Planning for a visit

We have fellow bloggers arriving for a BBQ tomorrow.  Jan suggested fresh strawberries for dessert, so this morning we set off before the heat and the crowd.  Actually the strawberry farms aren’t very far from where we live, which means it’s not much of a chore.

Several weeks ago the industry was hit quite badly when a purchaser discovered a steel sewing needle in a strawberry they had bought.  This made quite a story in the national media which unfortunately resulted in several ‘copy cat’ incidents around Australia.  Tonnes of strawberries went to landfill as the market collapsed.   We have always preferred to pick our own locally.  The supermarket strawberries tend to be colourful, hard and tasteless.  Probably because they are picked early as they tend to travel long distances to reach their markets.  Moreover the chances of finding something ‘foreign’ in them are quite low.

So off to our favour strawberry farm.

Usually we are directed to a defined portion of the farm to do our picking.  One assumes the grower wants to ensure intensive harvesting occurs.  However it’s now the end of the season and we were told we could pick anywhere we liked.  With few pickers about it only took 20 minutes to fill our large cardboard punnet.

Frankly we were picking fast in an effort to get the job done and get away from the pesky flies.  Apparently Jan had one which had become enamoured with her ears.  Next year we must remember to take a head net each.

There is only some touch-up painting to complete on the camper trailer kitchen and it’s complete.  I need to get motivated and do more work on the 12V electrical system.  However I’ve run out of solder which is quite disappointing.  The reel of solder we bought in Singapore back in 1981 has all been used.  I can’t believe how quickly it went! :

Under pressure from Australian retailers the government recently changed the rules regarding the collecting of GST (VAT) on overseas purchased.  It used to be that any purchase less than A$1000 didn’t incur GST.  However that has recently changed and now GST is collected on all overseas purchases.  The government has made the major overseas retailers collect the GST on their behalf.  So if you purchase from the likes of Ebay, Aliexpress, Alibaba, Amazon, etc you get charged an extra 10% GST.  Now the clever half of our partnership has discovered ‘Joom’, a Chinese retail website that doesn’t collect GST on behalf of the Australian government.