It is winter

The first really cold day of the season with a biting wind. Good thing though that it put a stop to the horse flies and that one needs to keep working to stay warm.

The aim was to clear the track behind the toilet on the main picnic site of blue gum branches and, even though we got quite far, we didn’t manage enough by teatime to get all the way to the huts. We built quite a stack of branches though so I arranged with Goodman for Sisanie to burn them to make space for some more. Hopefully he will have done that by next week.

On inspection of the misting house I discovered that the ants really like the warm soil and had built quite a nest amongst our seedlings so that got quickly taken care of. Looks like the earthworms have also multiplied, don’t know if that is a good thing for cuttings.

After tea we decided to cut down some dead Widdringtonias in the Arboretum and replace them with new seedlings. While Ellie planted the new ones I took measurements of the steps of the bird hide to make a small modification to make it more accessible. I ended up taking it home with me and this is the result:

After lunch it was too miserable to do the planned sorting out in the nursery so we went for a walk instead to follow the forest stream up to the source. With the running water it is lovely up there.

We fought our way up through the dense bush up to the N2 hoping to be able to follow the fence or the powerline. Both were impassable so we ended up climbing over the fence, walk along the N2 for a while and descend via the mud slide where we found this lovely Pelargonium amongst many aliens.