What’s on my dance card this month – August
To give a bit more insight into what it’s like to live in the country on 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.
Here are the things we’ll be doing in August:
1. (More) roadworks
One of the joys of owning a rural property is also owning the responsibility for maintaining your roads.
If you’re lucky, any dirt roads leading into your property will be checked, repaired and graded by the local council at least once a year.
After that, you’re on your own!
Counting fire escape trails, we have around six kilometres of roads running around our 100 acres. Some were better built than others and are consequently in better condition than others.
A key challenge is drainage (or lack thereof), resulting in roads being quickly ripped up and washed out any time we have heavy or sustained rain.
It’s been an especially wet 12 months here (thanks La Niña), meaning many of our roads are now in need of some love and attention.
Rather than bringing in the local earthworks people, we’ve decided to become more self-sufficient and have bought a grader blade and a carryall for the tractor so we can manage repairs ourselves.
Our first job this month? Using the new grader to take some preventative measures and create new drainage on our worse faring roads.
2. Orchard planning and planting
Like everyone who moves to the country, we’ve become fixed on the idea of growing as much of what we eat as possible (I’m sure it’s one of the pre-requisites of signing up to become a tree changer 😉).
Top of our list right now is creating an orchard.
We’re lucky to already have a few mature trees in place, which produced a modest haul of apples, cherries and plums last Summer.
So with our trusty gardening book telling us winter to early Spring is the best time to plant deciduous fruit trees like pears and stone fruit, we’ll be figuring out the best spot for our new orchard and off to the local nursery to stock up on some trees.
3. (Even more) firewood cutting!
In case you’ve missed my previous updates… the other joy of living in a spot that regularly starts the day at -5°C is needing a never-ending supply of wood to stay warm.
So this month will see us out with the chainsaws for a couple of days on the weekend to ensure the wood pile is healthy enough to see us through to Spring.
How is your August looking? I hope you have lots of good things planned!
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