Month: February 2018

Well, here it is–finally finished and painted! Theo the farrier/handyman/painter/ everything did a great job. The first part of the work was actually putting the building finish in place–sealing all the gaps in the render, re-sealing some of the work that had been done, washing everything down, and so on. Then two coats of paint went on. It is special paint designed specifically for concrete render, very thick and hard to put on first (easier with the second coat) which seals everything in. Then all the windows were sanded down and sealed with an external varnish.

There was much debate about the colour–different shades were tried–the first coat was actually quite yellow (Lesley not happy at the time). However the final colour came out well, and seems to combine with the chimney and steps, and now with the darker colour of the varnished windows. So Lesley is very happy now!

We do think it came out far better than we could have imagined. Among other things the design lines come out much more cleanly.  Anyway, see what you think–these are early morning pics, to bring out the colour best.

Here are some pictures of our first real experiments with harvesting and processing Muntries. There’s pretty good coverage right across the two blocks, ripening at different times, from January through probably to May, depending on how much hot weather we get. Here are the picked berries–even though they were picked in the same general area you can see here that the two batches vary in ripeness:

 

Then they go through a dehydrator–this is just a kitchen design I bought on eBay, seems to do the job pretty well. We’re experimenting with it: working out how to make the drying process smooth as it seems to differ slightly through the vertical trays; and trying to work out how to tell when the berries are really dried, because any residual moisture will interfere with the next stages:

 

 

And here is the hand-grinder I also bought on eBay–it’s designed for nuts and berries so we’ll see how it works. The plan at this stage is to produce fine grounds whose use in different products can be explored.  Needless to say all of this a small-scale trial–if it works out it would all have to be scaled up.

 

 

And here’s the final (pre-processing) product–muntrie powder! It tastes very nice. It turned out that the hand grinder, although more picturesque, wasn’t as good as the electric coffee grinder, so for the time being that’s what we’ll use. The sealed bags of powder are in the fridge ready for the next stage.

Not bad, huh? A start, anyway.

I forgot the hand grinder pic! Here it is:

 

 

Here’s a walk I like doing, around the Marina. It’s tidal water, so the vegetation is adapted to that. The trees are Melaleuca, and I think must be the swamp variety (as distinct from the dry-land Ti-Tree which we have on the land), but I thought that was usually found around the fresh-water ponds, lakes, and swamps across the district, so I’m impressed that it does all right in salt water, too. The boardwalk works very well and it’s always nice to get views across the water–and the boats!

 

At the entrance to the Marina is displayed a restored hull of one of the old fishing boats operating out of Robe, The Butterbox. It’s carvel planked from oregon, with jarrah frames, which is pretty impressive–must have taken some serious steam bending. The restoration was carried out by a couple of local enthusiasts–‘I dips me lid’.