The calm before the storm ....

We are currently waiting for the final council go-ahead to start our much anticipated renovation. It certainly has been a long time in the making given that we engaged our architects over a year ago. Our chosen builder is champing at the bit and ready to start and we are slowly coming around to the idea that we will be living on a building site for the foreseeable future. We are busy transforming our second bedroom into a living room, our third bedroom into a store and parts of the shed into a kitchen! The next seven to nine months are likely to be a trifle challenging, so to find some inspiration I looked back through some photos to remind myself of how much we have achieved since we first came down to stay for six months in August 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

One of the first things we did on arrival was to sort out the drainage around the shed. August of 2020 was reasonably wet and the area around the shed was a quagmire. This August and September have been even wetter than the same period four years ago. In fact I can only recall sustained rainfall of this magnitude once before and that was December and January of 2011 in Brisbane. Despite this deluge both the farm in general and the area around the shed in particular have held up remarkably well.

August 2020 - Pepper turning up her nose at a broken drain behind the shed

August 2024 - No more open drains or casual water lying around

After we served our 14 days mandatory quarantine after arrival in Tasmania, I remember the excitement of rushing off to Hobart and purchasing what has probably been the most useful of all the things we have invested in - our trailer. Its very first job was to head off to a nursery halfway between here and Hobart where we had a number of trees waiting for collection.  Its hard now to believe that the only trees in the garden at that point were the magnificent birch on the island above the cottage and a single twig of a lemon tree that was more than half dead. It was with a some ceremony therefore that we planted the first tree in the front garden, the ornamental cherry blossom, prunus serrulata Weeping Cheals.

 

August 2020 - The first tree in the front garden 

 

Cheals became a bit of a totem around which we designed much of the front garden. It is now seated in what we call Frances' bed after Cath's mum, as all of the camellias and azaleas in the bed are taken from her garden. It forms a nice crescent of ornamental cherry blossoms with Taihaku, Mount Fuji and Shirofugen. The trees are slowly maturing and starting to give a hint of the display they will provide when they are a little older. The blossom has been remarkably resilient in the face of the incessant rain and high winds. 

September 2024 - Weeping Cheals (left) and Taihaku (right)

 We bought the Taihaku (also known as the Great White Cherry) for no other reason than because it was on special at our local nursery. We knew nothing about it or its history. It turns out the tree has a remarkable back story of rediscovery. Native to Japan, it was believed to have gone extinct in its homeland by the early 20th century. However, in the 1920s, a British horticulturist and expert on Japanese cherries, Collingwood Ingram, spotted an old painting of the Taihaku and recognized it from a tree in a Sussex garden. Ingram took cuttings from the tree, propagated it, and eventually restored the Taihaku's presence in Japan. All Taihaku trees, even the one in our front garden, are all descended from that one tree.

 

August 2020 - Looking towards the shed

September 2024 - Looking toward the shed with recently expanded border in foreground

In terms of the focus of our efforts, the strategy has been to work outwards from the cottage. The basic structure of the front garden, the apple and lower orchards, the arboretum and the veggie patch have all been tackled, more or less in that order.  One aberration in this plan was the fact that the next task in line was what we call the hill paddock. The hill paddock had been severely neglected for many years prior to our tenure and was covered in scrub, blackberries and far too many wattles trees. One of the pictures which I shared in one of my first posts on this blog was Cath and Pepper slogging into the depths of the hill paddock. As a result we skipped work on this rather large project and focussed on getting the lower paddocks in order for the arrival of our Wiltshire Horn sheep.

August 2020 - Cath and Pepper disappearing into the woods

Earlier this year, prior to the onset of the winter we started to work in earnest on the hill paddock. We adopted a three-pronged strategy; reducing the number of wattle trees to allow the light in, slashing with the brush cutter and employing our three goats (five as of early July with the arrival of Oreo and Milo) to do some trampling and some munching. While the goats probably didn't eat us much as I perhaps expected, they are very effective at flattening the brush thus making life with the brush cutter much easier.  Although much still remains to be done, the change in the hill paddock is rather startling. Indeed you can only recognise the area by using the large wattle tree on the right in the two pictures to give some orientation. The paddock is now a lovely sheltered spot where both goats and sheep are protected from the worst of the prevailing south westerly wind. 

September 2024 - the hill paddock

So now, we anxiously await the beginning of this renovation which have thought about for so long. We can only hope that it works out as well as some of the other things we have worked on over our brief tenure of Cracroft Farm ...