A Clean Slate

Sometimes you decide that it's time to stop, regroup, and start with a clean slate. Sometimes, the universe decides that for you.

The universe decided it was time for us.

It's been a funny old week - aside from being extraordinarily busy setting up our new shop in Hervey Bay (yep - we've now got two shop fronts to buy our booze from!), we've also had quite a few large group bookings (a day preparing food, the day that they are here, then a few hours cleaning up).

On top of this, our rainwater tank got a little out of whack and started smelling really gross. All of our water had the stench of sewerage/pond water for about a week before we couldn't stand it any longer and made some calls. After the advice of 'chuck in some chlorine', 'buy a filter cartridge system' and 'don't worry, its probably fine', we decided to bite the bullet and pay "The Tank Cleaners" to come out and, well, clean our tank.

I am SO glad we did!

We had to drain out the whole tank (devastating), but then Peter the Tank Cleaner wiggled his way inside and for the next half hour all we saw was handfuls of leaves and gunk getting flung out of the top. When he was done, he explained that he evicted a family of frogs and there was about 8 inches of 'decaying organic matter' sludging up the bottom. That, along with the stinking hot days we've had lately, caused some serious algae and bacteria growth. It was so bad that a proper cleanup was the only solution.

After a stern talking to about proper rainwater tank management, we jumped up on the roof to give all the pipes and gutters a clean out with the high pressure cleaner and then we were ready for a fresh start.

We've had the tanks topped up with water again, and hopefully it won't be too long until we get some rain to finish off the job.

Aside from that, the new cool room that has just been built is still a tad leaky, so again we've made the big decision to accept our losses and build a big roof across the whole thing. So Josh has been up and down a ladder all day doing that. It looks surprisingly neat and tidy, and doesn't really fit in to the mish-mash of everything else on the farm!! Fingers crossed it solves our leak problem...I guess we will found out soon enough.

Finally (everything comes in threes, you know), even Betsy had a clean slate this morning. She's been getting progressively rattlier over the past few weeks, and a mechanic friend of our said she needed a new rear muffler. Eventually I got around to ordering her one...just in the knick of time! Her old one had rusted off and was hanging by a rubber thread. 20 minutes later Josh had fitted the new one, and I was off on a test drive. I can't believe the difference a new muffler makes! She's back to being fuel efficient, zippy and has lost that dirty fake-V8 growl she has had lately!

So - all in all - it's been a very expensive but productive day. Not a single customer, but never mind. There is always tomorrow!

The house that Jack built

But instead of a house, it's a cool room. And instead of Jack, it's Josh and Geoff.

Today, the boys built their second cool room together. We bought a heap of refrigerated cold room panels off Gumtree (as you do) and had them trucked up to us from the Gold Coast to Childers. They sat around for a few weeks while we waited for a concrete slab to be poured earlier this week, and then the boys put it all together today.

I'm quite impressed, I must admit. There was a lot less swearing this time around than last time, and they've done a great job. We ran out of glue (again!) so it's not quite done - but they will finish off the door in the next day or two.

The whole point of building a new cool room is to be able to increase our production of wines as we head into our second season of producing fruit wines. They've been immensely popular, so much so that we've sold out of the 'first round' of everything we've made and are well and truly onto 'round two' (and three, and four) of a lot of our wines. It's great that we have been selling them so well, but it's also really time consuming to keep producing our wines in such small quantities (a hundred or so bottles at a time).

By having more space to ferment and age the wines means we will be able to produce more at once, hopefully meaning we will be able to cut some costs by filtering and bottling all at once...and simply have more stock on hand.

As summer creeps closer (and the humidity increases!) a lot of the lovely summer fruits are also ripening up, ready to be turned into wine. We are eagerly awaiting our 2017 crops of mangoes, lychees, dragonfruit and plums and can't wait to get these back on our shelves.

Slab getting poured

All ready for graffiti! (and to dry)

Walls going up

OHS nightmare - roof going on

Oh hey up there.