On Sunday night we boarded the Spirit of Tasmania southbound with a car loaded to the roof with donations of useful tools and implements from our families and the suitcases we’d been living out of for the past two months. The next morning we awoke approaching Devonport, in Tasmania’s north. It was raining, which we decided not to tell anyone from Melbourne. The drive from Devonport to the Huon Valley is around 340km but takes four hours. That was ok because (1) it let us see more of our new island home and (2) the winding highway also took us past the compost sellers we wanted to visit. Since we are planning to grow vegetables using no-till/no-dig methods, we knew we needed a lot of compost to be able to start work. We pretended to know more than we did, fooling no-one I’m sure, and we can say we got our hands dirty on the first day. We continued to the house, which, thankfully, looked like it did in the pictures! That same night we collected Ebbi from the airport. We hadn’t seen her since Amsterdam two weeks earlier. She seemed completely fine, which couldn’t have been more of a relief.

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The rest of the week was devoted to getting started. Our ambitious plans to lay garden beds on day two were thwarted by the grass that was higher than Ebbi. In any case, there was still a lot to do. We sowed 33 different types of vegetables and herbs (lettuce through to chamomile) and planted 10 varieties of potatoes (partly thanks to the seller’s end-of-season generosity). By the end of the week, it felt like we are getting better at filling trays with soil and seed. But of course the thing about this new job is that we will have a definitive answer in 1-2 weeks’ time.

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We have tiptoed into the local community through problems to be solved. Firstly coffee. Our town’s short main road boasts four cafes with excellent coffee. The tricky part is remembering which day they are open as it seems many businesses open four days. But this is something our previous lives prepared us well for. We had wondered why there are no letterboxes and learned that that the township’s café/takeaway also serves as the drop-off point for mail and parcels. It’s a bit like a concierge in an apartment building really. The trap is that the potato cakes are good – who knew that collecting the mail was bad for your health?

Our grass set off a particular chain of events. We expected to arrive to a local farmer’s cows munching on our grass. We had arranged it on the phone when we bought the property. But the grass was knee-high. On Gumtree we found a lovely couple who wanted hay for their horses and will organise our grass to be cut and taken away. Thanks to them, an older gentlemen arrived unannounced the next evening and said that he would be mowing. Apparently he first mowed our paddocks when he was 16 so he knows where all the other rocks are! He also offered to put cows on the steep, rocky paddocks at the front, so that should be grass solved. And one of the couple’s friends who is a builder dropped by on Saturday to check out the hole in the shed roof.

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We realised pretty quickly that we just have to get on with fixing things even when we have no idea how. What a change from being a tenant and just emailing our landlord. Water problems have followed us from our previous apartment: there were two leaks on arrival. The most concerning was an irrigation pipe by the shed that was slowly but continuously leaking water. The various taps on the property that we managed to locate in the long grass wouldn’t turn it off. We eventually found the mains, and turned off water to the property.  After watching some Youtube and becoming members at Mitre 10, we (mostly Alex, but I did provide limited intellectual services) managed to repair the pipe and stop the water leak. Wow did that feel good! Buoyed by this experience we are ready to tackle the next round of fixes!