him off. Then he found the strap of my headlamp and started pulling it backward and putting his nose in between it and my head. It felt as if he was getting aggressive with it (I couldn’t see any of this, but could feel the force he was using on the strap), and we quickly moved him from my back to the cage.

In the morning he was gone.

The next night Hanneke and I went out looking for him and calling his name, but there was no sign of him. We figured that he had gone back to the “wild”, but were anxious that he might not have found enough food, or even might not have known what to eat, given that he had never been introduced to “bush tucker” by an adult possum.

The following night there was similarly no sign of him, so we resigned ourselves to not seeing him again. However, just after we went to bed there was a clattering and scrambling on the roof and the sound of claws slipping on the iron. When we shone the torch up there a small nose poked over the guttering, followed by some creamy fur and brown eyes. Crikey was back. Worried that he might fall, we got out the ladder and I climbed up - as I came level with the roof Crikey stretched out and climbed onto my shoulders, where he rode all the way back to his cage.

After putting him into the cage and cutting him a large bouquet of different leaves we went back to bed and a sound sleep until 2.45am when the sound of what seemed to be an army of possums having an olympic sprint meeting on the roof woke us. Crikey was back yet again. This time we resolved to just let him find his own way down, worried that it was all a ploy to get another dose of human company, something that he clearly loves. What seemed like hours later the clattering and thumping ceased and we finally got back to sleep. A lot like having teenage kids who had friends over for a noisy party - hard to take, but preferable to not knowing where they are and what they are doing.

In the morning Crikey was back sleeping in the nest box in his cage, and raised a cranky, sleepy face to me when I moved the leaves aside to see how he was doing.

Who knows what the next few nights will bring.

Visit to Peter and Wendy's new place - Chillingham

Went with Liz to visit Peter and Wendy at their new rainforest block. Stayed for a couple of nights in their new shed.

Impressive shed, and very very impressive view and rainforest.




They have their new solar power system in place - what luxury to have all that power!!



Some amazing plants, fungi, and birds in the rainforest.

Christmas Day 2007

At home on the hill with Liz and Hanneke. Cool day, cloudy.

Feels a bit like the holiday at Byron Bay [see the pic] all together and very relaxed.

Wonderful to have Liz here, but sad that she will soon be so far away. Good to know that we will have blogs to help bridge the gap. This posting is really a test to see how it all works.