Rehabilitating a relic ...

No, I am not referring to surgical intervention to correct the various ailments which hard work has inflicted on me in recent months. The latest of these is a rotator cuff injury of my left shoulder which means that today I am stumbling around looking more like a character in a Monty Python sketch (“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but I'm afraid my walk has become rather sillier recently ...”) than a robust Tasmanian farmer. The real reason for this injury is the metamorphosis of an ancient bath tub into a beautiful veggie patch.

When we first bought the property, Cath and I discovered an old bath tub – a beautiful cast iron one that weighs a ton – serving out its life as a drinking trough for horses. We emptied and cleaned the tub but thought no more of it. In the intervening years our tenants must have taken against it and when we returned in early August it was lying abandoned at the bottom of the paddock adjacent to the house. 

Yesterday, which as the photo shows was a spectacularly beautiful spring day in the Huon Valley, we rehabilitated the bath tub. With the help of the amazingly versatile tractor we managed to lift the tub and move it to place of honour in front of the cottage, fill it with a mixture of garden soil and composted manure and build a structure over it to support protective netting designed to keep wallabies and possums away from the crop. Somewhere in the moving and shovelling I must have tweaked my shoulder.  I can’t really pinpoint the exact moment because it only really started to hurt when the body had cooled down after the day’s labour. 

Now you may have inferred, correctly, that the tractor did most of the heavy lifting, but in my defence there was a bit of hard manual labour involved at various parts of the project. Okay, so Cath did most of those bits, but I must have done something if the severity of the injury is anything to go by. Luckily today the weather turned absolutely foul, so we are back indoors in front of the log burning fire, listening to the wind roaring and watching the rain sweeping down the valley. 

This enforced idleness has had the advantage of postponing the robust discussion of what to plant in this beautiful new patch. I firmly maintain that tomatoes can be grown outside in the Tasmanian spring/summer without the use of a poly tunnel, but Cath is equally adamant that they can't. I guess time will tell, but I can say that if we had built a poly tunnel yesterday, today we would have been fetching it somewhere a lot further south than Cracroft Farm's 43 degrees latitude ...