It’s been just over a month since my last post, in spite of my best intentions. In my defence, in that time I’ve been recovering from a broken arm and a nasty cough. At the same time. Yes.
Not that it has anything much to do with permaculture, except in that it’s surprisingly hard to do anything (eating with a spoon I felt like an uncoordinated 5 year old – so much work to avoid just smearing porridge on my face!) when your dominant arm is unusable, the broken arm was a result of a rollerblading accident. I caught a stick in my wheel, overbalanced, overcorrected, and fell. I even did a pretty good martial arts breakfall and so avoided slamming my head into the concrete, but my right arm bounced at a weird angle, bent backwards at the elbow, and caused me a sudden burst of agonising pain. Minor occult fracture (i.e. one that doesn’t show up on x-rays), and some soft tissue damage. Pretty insignificant as these things go, but it did prevent me from being able to type at any meaningful rate for 3 weeks.
In other updates, construction of our house has finally started! The frame is up, the roof is on, and the walls are going up as we speak. The builders said it should be on site in 2 months or so, which is very exciting. We’re looking forward to being able to move onto our little farm very much.
The winter rains are here, along with the cold weather. We planted a few more trees last week, mostly Paulownias along the inside of the firebreak to start forming our shelterbelt against fire and truck noise from the highway. There were also my two seedling carob trees, each now almost a metre tall, and an olive tree that my dad gave us. The rest of the trees are still in pots, waiting for the house to be done and the need for truck access to be finished. I’m still planning to line the driveway with jacarandas and poincianas, for beautiful, dappled shade in summer and the display of flowers in the spring. The bees should love them, too.
Otherwise it’s just some more hurry up and wait. We have so many plans, but they can’t be implemented yet. Soon. very soon.