We are in the middle of a scheduled power outage thanks to our lines company. The last “planned” outage for maintenance we were supposed to have never happened, so I was a bit blase when the letter arrived announcing today’s outage. Someone new must be in charge because at 1:00pm exactly our power went off.

Thankfully things haven’t changed too much this afternoon. We still have the range going to cook lunch, make cups of tea and keep us warm.

My laptop has been going for an hour and a half so far on battery and still seems to have plenty of juice left.

Our little UPS is doing admirably and with only the small load of our router and wireless internet dish it is still going strong 90 minutes into the outage.

So all in all – a good test and a nice reminder that life without electricity (for a short while anyway) is quite bearable.

I don’t usually get so excited about a bit of fencing but this one has been on my to-do list since we arrived. No more will helpers (or us) need to climb the electric fence to get to the back garden.

Here’s the before pic of the fence line we used to traverse regularly.

Like most projects, it ends up being more complex than planned. I had to re-strain and secure all the existing wires to the new posts. The line of shade cloth keeping the chickens out relied on good fence tension.

I snapped this little guy this afternoon on one of the tree lucerne. There are vast armies of bumble bees collecting pollen at the moment and very few honey bees. In fact I’ve seen exactly one honey bee so far this Spring. That will change when our new colonies arrive in November but until then I’m glad someone’s making use of the flowers. Check out the very full pollen sac on his leg.

Our not so wee foal posing for the camera. You’d never know she had knee surgery or weeks of physio.

You can tell it’s organic – there are weeds in the background. We had this with a delicious cheese sauce for dinner about ten minutes after this photo was taken.

We had spent the afternoon planting and the wind was picking up so I put some straw bales on edge along the row to protect the larger bean seedlings.

The smaller seedlings were quite happy nestled down in the wells we created in the mulch.

Karen is quite pleased with this harvest – mainly because she got to it before the chickens did.

Daniel and Kelly helping out in the (so far) chicken proof garden.

Karen showing one way of planting basil seeds between the tomatoes. I’m sure there are others, but they wouldn’t be as fun to photograph.

Here’s the end result. Half the beds planted up, composted and mulched. Off to a promising start for Spring.

I asked the butcher to leave our bacon loins whole this time so we could slice our own. Sometimes you just need stupidly thick slabs of bacon-steak. Now we can slice it how we like it, thanks to a smart TradeMe purchase by Daniel and Kelly. This piece is about a third of the loin, cut into a more manageable chunk for the slicer.

And the sliced bacon, proving it wasn’t all sliced into half-inch steaks.

We had blazing sunshine this morning, now it’s snowing this afternoon. While living in a winter wonderland is lovely, it’s quite cold right now. These pics are taken from inside – if you want exterior shots feel free to come over and grab them yourself :-)

The lawn and surrounding paddocks.

The car in the process of disappearing.

The back garden…snow peas anyone?