Shade cloth and chain saw

It would be very interesting to get access to the weather station data at Van Stadens but so far all attempts at finding out who actually is responsible for this station have met with “Duh??” The rainfall must be quite a bit higher there than in PE. It was overcast when we left but on arrival it was raining and fairly miserable, not for the first time.

Fortunately it eased up a bit and Rob and Cathy decided to do some weeding in the nursery while Keith set of with the chainsaw to cut down another pine.

We had measured and prepared the shade cloth for the braai and were keen to put it up. At first it looked quite untidy bellowing in the wind:

Afterwards though we were very pleased with the outcome, the braai is starting to look not half bad. Later we also planted some trees in the empty holes on the side and some creepers along the fence.

Still lots of tidying up and fastening to do though and we are worried about some irresponsible people make a huge fire and melting the shade cloth. Time will tell.

In the meantime Keith managed to drop the pine tree, why do they always fall in the opposite direction to the one intended? In doing so he unfortunately broke the chain and bent the blade so no further progress was possible.

After lunch our necks were getting rather sore from craning upwards so the finishing off was left for another day and instead we scouted about for some possible paths to and from the Forest walk. We’re not sure if that was a good thing because along our route we saw plenty of aliens, a good collection of pine, wattle and hakea with a few rooikrans thrown in for good measure.

 

The lower section follows an old track all the way and should be fairly easy to open up. The section around the dam would be a bit more of a challenge and is not quite the route we would want to follow anyway.

On the way we spotted some interesting plants including this grass aloe.