It's officially autumn, and the ground is covered in leaves. Unfortunately its not the deciduous annual dump. After months of almost no rain, and relentless baking heat, the trees are slipping into survival mode and dumping leaves, seed pods, flowers, small sticks…and big heavy branches.

We have two magnificent paulownias in the house yard. Paulownias are quite a thing round this area, they were seen as a quick shade tree, growing fast. And someone who lived on this property was an early adopter….ours are gigantic, more than 15 metres high, with massive trunks and limbs.

But they drop them, often. Yesterday the dogs panicked as we heard a massive "Crack!", and then the smashing descent of a big branch. But no thump as it hit the ground. I went round to see what was going on. Aah. There it is, a eight metre spear, pointing downwards, but hooked a good five metres above the ground. Aah yes, and another one over there. Next windy day might be a bit exciting.

Not that we've had much wind. It's been mid-30's forever, every day, and no breeze to shift it. We do cool down a little at night, as the cold air drifts down from the mountains, and there's a brief interlude pre-dawn where you can flush the house out and start with a clean slate.

The grass has all burnt off, and we are starting to see bare dirt.

When we cut hay in December we got less than half the normal amount of bales. And poor quality hay, no nutrition in it. The maths of it is against us, and we didn't have enough feed for our cows to see us through the lean winter months. I had to sell off most of my cows, which we did four weeks ago. I found it quite depressing, but a relief to have resolved that issue.

That's despite me doing a guerilla hay cut, using what tools I had and hand collecting about two weeks worth of feed. I made a well in the middle of the hay bale stack and piled the loose hay in. But it isn't enough.

Since then, the remnant cows have cleaned out the remaining feed and this week are starting to lose weight. If it doesn't rain in the next week I'm going to have to start supplementary feed for them.

We are also having to do a similar reduction in sheep. That's happening this week.

The other thing I've been doing is fence repairs. There's a few paddocks I haven't used to full capacity, as the poor fencing means livestock finish up in the neighbour's place….It's the shared fences that are the problem. I have had conversations about improving the fences, but nothing ever happens, so I just went ahead myself without their input. It's been a slog in the heat, trudging up and down the fenceline adding mesh and getting it all tight, adding electrics, adding a few extra fence posts where the old fence was dodgy, but it's done now and given me a few weeks extra breathing space with feed.

All a bit grim, really!