It never rains.. it bloody pours!!!

When we bought this place 5 years ago it was a jungle (still is in some places). I had thickets of weeds and shrubs 10ft tall all over the property with blackberry tangled throughout it. The machines I have to try and get this place under control, which is still very much a work in progress because once you remove a thicket then the weeds become an issue, are many and you get good at fixing things yourself and I hate working on motors.

I have a 5.5HP Garden Master chipper to try and recycle the endless supply of woody weeds and shrubs here that I pull out... works great but I still have piles and piles of branches every year in the back paddock that become bonfires in the winter.

I have a Kubota tractor to keep the driveway graded (my job for today now that it has rained over night). My driveway is very long and quite steep. It is gravel. Whenever my next door neighbour turns on his big irrigators, or it rains, we end up with a river flowing down the driveway and it turns it into the channels of Vienna. I've just taught my daughter to drive the tractor so that I can deligate this job out to her, which she quite enjoys

I have a good Husqvarna chainsaw that gets flogged on the branches and trees that fall down here every year in this wind tunnel we live in. I have two full trees that need cutting up now but I just don't have the time for it at the moment. It takes a really long time to cut up and move two 40m high gums with trunks over a metre in diamtre.

The push mower needs to be replaced by something like the 4.4HP Rover, because mine is too 'suburban' for the job it has to cope with here.

The brushcutter is great. It's a newish (5 years old) Honda 4-stroke and with the blade on it does the bulk of the clearing work around here.

I bought the 12.5HP Victa ride-on mower with the view to making my life easier but it doesn't seem to be able to cope with the slope of our land so I end up not being able to use it in very many places as it is... It will be good to get it fixed, however, as it is great for doing the edges of the driveway and I'm going to see if the guys at the shop can suggest tweaks to make it more able to cope with climbing slopes, which it has to do head on as I'd probably tip if I went around perpendicular to the slope.... Maybe traction spikes on the wheels

The blower... well I don't use it any more.... what's the point using a blower to get rid of debris when the Roaring 40s puts it right back there in an instant anyway!

I reckon I'm still about 20 years away from getting this place even close to under control.

Flat land and a self-proplelled push mower would be heaven!