It has been an eventful week here at Fernglade Farm: It has both rained and the sun is shining with unmistakeable warmth. Sunburn is now a serious possibility after about 11.30am most days. The plants and trees are all growing strongly too. Plus today was something of a smashing record breaker (more on that later)!

Spring is an awesome time of year here: Warm days, cool nights, plentiful rain (normally) which equals lots of plant growth. It has been interesting because there has been a bit of talk over at the ADR about insects as food source and I thought that it may be worth mentioning that the Aboriginals used to travel across various tribal areas and up into the mountainous areas of the Australian continent every year in order to catch and eat the plentiful supply of Bogong moths. A similar gathering took place around the time of harvest for the very yummy Macadamia nuts - although that was a long way north of here. Both of these foods were traditionally outstanding and reliable sources of protein and I have both the Macadamia trees and Bogong moths here. Mind you, I haven’t tried eating a moth because years ago I read of a park ranger that had partaken in an Aboriginal ceremony of catching and cooking (over coals) of the Bogong moths and he stated that they tasted like eating moths. Perhaps I’m only being a bit choosy?

The moth is about the size of my hand and there is certainly a lot of meat on the body of that moth.
Incidentally, if you were of the persuasion that is inclined towards eating insects, the excavations here have shown to me that there is no shortage of grubs to eat buried in the volcanic clay. The Kookaburra’s and magpies often follow me around as I occasionally feed them the grubs that I excavate out of the ground. One day, a Kookaburra here had eaten so many grubs that I was able to sneak up on it and grab it twice!

Oh yeah, and stage one of the excavations is now complete. Yay! I’m quietly grateful about this turn of events as I’m unsure whether I’d be up for yet another day of digging and hauling soil anytime soon. The enjoyable part of this project will be building the first steel shed. All being well this shed construction phase should start in about two weeks as I have to obtain some more materials first.

Before we continue the blog though, it may be worthwhile mentioning that it is sometimes very difficult for me to estimate how long projects will actually take here. Most of the time I have no idea how long things will take as every task is so different from any task that I’d ever previously undertaken. People always ask me: How long do you reckon that project might take? The simple answer is: I’ll tell you when the job is completed!

This week was no exception to that reply as I’d both assumed and stated on the record that there would only be about two hours of digging to complete the first stage of excavations this week. You know how it goes though with estimating a project: I thought that it would actually be about an hour so I doubled that time estimate just to provide a bit of leeway. Ten hours later that day though, I can only admit that I had no idea at all! Fortunately, the excavation day was both cloudy and windy, which made it feel much cooler than it actually was. Incidentally, I’m now having to wake up at sunrise in order to avoid working in the heat of the afternoon, but there was little respite that final excavation day.

As they say, a camera doesn’t lie, so I captured a moment in time on that final day of excavations when I found a giant rock in the midst of all that clay. In the photo below, I’m really trying hard to smile whilst "Toothy" - so named because he likes biting people - the long haired Dachshund looks down on both me and the rock only to say “Bummer dude, I’d like to help you with that rock, but it’s just not in my job description”.

For the rest of the post: http://ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au/