Solar pies!

Cooked four pies in the solar oven today. Outside today was 40deg C - maybe we didn't even need the oven.
The pies tasted great though. Yay for the solar oven.

Our fire tank burst!!

Water everywhere...Arghh...
We were about to use, for the very first time, our newly placed old 1000L water tank . Our garden desperately needed a drink. However at first use the handle broke off!!! That meant lots of our precious water running out on the ground....NO!! So on a very hot day we had Lisa and Gavin running around with buckets trying to fill up anything that would hold water, and giving our fruit trees a good drink...sigh..

New recycled garden shed nearly up

The new recycled garden shed is nearly up. Got the back rafters on and the back half of the roof. Hope we don't get a big blow over night. The shed cost $25 dollars for the sides, maybe $5 for the roof tin(sides and roof all from the tip!) but $38 for the tek screws! I made the roof trusses from recycled steel from the tip too - about $5. Still a shed for $73 is still good going. I scored a reversible drill from a garage sale for $20. It was hot today and I think I lost about 4L of sweat working.

Should get it finished tomorrow if its not too hot. This means I can get the garden tools out of the workshop and finally get my workbench in the workshop instead of outside it. Then I can move in the workshop and sort it out -watch out world - I'll be making all sorts of stuff!

Our amazing plum tree

 Well, one of our amazing plum trees.
We just harvested ten crates of plums off our mariposa plum tree.
I planted this tree in exactly the right place. Its ten crates of plums produced without a drop of irrigation.
We don't water this tree! We do prune it and thin it though.
We've already got our first batch of plums sun-drying. There's plum jam and plum chutney bubbling on the stove.
Life is good.