On Wednesday, the prolonged Summer 2020 Fencing Festival ended with the last corner space closed over. It took us six days to cover around 130 metres, which I probably shouldn’t advertise. I’m sure someone with the right inputs, tools and knowledge could have finished in a day. And it would look nicer. But this is our fence and is now part of our story.

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The design seems to have worked overall. We’re extremely grateful to Longley Organic Farm who detail how they have set up their fences (and plenty of other things) in a way that people like us can understand. Alex’s various shortcuts also worked out (a great relief!). The biggest hitch was making a small change to the design part-way through which mean we needed more wire mesh. The one we wanted was out of stock and I didn’t want a two-tone fence (it was longer-lasting and blue). Fortuitously, after an initial panic followed by calmer phone calls, we located the mesh at a supplier two doors down from the original supplier. And it was almost $100 cheaper! The economist part of my brain was (and is) struggling to explain this! Needless to say, we did our bit to restore market mechanisms and went for the cheaper one.

Our farm is still without a name. We very nearly had one via this fencing project when the first version of the gate was leaning severely after we tightened the wires functioning as guy ropes (yet-another shortcut, this time to avoid digging a proper posthole). Crooked Gate Farm is our best name idea yet but I am still working on letting go of perfectionism and this is just too much. So we have a straight gate… with two symmetrically leaning posts for the stretches of fence either side. And we’re still looking for a name.

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With the closure of the fence we could finally begin transplanting bursting seedlings into their new home. So on Thursday and Friday, we planted spinach, chard, beetroot, corn, more beans, three types of lettuce, Chinese cabbage, purple sprouting broccoli, tomatoes, borage, chamomile and parsley into the beds. This turned into a total body workout, with legs squatting for hours and arms trying to dig holes for large plants like tomatoes into the poor-quality soil below the compost, cardboard and matted grass roots. Parkrun on Saturday and my first 10km run in a long time on Sunday diversified the muscle soreness.

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The last lesson from the week (well, the last big one – there were many) is that we may have wrongly accused wallabies of taking everything that has disappeared. With the grass drying up the wallabies have come closer to the house where the grass is greener and a visitor told us they are pademelons. Wikipedia says they are nocturnal but three times during the week we saw them just a few metres away. The final time I was watching one under our plum tree only to realise it had been tasting my tatsoi in the seedling trays minutes earlier!!!

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