December 17-30

Not a whole lot of pictures this time - a few projects have soaked up most of our time. The expansion of the back yard is at the end of the second phase, with all of the john-grass cleared (phase 1), and 41 bananas and plantains planted (phase 2). We're not sure what phase 3 is yet! The big mango behind Casa Siegel is now out in the open for the first time in a very long while.

Christmas is sorrel season, and with Garnett's help we harvested and processed our sorrel crop. We now have sorrel to drink for the indefinite future.

The second mango tree of the two that got lightning damage had appeared to be only half dead. It produced a bunch of fruit - way out of season - and then once they were ripe it died the rest of the way. It was quite dramatic - it went from looking fairly healthy to totally dead in under a week! Tai Jean helped us cut off as much as was practical without a chainsaw, and we now have two large dead tree trunks in the back yard.

The laundry sink is now partly tiled, and Tom has begun fabricating a trilobite grate for the new access doorway we cut into the crawl space under the bedroom. The grate project is on hold at the moment awaiting parts for the welder, which conked out a couple of weeks ago.

Christmas was pretty quiet - Garnett and Paulette came over and brought us dinner and we visited for a while. The weather has mostly been fine, but we did have an unusual December rainy spell, with heavy rain for three successive nights followed by an all day rain. The plants loved it, our water tanks got topped up, and the threat of brush fire got moved to later in the season.

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