You may have wondered if Panda was still around.  Yes he is…he’s just waiting for the right conjunction of stars to write something.  Yes, he’s a bit like that.  Anyway, he’s trying to learn to live on a farm and to find a practical way to live.  We are giving him some guidance and occasionally a kick up the backside to move him along.

This is because, when we started, we made so many mistakes and now we feel that with a few pointers in the right places, it would not have taken us so long to set things up.  On hindsight, I would advise anyone wanting to live a self-sustainable farming life-style to start with the following things: power, water, security and access.  Now I know it sounds so obvious but it wasn’t obvious to us as silly wannabee farmers.

We totally messed up, at the beginning and didn’t even consider these most important concepts.  Instead, we bought a billy goat (a very rude one at that) without fencing the property and ended up tying him up on our veranda.  Those were the days when we sat down to have a cup of tea and Horatio (the goat) would attempt to clobber Gnome whilst in the act of obscene gesticulations.  Gnome would clobber him back and this went on for a while until we realised our priorities in setting up a decent farm life.

So, Panda does not need to learn our goat lesson.  Since he has power and water, we have moved him swiftly onto “security.”  This involves chopping the front fence line and planting pandanus plants as a natural barrier.  Anyway, we went to have a look at Panda’s efforts today.  We noticed a few problems; his fence-line, that he has chopped, is all wiggly and not in a straight line.  He also hasn’t chopped enough width to allow the pandanus to grow and he did not take into consideration that part of the land, outside of the fence-line, is public right of way.  His line weaves in and out in a meandering kinda way.

Panda has to re-visit this chore and cut a straight line within the land and chop at least 2 metres wide to allow the fence-line plants to grow.  That is no mean feat!   Gnome told him that there was a lesson to be learned in this: prior to this, we advised Panda not to hire help for this particular job.  We said this because we needed him to realise what chopping with a machete really meant; we needed him to do some real work.  Panda may choose now to hire a worker for this job but he will do this with respect and  gratitude.  All too often, we meet many people who hire, in a nonchalant way, stating that their main reason is to “help the locals.”  We would like to urge Panda to have a less superior attitude and adopt a more balanced, symbiotic attitude with hired workers.  I think he got the lesson.