Thursday, October 14, 2010

Rain, Lantana and Yabbies

Rain
It has been raining off and on for about three weeks now.  We have had to watch our power usage but that's okay, working with nature was one of the reasons we went "off the grid". The rain has done a fair bit of damage to the veggies etc but that's the way of things.  It doesn't seem to have put the chickens off and two more hens have gone broody and now have baby chicks, the females for laying, the males for eatin' !

Lantana
We have taken the opportunity to pull a whole heap of lantana while the ground in soft, we hope by working at it in sections we will have the block cleared in about 2 years or so.  It's fairly endemic as a weed down here, very widespread.

Here's an old pic of a "lantana mountain" , the first patch we cleared.

Toni atop lantana mountain !
and this is one of the patches we recently attacked (before shot)

Next path of lantana to be attacked !


We have since burnt that pile  We don't use weed killer and simply pull it up, and pile it up.  We then rev-ist the area about 2 weeks later to see what we missed and then again a few months later to pull nay that have struck again.  Those two follow ups are usually very quick.  The downside of this method is it can cause erosion, especially around creek banks if you are not careful.

Yabbies
We have also ordered some glass shrimp and yabbies from Aquablue I just hope I can catch as many as these guys in this pic
Our aim !

We will be putting the yabbies along with glass shrimp for them to eat, we don't want to put them in the Dam we use for water because yabbies can do damage to Dams but the other Dam seems perfect and is not used for anything.  We will be letting them breed up and then adding some Bass and/or Silver Perch to catch and eat... we'll see how it goes and I will report back !

The solar shed was finally finished a couple of weeks ago.  We had been waiting for the doors to be welded up.  Looks very professional now

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