Monday 9th August.

You can always tell when it’s Monday here, something will have happened over the weekend to throw any plans right out the window, down the road, and behind whatever tall tree happens to be around.

I had hopes of getting the posts up for the shade house, but some probably drunken driver had decided to demolish the fence at the Childrens Playground, which is next door to the Rove Police Memorial. Ok, so it is just a fence, repair it whenever? Not when the Police Memorial Park is being used on the Monday morning for the August 7th Commemoration of the Guadacanal Campaign of WW2. David found some of the crew over the weekend and had the fence mostly repaired and rebuilt by this morning, but still needed everyone there to finish off and tidy up. Then we still had to get the usual Monday town clean up done, and start on the median strip mowing. With a few of the crew still coming back from the elections, we don’t have a great number of people available.

Still, we did manage to get 16 bags of chicken manure this afternoon, and I had 3 of the crew to help put up another compost heap. As the pics show, we started with shredding a lot of branches and prunings, then put down a layer of sawdust, then chicken manure, chippings, sawdust etc like a large layer cake. All up the heap is about 10 cu metres, a metre high, the width of the bay is 5 metres, between posts about 3 metres. Another load of chicken manure will see all the sawdust in the background layered, then it becomes a matter of praying for rain to keep it moist, and the temperature to stay high, not that it ever drops much below 27*C over night, and we should have a good supply of potting mix again.


First thing is to shred all the prunings and branches


Then we made a layered heap of sawdust, chicken manure and the shredded prunings.


Added water to each layer


Sawdust and then more chicken manure and shredded waste



Then a final capping of sawdust, and we wait a couple of weeks, and hope it rains to keep the heap moist

Next we start filling all the other bays, SolBrew are delivering a load of brewery waste tomorrow, I was hoping for the sludge, but it seems all we can get at the moment is the spent grain, which is still better than nothing.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better, and we can get the posts in.

It’s still quiet around town, the only trouble has been in some of the outer islands and provinces so far. Now we wait till August 14th for the new Prime Minister to be announced, and hopefully it will be a popular choice. Not all results are in yet, but so far it looks like half the previous MPs have been voted out, the usual state of affairs here. Plus the usual calls of corruption, vote buying, bribery by the losing candidates, which means they didn’t spend as much or bribe as many people as the winning person did. That might sound cynical, but unfortunately here, it’s far too true.

We’ve finally go the MID contract for another year, well, it’s taken 6 months to get it signed, and it expires in January next year, so it’s for 6 months anyway. We’re still waiting for the last 6 months payments, from March till now for the work we have carried on doing while the contract was being decided. It should be a good cheque when we finally get it.