I still haven't managed to get the fox, unfortunately. I've only seen him once since I bought the shotgun, and I couldn't get it up quick enough to shoot the bastard before he ducked behind some trees. And he has been eating the quail - there were hardly any of them escaping from under the slasher last time I mowed.
Still, all-in-all the health of the paddock is pretty good - I've got clumps of trees and saltbush scattered over it, and there's a lot of grasses and other short plants as well, including some lucerne that Chris and I broadcast-seeded a couple of years ago.
The thing in the foreground is the handle of my Hamilton tree-planter, to give some scale: it's about a foot long.
And here's a photo of a bit of the windbreak from last August. The whole of the windbreak and the micro-forest had this beautiful golden haze from a distance because of the wattle blossoms.
I recently bought a second-hand post hole auger, which was really hard to attach to the tractor, and I still haven't worked out how I'm going to store the thing other than on the tractor itself. I think I need some kind of gantry in the shed. After Chris and I spent a day playing agricultural equipment Tetris, I've got everything under cover (the slasher spent a couple of weeks out in the weather). Having sons has turned out to be handy ...
So, the next steps are to find a contractor to put the slab in before the building approval runs out in May, and get some fencing organised. I need to fence in the micro-forest and the windbreaks, and along the creek line, and also divide the paddock into 5 or 6 bits, of a bit over a hectare each, so I can cell graze when I finally put some sheep on it. That's actually not as critical as the rest, especially as too much fencing will make building the Hovel trickier, but I need to at least plan where the fences will go eventually.
