In these tricky times, when water does not just drop out of the sky, when summer starts in October and goes through to about the following May, when kids sit slack-jawed at their grandparents' feet as they reminisce about when most people could afford a house - everyone and everything must pull his, her, its weight.
And so it is on our humble block of dirt, where dear wife's scrutiny has turned to our under-performing olive trees.
Actually my performance in wood splitting, weed eradication and general usefulness around the place had to be assessed first, and that's never straightforward, but I passed so now at last we can focus on the olives.
The olive tree - the oldest cultivated tree of them all - is extremely hardy and forgiving, and can survive poor soils, with little water.
It's amazing where research, in this case about olives, can take you.
I can report that Olive Oyl, hot, slim girlfriend of spinach-fancier Popeye, was introduced exactly 100 years ago, in 1919.
She is the youngest sibling of Castor and Crude.
Perhaps there was also a child, Baby Oyl, who became a masseuse?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, olives love good drainage and cool winters, and hot dry summers without humidity.
We have eight magnificent specimens with trunks as thick your thigh and long whippy branches with a million leaves.
But, and not for the first time, no olives this year.
I'm told olive trees can live for hundreds of years. Is that how long we have to wait?
There were 12 original trees, most sourced from the wife of the bloke who graded the track up to the home paddock, plus a couple of trees from an old mate, John.
Two-metre saplings at the time, they were all planted in north-facing rocky soil one hot day in 2002.
But within a couple of months, in our pre-electric fence days, four of them had been snapped off at ground level and completely stripped by feral goats.
The survivors thrived, or at least looked very healthy.
The lack of olives (not complete absence - two or three times we have had small crops) is something of a running joke around here.
Making things worse, when we last had a crop, the olives were small and the king parrots got there first and had a right old feast.
We have watered, fertilised and pruned.
They do not have 'wet feet' (all the experts warn against that).
We're kind to them.
Perhaps we could feed them spinach?
- Ross and Gemma Pride have split their time between Sydney and Billagal, Mudgee, since 2001.
