I just got the Macrocarpa for the vege garden retaining walls delivered. I hunted around for ages and found a really good deal from Akatarawa Saw Mills — $6.50 (+ gst) per linear meter. (They also do macrocarpa sawdust for a very good rate, but there wasn’t space on their truck to get that delivered this time.)

My order ended up being approx 250 meters, and arrived early Saturday morning. (Yes there is room for a car to get past, we didn’t totally block the road!)

It took two people (myself and Vince from SJS) three hours to carry it all down to the vege garden, and we were VERY tired at the end of it.

Perhaps you’re curious why I got macrocarpa rather than standard H4 treated pine? I’m planning to grow beans and other vines up these walls and pine is generally treated with CCA - copper, chrome and arsenic. I don’t want heavy metals with my beans thanks!

I really dislike buying soap. I only use vegetable based soaps, and avoid brands with lots of chemicals in them. Unfortunately, most supermarkets don’t have a very good selection of soap I’m willing to buy — and it usually costs $2+ per bar.

So I worked out how to make my own soap. I read The Natural Soap Book, and it all turned out to be really easy. There were only 5 ingredients (one water) and an hour’s effort to make it. Now I have more soap than I’ll need for the rest of the year.

Krsna Prasada is thinking of getting a mulcher for Gaura Haven this weekend. I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the mulcher I hired in August to give him an idea of the scale of operations possible. My advice — get the biggest mulcher you can! The one I had was 6.5hp petrol-driven and could chip up to approx 5cm diameter branches. It took the best part of a day to mulch up the stuff in the picture below:

Here’s how things looked afterwards. You can get a better view of the mulcher here. It’s the biggest one I could manage to carry down my stairs.