It's an inside day today. Three days of extreme heat, with today running neck and neck between extreme and catastrophic..

Last week we had two fires locally. When I say "locally" one was next door, the other was 8 km away, but directly visible from my breakfast table. Mt McLeod takes up most of my view, but last week it was sending up a thin line of smoke from a tree stump that had been hit by lightning. The next door fire was the other classic, a mower hitting a stone and igniting bone-dry grass.

So we are taking the warnings seriously. I have a red-neck-technology firetrailer set up and parked in the yard. Wouldn't fight a bushfire but useful if the prime suspect, a grass fire, shows up.

We are fortunate in that the local CFA is Ovens, but it's 400 metres down the road and actually in Eurobin. Its also the site for a huge response base that needs room for hundreds of people. (It was used recently as police HQ for the Dezi Freeman search. Before that it was HQ for the fires five years ago.) And it is also home base to firefighting helicopters. So in general terms I think we are quite well located in terms if fire response. On top of that, our neighbour is the well-watered hop farm, lush green 6 metre foliage from here to Myrtleford. I think its unlikely that a fire would make it through that way....

When the fire started next door I heard about it first by helicopters screaming past very low, shortly followed by notifications from the Vic Emergency App. It was impressive to watch the two helicopters circling the fire. Since then there's been a constant parade of helicopters flying past as there are more firs on the other side of Mt Buffalo.

Machinery-caused fire just past those trees!, December 30 2025

The Mt McLeod fire needed a crew dropped in to deal with it, as it was inaccessible by road, being on a flat ledge halfway down the Mt McLeod face.

Lightning strike fire on the side of Mt McLeod, Dec31 2025

It took me a whole day three days back to pre-water all my saplings. ( I drove around towing the fire trailer, cooked crazy in the heat!) In the far paddock, for I think the fifth time, 80% of the trees I planted have baked and died. I watered all the survivors, but some of them looked pretty far gone. Apart from that paddock overall most small trees have survived, but the three days we've been through might knock off a few more. And I have been hand-watering everything in the veggie garden. Literally hand-watering....tapping a 1000litre IBC I filled in greener times and carting it in 20 litre buckers to ladle out on the vegetables we have growing.

All in all we are prepared as we can be, and dealing with the deadly heat as best we can.

Cool change tomorrow, if we are lucky!