We have been flying by the seat of our pants the last two months. We have had three sets of guests come and stay with us since the 27th of December and we are really only just coming up for air.  The first set of guests was my mum and dad, then Tim’s dad and his friend, then Tim’s sister. On 6 February we are expecting my sister and her boyfriend over for a week then we are expecting Tim’s mum to come over in March some time. So we have been very busy, taking the guests out almost every day, showing them around Tasmania and Hobart.

We were lucky to be walking around the Hobart waterfront the day after the first few Sydney to Hobart yachts arrived. We had no idea that these yachts were so tall.

We also took a trip to Port Arthur, which is the penal colony which was built to contain the convicts that were sent to Australia from England in the 1830’s (most of the people that were sent over here were just petty theives, given transportation to Australia as punishment for stealing a loaf of bread because they were so poor). It must have been a hell on earth for the convicts living in the tiny, cramped, damp, freezing cold cells of the Port Arthur Prison. Many of the buildings that are at Port Arthur are ruins, as it is only in the last 20 years or so that the Government has listed them as heritage-rated and has started restoring the old standstone Georgian buildings. Unfortunately not a lot of buildings that were originally partof the colony remains as hundreds of them were lost to a raging bushfire in the 1890’s.

We took a trip to Richmond, site of the oldest surviving bridge in Australia, being built by convict labour in 1823.

And we also drove up to the top of Mount Wellington, where these spectacular views are on offer (taken behind glass – I’m too scared of heights to go onto the open lookout):

As you can inmagine, not a lot of renovation or decoration work has been done to the house this last 6 weeks or so. The only real thing that I can report on is that in between guests departing and arriving I have managed to build 4 garden beds (and have filled 3 of them ready for planting).

To build the bed for the three circular garden beds at the front of the house, we hired a rotary hoe to help us with tilling over the soil, as the soil was just rock hard and there were too many weeds and grasses to deal with by hand. Here’s Tim operating the rotary hoe (the rotary hoe cost $60 to hire for 24 hours and did in 3 hours what would have taken us 3 weeks to do by hand):

Oh and he found a little frog in the garden bed:

Here’s the garden bed before:

Here’s the garden bed after:

I am using Adbri border blocks to re-do the garden beds around the garden. They are very difficult to work with, as their shape makes it very awkward when it comes to curves and completing a circle (and even completing a straight line is very difficult). Had I thought about the type of material to use as garden bed edging, I probably wouldn’t make the decision to go for these again. Although they look great in the garden and they really go with the colour of the roof and the gutters, there have been many times where I have been so frustrated with these blocks and just had to walk away for a moment (I’ve also been in tears over these stupid blocks). And I’m really unimpressed with the booklet that the Adbri company produces for these things. It’s pretty unhelpful and really needs to go into a bit more mathematical detail about planning the bed in the way of laying out the first row of  blocks. If only they had some standard formulas for the angle that you need to place the bricks and how many bricks you will need … Anyway, there are only three  more beds to be built and Tim will be doing one of those, the last remaining circular bed. Here are some previous beds I built a few weeks ago with these Adbri border blocks: