Below, a few pictures of some interesting forest features. Below left, one of the dead really tall black wattle trees has just lost all it's bark - a striking light colour contrasting against all the other dark tree trunks and green foliage. Below centre, just when you think a fallen black wattle tree is dead, with a bit of moisture in the soil, out sprouts a little bunch of new growth. Below right, an interesting old lonesome tree stump still standing upright with a hole burned right through it. The final picture is of our sheep spotted out grazing in one of the super-green clearings deep in the forest.

After moving some scaffolding across to the chimney area I was already tired. And then having to mix the mortar, shovel it up onto the scaffold plank, then again up to onto a board balanced carefully on the perlins, lay the bricks, checking that each brick was straight and level in all directions just finished me off completely. After a few hours and about five tedious courses of bricks, I gave it up for another day.

And the wood oven chimney already has roof sheeting around it, so it's going to be even worse working up there on the slipery surface trying not to drop blobs of mortar onto the nice clean roof sheeting. I may leave that for the builders and just supervise carefully to attempt to control the mess levels.

Our first 12mm came around the 8th and then two days after that we had another 6mm. For the entire three days there were lovely thunderstorm cloud formations drifting by overhead and I got some great pictures, especially the early morning and late afternoon formations.

The farm dams are surprisingly full and water is still flowing in from the hills into all of them. Obviously areas higher up and a bit further away from us got a lot more rain than we did. In fact, Johan measured double the rainfall than we did in one of the heavier cloudbursts last month. And he's just 2km away from us. Our summer thunderstorms are really hit and miss affairs - but the more thunderstorms around, the luckier we get.

The workshop was swept out and the bales moved in and now there's not much space left there to do any woodwork. But as most of the woodworking tools are up at the tea garden structure at the moment, I'll just do whatever woodwork needs to be done up there for now.

Our building team was Leno and Serge, who had last worked with us when we started building the garage block a few years ago.

Once we had the outer walls up near floor level and all the grass dug out of the inside sand fill, we could estimate more accurately the amount of fill required. It was quickly obvious that there would be quite a lot of fill required so we decided to step the whole structure down from the bedroom separation point by two brick courses. But we weren't gong to dig any foundation for the step, just rest it on the bottom level floor slab. That meant only two or three bakkie loads of fill were required - all taken from our big sand pile next to the house kitchen and we would have to plan the casting of the floor slabs carefully so that the two courses of bricks for the step could be built on the lower level slab before casting the upper level slab.

So we had fresh pumpkin with our dinners for over two weeks and Martie made lots of pumpkin soup to put in the freezer for winter.

We've also kept some of the seeds and will be trying our luck with giant pumpkins of our own next growing season.

As this little monster was already a quarter way across the road, I reversing back to it quickly and parked still well on the road to force the bit of traffic that was coming up the hill to steer wide of us, then quickly jumped out and grabbed it up. It put up the normal hissing fuss but I bundled it into the bakkie cubbyhole to calm down and went on into town to organise my building materials.

When I got back to the farm it was a lot calmer and we had a quick photo session before I let it go in one of our indigenous bushes next to our "wetland" area.

The main reason for this was to get the floor surface clear of the tree roots. We won't concrete the floor around the tree but rather just leave it sand (maybe cover it with a layer of clean river sand). We plan to lay a deck floor there and maybe cover the area with a thatch roof to work around the big tree trunk.

After a final compacting of the sand surface and filling in a few little "soft spot" indentations, the plastic and steel mesh was layed down for the kitchen and bathroom areas. Thankfully I remembered at the last minute that we needed a waste pipe for the shower in the bathroom and had to hastily fit that while the concrete was being mixed.

We also layed plastic and mesh down on the area where we would be building the little step between the lounge and bedroom areas.

Then it was almost two days of mixing and pouring concrete to get the floor slab down. I tried my best to keep the site neat and clean but it was just impossible. The builders insisted on continually overfilling the wheelbarrows with the resulting inevitable spills on the way to the pouring site and we had some rather big splashes over the side face bricks to clean up afterwards.

Mortar was mixed, bricks brought in and piled up next to the structure and in no time Leno was laying bricks. By the end of the day we had the entire side wall up three courses of bricks above the floor level.

It was so peaceful working with Leno and Serge out there with nature all around for the day. Kind of like a whole day of "bricklaying therapy" for me .

We also got the fireplace all worked out with the top roller course of bricks and all the internal lintels in place. We left a ledge for the mantle and started building the chimney up two courses of bricks.

Then to finish off the day Leno started laying a few courses of bricks for the kitchen and bathroom outer wall.

And no, the bone was not part of this kill. That's an eland bone, one of the many now scattered far and wide over the farm by our dogs from sites from where two eland had died on the farm over the past few years.

I worked on the inside and built the inside walls to separate the kitchen and bathroom and to separate the kitchen and bathroom from the lounge.

Serge and Leno work very well together and Serge is an excellent helper. He makes sure we both have bricks and mortar on hand at all times and gives a hand in setting up the profiles. He also keeps a close eye on building progress and is always there to move the building line up on a profile when Leno has finished a "line" and is on the other side of a long wall.

At the end of the day we could step back and see real progress on the structure, especially as we had managed to lay the first few courses of bricks for the final front wall.

This year's Worm Moon was also a super moon and was unusual in that it occurred almost four hours after the March 20th equinox. I got great picture of it behind the only little late evening cloud as it rose up over the hill.

I also made the first wooden door frame for the front door. Very easy stuff, doorframes. Just sand and finish some straight 114 x 36 roofing timber and glue and screw it together square at the top. As soon as it was screwed into the brickwork, Leno layed the roller course of bricks over it so he could get on with building that front wall higher.

Below left, on one day we were visited by lots of these very pretty Blue Pansy butterflies sucking up moisture and minerals from the wet bricks. Then below centre, for over a week we had hundreds of these quite common Painted Ladies all over the farm. And then below right, what could possibly be a Rainforest Brown, found one late afternoon in the duck pond. Unfortunately it was discovered too late to be saved.

Yep, another full adult (about 60cm) night adder. Regular rains bring out the toads and seem to be attracting quite a few of these snakes.

Martie had heard a chicken commotion at the rabbit hutch coop while I was out working in Joburg and when checking what was going on, spotted the snake in one of the cages. We leave the cage doors open during the day so the chickens can go in and out as they please, so the snake must have slithered in through the open door while the chickens were out. Anyway, she just closed the door to shut it in until I could get there to sort it out.

Next day I went in to "bucket" and relocate the snake and on closer inspection, saw it had a rather fat belly. We didn't have any little chickens so we were quite safe there, but we did a chicken head count anyway. The night adder's main diet is toads and frogs and it had obviously caught a good sized one a day or so before and took refuge in the chicken coop cage to digest it's meal. It was coaxed out of the coop into a bucket and let loose deeper into the forest.

I took a picture above of it just after I let it loose - amazing camouflage against the forest undergrowth and the discolouration of the "toad bulge" on it's body. The inset picture is of the snake at the chicken coop door waiting to be "bucketed".

Things are getting a bit busy down there - the new tea garden structure is clearly visible. The new farm cottage is also visible but due to picture size restraints, I cut it off the bottom of the picture. All the grass has been neatly cut in patterns around the fences (we'll cut the middle sections as we need the grass for feed and bedding for the animals) and almost every one of our fruit trees are visible in their neat rows.