All in a days work

One of those days when it was hard to get motived to spend the day helping out at Van Stadens especially when talking to Goodman it was quite clear that his mind was elsewhere and if we want the massive clearing up of the blue gums to be done it is up to ourselves.

As promised Neil arrived to work on the shade house, admirable to sacrifice a day of his well earned holiday to come and do some heavy digging while we took some pine logs to the arboretum and then started to stack more branches on the picnic site. While doing that we spotted Rob in the far corner by the fence fighting with coppiced blue gums which have seeded themselves long ago from the neighbouring property.

Ellie is still on her quest to find and identify a rare plant which looks like this so when she spotted it we had to take a pic to make sure this wasn’t it:

It becomes a bit monotonous to cut branches and drag them away so I interspersed that with cutting some logs as well. I am pleasantly surprised that the wood cuts fairly easily and the awful sap is no longer there to clog up the chainsaw so it will be feasible to clear up most of trunks eventually.

Logs

The picture below tells a good story, first of all the new indigenous replacement trees we planted a while ago are doing very well, secondly the huge stack of branches is getting ready for Sisanie to apply a match and thirdly there is still a lot of firewood lying around, hopefully the visitors will take from those piles instead of stealing the logs we have put around the new trees.

Perhaps some cynics will add a fourth point and say that the grass needs mowing.

In the meantime Neil had progressed well with the shade house, adding shade cloth on the open side will surely protect the plants better whilst giving us a little more space as well.

Rob went and planted some Sansevieras around Jenny’s succulent garden so all in all a good day.