Clearing Finished!

     This morning it threatened rain which would have stymied the finishing of our tree clearing for possibly weeks, but held off with nothing more than a misting sprinkle and now it is all finished. The cloud cover was a lovely cool blessing after the last few days being unpleasantly stinking hot. We also got the boys to put a swale above the house site so that water running down the hill will not fill up the holes for the footings once they have been dug. This afternoon - after the excavator was loaded back onto the truck and safely driven away - the rain began in earnest and it has been very heavy for a few hours now. So I guess that means the swale is being given a good test!
     We have some many piles of trees that it creates a tall unbroken wall for about 100 metres, it could almost work as a fence for stock if we blocked off the gaps. Except for goats, who would just have a ball jumping them!

     We decided not to dig the greywater trench yet, as the spot where the report told us to put it is actually UPHILL of the house site. I don't know much about plumbing, but I am pretty sure that would be a bad thing. We will leave that to worry about that at some later stage.
     Next task is to tidy up the ground - pick out all the rocks, pick up the random sticks, rake out the dirt so that it is roughly level, and spread some mulch and native grass and lomandra seeds. This is gonna take a while since it is such a large area! I was also thinking that it would be nice to have to slope vaguely terraced, with rock walls between each level. That's also something for later after we have built the house I think.
     It is almost time to start planting fruit trees, but I think we should wait until we have a pump which we can use to pump water up from the creek to water the fruit trees. Also it's only a small creek so in the dry season there will be very little water available. Don't want the poor things to die!

Trees are down.

      Today the man came and hopped into the excavator and knocked down a lot of trees. Most of the trees. He only had to stop cos it was the end of the day! Now we have a big area of disturbed dirt and several big piles of fallen trees. Our driveway was also repaired and loaded up with road base, hopefully now it will be accessible to those people who don't have 4WDs!

     There should be just one more day's work in it, clearing the rest of the trees, finished the driveway, creating a swale above the house-site, and probably digging the greywater trench. If we can figure out where it should go!

Something happened!

     Not much has happened, but at least it's better than nothing. Finally our bulldozer arrived to clear the trees - only it's not a bulldozer, it's an excavator. They decided that since the phone lines run through the area to be cleared, that an excavator would be more suitable for the job. We could have gotten an excavator out here more than 6 months ago but were told by many people, who seemed to know what they were talking about, that a bulldozer would be much better. Oh well.

     After repeated "We'll be there tomorrow"s they finally turned up only an hour late, and unloaded the excavator off the truck and drove it up the driveway. Gosh it was a tight fight through the gate and I thought they were going to have to buy us a new gate for a few seconds there.
     Then they had to go off for a meeting and won't be back to tomorrow. So it's not much progress, but at least they now have a vested interest in coming back - we can hold their excavator for ransom!