New Year, Gardening and so on..

Happy 2023. 

The first I heard of this year was at 12.02am when I awoke to the sounds of the dog barking and nearby (and illegal) fireworks. After muttering some obscenities towards the dog I promptly closed my eyes and opened them again at 4am. 

I've had a lot going on since Christmas Eve, and I'm still not entirely sure where I'm at. A lot of concurrent tasks running all at once. 

Firstly; radio stuff:

- I haven't done much. I actually sat down last night - late, and discovered just how much noise the battery charger in the shed is putting out. 40m went from a noise floor of S5 to 20+ after turning it off then back on. Yikes. I probably should get on to that. I knew it was noisy, but not that noisy. I was still noticing it on 15m.

I had thrown out an SSTV image earlier in the evening, but the band had the kind of sound suggesting that there was lightning somewhere far enough away that I can't hear it, but the radio can. 

Technical stuff:

I leased a server that was pretty low spec, and decided fairly quickly that I needed an upgrade. I'm still waiting on the faster server to be provisioned and installed at a datacentre in the US. I've got a heap of stuff moved to the first server.. that I'm using as a staging server given my upload speeds on NBN Fixed Wireless are abysmal (and are part the reason why I'm doing this in the first place). 

The waiting is frustrating. I had been a goal to get done while I was on leave over the break. Now it's turning into something I'm going to spend a lot of time sorting out when I'm back at work. Blah. 

Gardens:

Nearly all of my Christmas (and birthday) presents have been gift vouchers. All have wound up being spent at Bunnings. 

We have an area along the back fence between the shed/smoker area and the kid's cubbyhouse that I'd turned into a garden, and laid down some road base with a goal to one day gravel properly. 

We were given a nice firepit for the area, and once I put that in, I felt the sudden urge to work on enclosing the area. My wife had suggested an arch for the entrance. Very quickly, I found myself buying lattice for something of a low fence, an arch, mulch, and some English box bushes to plant in front of the lattice with a hope to have them grow into hedges that will grow high enough to really separate this garden from the yard. While looking at the plants, we grabbed some pittosporum to grow parallel to our west fence line. Hopefully in time those will grow above the fence height and give us a little privacy from the neighbours whose property is built up a little higher than ours (and whose back cameras height and positioning would put our yard in their view). 

We put in some jasmine as a creeper for the arch as well. One each side so hopefully it'll grow and start to overrun the entire arch. 

Yesterday I got to work on path in front of this new pair of garden beds that separate the garden itself from the yard. I had a pair of 600x600mm concrete pavers floating around that I installed under the arch to help define the entrance to the garden. I need more edging to finish off the path in front of the beds (this links up two other paths)

I need to get into the garden itself and clean it up. It's quite the mess and I've made a few changes that require the beds to be fixed up. There's also plenty of weeds, dog excrement and other undesirables to sort out. There's also a lemon tree that I need to dig out when summer ends and move it somewhere else. 

My wife would like a water feature directly inline with the entrance. She's fairly specific about a Buddha zen like feature. I'd really like to put a high privacy screen behind it with a creeper on it for contrast. I'd also like to put a rock pool style pond over in one corner with a fountain pump in it. They'll be future problems given the cost. 

We also have what was always intended to be a nice little garden down the west side of our house. It's blocked off from the kids and dog, but over the past year it's started accumulating junk. My wine barrel pond wound up in quite a state given it was fishless and I've struggled to keep working pumps running. The water from the water feature over it tends to get blown away on account of the wind tunnel that side of the house creates. I've just ordered a canister filter that I'm going to use with the return line feeding out through my gargoyle water feature. I will look at some decent sized ferns to put either side as wind breaks. I'd like to tidy this whole area up, but probably not yet. 

There's a lot still to do in the backyard and right now I need to give that some priority. It's getting on time to start finishing off the paths and other graveled areas to start making that look tidy. The road base I've used is anything but tidy looking - it was only ever intended to define the paths and give me a solid enough surface to gravel over. 

Next week marks a return to work. Not quite yet a return to normality as I'll have the kids home awaiting the start of the school year, but I won't be out in stinking hot weather trying to get things done in the yard. 

73.