Widow-makers, compost and a tooth

It’s been an odd week, starting with the widow-maker. And no, in Aussie parlance, a widow-maker is not a psychotic gigolo, it’s a tree, or tree branch that falls without any apparent warning. You can see it in the pic below with my foot for perspective:

I don’t have huge feet, but they’re not tiny either, so that should give you some idea of the size of the damn branch.

The tree it fell from is that Red Box there at the back. Red Box are tall, eucalypts with spreading branches as long as some smaller trees. The next pic shows where the leafy bits landed. I still can’t believe that they missed my roses by less than a metre. Roses on the left, the tips of the branch on the right:

As the branch fell, it tangled with a second Red Box and stripped it of a couple of big branches as well:

It took a man with a chainsaw most of the morning to cut up the widow-maker and cart it away. Twas not cheap. And then this afternoon I had to have a tooth extracted. Not counting my wisdom teeth, it’s only the second tooth I’ve lost but I still feel rather depressed. I’d hate to end up having to gum my pork crackling. 😦

On a brighter note, I did manage to make a compost container yesterday. It sits in a corner between the fence with my neighbour and the side fence that keeps the dog from running out onto the road.

It’s a very simple, three-sided structure made of corrugated iron held in place with star pickets. Star pickets are those black metal posts you can see. They’re kind of ubiquitous in Australia.

Back to the compost bin, I’ve left the front open to make it easier to wheelbarrow grass clippings inside. The hardest part of the whole project was banging the star pickets into the ground. As anyone who’s every tried to dig a hole in Warrandyte will know, the soil is mostly clay and shale. Not the easist soil to dig.

Luckily the editing is going really well so I’ll leave you with a track from ‘Sun’ by Thomas Bergersen [of Two Steps From Hell fame]. It’s called ‘Cry’.

 

cheers

Meeks