What’s on my dance card this month – June

To give a bit more insight into what it’s like to live in the country and own acreage, I thought it would be interesting to do a quick post each month outlining what’s on the cards (or rather the never-ending job whiteboard) for the month ahead.

Here’s what we’ll be doing in June:

1. Bonfires, bonfires and more bonfires!

In New South Wales (where we’re based), the official Bush Fire Danger period generally runs from October 1 to March 31 each year and, through this time, you can’t light fires out in the open without a permit from the Rural Fire Service (RFS).

While we’ve been officially allowed to go a little pyromaniac since April 1, June is generally the month when we get stuck into our pile burns, given the cooler outside temps and more favourable weather conditions.

While we’re keen to preserve as much bush as possible on our 100 acres, we live in quite a high wind area which means LOTS of trees coming down through the year (as they had done for many, many years before we got here!).

While logs on the ground can provide good habitat for smaller wildlife, it’s obviously not good for bushfire prevention.

While we try to cut as much of it up as possible for firewood to heat the shouse, we still usually end up with a good number of piles to burn around the place.

So June will see us sitting around a bonfire or ten, with marshmallows in hand and the trusty fire trailer by our side.

2. School holidays adventuring

While we don’t have any little Tree Changers of our own, our place has become the number one school holiday destination for our little tribe of city living nieces and nephews.

So at the end of this month, we’ll have four mini-humans, aged between 7 and 14, descend on our place for some country living adventures.

The mid-year winter school holiday is my favourite. While it usually means rugging up in beanies and warm jackets to head outside, the colder weather is much more conducive to running around outside for hours on end.

Adventures planned for these holidays include:

• Making a(nother) bonfire and having a cookout
• Searching for gems on the hillside
• Visiting a local alpaca farm at breakfast time to help with feeding
• A treasure hunt
• Some firewood collecting (well, they do need to earn their keep!), and
• Wombat spotting.

3. Building a turtle island

One of the special projects we have lined up for niece and nephew assistance is building a turtle island for our dam. Yep – a turtle island.

Our dam is home to at least ten eastern long-necked turtles, which we generally see during the warmer months when they like to sunbake on its walls.

But dams are also a valuable refuge for wildlife (especially birds) year-round.

Thanks to some donations of large water bottles and planks, we’re going to make a floating but fixed island for the dam to provide a predator-free place for our resident birds and turtles to hang out.

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How is your June looking? I hope you have lots of good things planned!