When I’m not pickling, cooking and vegetable growing I’m building fences to protect the trees from the rabbits.  Yes the pesky blighters keep burrowing around the roots and gnawing the stems.    As you can see the bassets help me with this task by watching out for rabbits!

We’re continuing to harvest gorse and grass as part of the long term effort to claim land for the back garden.  It’s been a hard slog with temperatures reaching over 30 degrees. 

So this weekend we’ve gone from this…….

To this……

I’m sure these trees are relieved to be released for some more light, air and if it ever rains the water.

But it’s not all be work, work, work.  We set off early today with the bassets for their daily walk – the Rimutaka Rail Trail walk.  It was a gloriously sunny start to the day but a gusty wind to keep a nice pleasant walking temperature.  This is where we walked on the way out.

And the view coming back!

We could see the cloud building over the Rimutaka Range

There’s been some haymaking also on the land for sale.  This is the land we were going to buy.  It’s a long story but suffice to say that these plots of land are still for sale with little sign of them being sold.

Our house was designed to sit on the piece of land below.  The higher area you can see.  I wonder if we’d be haymaking instead of harvesting thistle and gorse if we’d actually gone ahead and bought this land and built our house there.

That we will never know.  I’m totally happy with the land we have, even if we can’t bring in  a farmer with his tractor to mow the grass and make hay bales.