What’s on my dance card this month – September

• 

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.

Here are the main jobs we’ll be doing in September:

1. Preparing for bushfire season

With the statutory bushfire danger period set to start on 1 October, it’s once again time to get ready for bushfire season.

Unfortunately, we know from first-hand experience that things happen VERY QUICKLY when there’s a bushfire nearby and you need to evacuate. We also now know that doing lots of prep work and planning makes a huge difference to your readiness to deal with an emergency, not to mention your peace of mind.

As I’ve shared in an earlier blog, our preparation involves LOTS of checklists and jobs, including but definitely not limited to:

• Making our place more resistant to a spreading fire, with jobs like moving wood and leaf litter away from buildings and slashing our grassy paddocks
• Testing our sprinkler systems and firefighting gear, including pumps
• Reviewing the plan we’ll follow if we do need to evacuate
• Repacking our ‘Go Boxes’ – the boxes filled with the essentials we’ll take if we have to evacuate, like clothes, toiletries, dog care basics, essential documents and photos,
• Making sure our ‘Grab List’ is up to date too – these are the things we need to add quickly to the Go Box if we’re evacuating, like medication and laptops.

The little and big things we do each September really can make a big difference in an emergency. And we seem to get better at planning and being ready as every year here passes!

2. Preparing for our next haul of homegrown fruit

While most of our September weekends will be taken up with bushfire season preparations, we’re hoping to get some time to prune, weed, feed and mulch our existing fruit trees too.

The time we spent on this job last year paid off, producing a modest haul of cherries, apples, plums, lemons and limes.

So we’ve grabbed a trailer load of mulch, some new gloves and bucketloads of fertiliser.

Watch this space for homegrown fruit salad photos in the new year!

---

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