New Vegie Tank

Last Friday I had a new tank installed in the vegie garden. Instead of getting a stand made, the guy at the tank shop suggested I put the tank on an earth ring. Which is like a two foot slice of a corrugated iron tank filled with crushed 'blue metal' or road base. Because there isn't enough water in the shed cement tank at the moment, I connected hoses and poly pipe and filled one rung from the tap being fed from the tank at the top of the hill, just so the tank didn't blow away. The guys who installed the tank said it wouldn't blow away but I just had to be sure.

Then on Saturday I started weeding my vegie garden. It is going to take me a lot of weekends to get the garden free of weeds and ready to put on the wooden sides that Dad helped me buy. But with the temperatures we are having at the moment, it is a long time until Spring. I am a bit worried about whether my hands are up to the job, though. I take medication to mask the pain of my arthritis but my hands don't seem to have the strength I thought they used to have. I guess I will need to build that strength back again. This is a before photograph of my garden, so that later I can see how much work I have actually done.

I have another little story from the weekend. On Friday morning I walked down the back to visit my cows. Since I don't have time to visit them in the morning and it is dark by the time I get home, I don't see the cows until Friday and the weekend. When I got down the back I could only see five of them, but I could hear Harry mooing off in the distance ... the neighbour's paddock! I knew the tank guys were arriving mid morning so I thought I'd have an attempt at getting him back but if it didn't work I would try on Saturday. In the neighbour's paddock Harry was hanging out with two young steers about his age. They seemed to be in this paddock by themselves - there were no other cows but there was a mob of sheep over the other side. I think Harry had been having a fine old time with his new found friends. I found a low bit of fence that he could have jumped over but as hard as I tried I could not get him to try jumping back over again. I gave up and came back on Saturday. This time I walked further down to see if there was another low spot in the fence, and found a gaping hole in the fence across the gully. I had checked this not long ago and thought it was sound, but obviously not. I pushed back any sharp ends and climbed through myself. Harry and his new friends saw me coming up the hill towards them and they got to their feet. I told Harry to say goodbye to his friends because he was coming home. I had a little bit of running around to separate them and then got Harry heading down the hill towards the gully. But that's all it took, as soon as he saw the gully he went straight down and through the hole in the fence and ran off mooing looking for the others. I had a bit of bale twine with me and pulled the mesh wire down and patched the hole by tying a bit of wood to the bottom. It took practically no effort at all getting him down to the hole and through. It was as if he knew that the game was up and he had to go home. My eldest son says that animals are stupid and that they don't think like humans, but I sometimes think that they know what I'm saying and they know what I want them to do. Maybe they don't but sometimes I wonder.