Friends, family and others

November 24 2013

We have had a really busy week with a school camp here. Some of the youngsters had stayed last year so they settled down quickly into managing the farm tasks. Several of them remembered how to milk goats too, which is a help. The group task was to clear up the paddock across the gully. It still had fences and wire on the ground from the fires that were rapidly becoming buried in weeds so we were really pleased to have this job tackled.

There was plenty to do because there was a mass of fallen timber and some larger dead gums that had to be shifted as well as weeds and wire. There was enough scrap timber to have a large fire down by the ruins on the last night as well as stocking up the woodpile for winter. Once again the school was very lucky and managed a week of fine hot to warm weather! The boat was rowed around the dam a lot but no one caught any fish. We see the fish jump every night but catching any is proving hard.

We also have our friends from the UK staying. We all went over to St Andrews market last weekend and had a meal in the pub after shopping. The good thing is that they are very easy guests to have around and having four adults to do the work has made things easier to run. Today our friends have gone on a train to see Melbourne and Edd and I are going to pick our youngest son up from the airport. He has been away for a year working in WA so we are really excited about him coming home for Xmas.

Luckily we still have lots of vegetables growing. The cauliflowers have all ripened and the broccoli is behaving better and getting ready to eat in succession. There is a good crop of broad beans and snow peas and we have a delicious crumble made from mulberries my grand daughter picked. The cucumber plants have been slow and I am yet to get the zucchinis planted out which is very remiss of me.

We are now in full cheese making mode and so I have broken into the last of the cheeses from 2012. The one we are eating now tastes good but I cannot remember what type it is and the label is gone! This year I am going to try a new starter culture used in some Italian cheeses, which I have not tried before. Feta and cream cheese are easy to make so I do them if I am short of time. They are also popular with our friends.

problems

November 12 2013

How can we handle what is going on at Fukashima?  The plan is to move the fuel rods from the pool because it is up at the top of the ruined building and in danger of collapsing. Any accident could seriously affect the world even worse than has happened so far. It seems mad men build nuclear power stations to get materials to make horrific weapons of war. We are managing well from solar power so what is the problem!

Also today we have all the photos of the damage in the Philippines caused by the hurricane. It looks awful. I know first hand what it is like to loose everything in a few hours but we had the advantage of being on a farm where we at least had enough food and water to manage in the short term. My heart goes out to all those people and I feel over whelmed by their suffering.

Today’s problems are not totally limited to over seas. My Grand daughter has decided to leave her job at the outdoor education centre and needs picking up. None of us could contact her father at first, so I was preparing for a long drive but luckily he was soon available, and is setting off to fetch her home. I am not sure of all the details yet but I expect they will come out gradually. Edd is teaching all day so he is not available to help.

On the farm I am still getting ready for our UK guests; they on the road down from Sydney, so we expect them here before the week’s end.  The room is all prepared for them and yesterday I sewed small sand bags to hold the doors shut. The doors do not have any latches yet, so something was needed as an interim measure.  I am doing all the sewing that has built up over the last two years whilst I have the sewing machine all set up. I have commandeered a corner of the sunroom to act as a sewing room and it is very convenient because there is space to lay out even the big things like the curtains on the floor.

I am also making the first hard cheese for the year. I made some starter culture last night and carefully milked all the goats in an order so that I could avoid using milk from the few that have been wormed or have just kidded. The milk has been pasteurised and is now ready to add culture and rennet. There is more milk now because four of the male kids have been adopted and now part of a new family. All the other seven kids use the feeder but there are still three more goats to kid.

I have done some soul searching this week about how we will cope with Edd’s knee problems. He really finds walking painful so we need to reduce work here to an amount I can do sustainably on my own. After much thought, I have decided all the cows must go. I hate the idea of parting with Donna because I trained her to hand and machine milk myself and she is like a family pet. The two calves we have just raised must also go and Donna’s fat daughter Sharron. It will cut out a lot of walking and winter feeding. The only snag is that we have still not built the stockyards and we need them up to load them when they leave.

My daughter tells me she is hoping to buy a pony for her children for Xmas so the cows leaving would actually fit in with having another pony here. We already have a tack room set up for my eldest granddaughter to use when she rides the hafflingers, in fact we are quite well set up for ponies.

work stops for a horse race

November 6 2013

All work stopped yesterday for the Melbourne cup. We had a BBQ in the ruins with some friends and family.  I probably drank my whole alcohol ration for a week, but I thoroughly enjoyed the day. The weather was perfect and the company the best. It is even hotter today and we are back to work. I am making a feta cheese and have done some much needed weeding. We have friends from the UK coming to stay and a school camp the following week so there is a lot to do. It always seems to go from being too wet to weed straight to hard dry conditions. Consequently weeding work is erratic at best.

We have been eating the first of the snow peas and the last of the lettuces, which are trying to bolt. We ate the first of the new broccoli last week and the broad beans are now plump. The tomatoes are rushing up but the cucumbers and basil are struggling to get going. This hot weather should help them. I need extra space to grow the zucchinis and pumpkins but that involves more work.

We have faverolles eggs in the incubator and have to remember to turn them night and morning. The incubator stays at a very stable temperature in the back cellar but some of the eggs might be too old or not fertile so we are not counting on chickens yet. I am weaning the third set of goat kids today. We have boys of all colours but only two girls this year. I think I have found a sale for four of the kids to a home where they will be pets and blackberry eaters. Mostly male kids go for meat so it is great when some can look forward to a longer life.

I have not seen my daughter for a few days because her restaurant has been very busy and she has been hard at work. It is very much the high season for her with the racing carnival on and Xmas parties starting soon! She also has her daughter starting school part time to get ready for next year. This starting slowly for a few hours is good for the kids but a pain for their parents who never seem to stop driving them around.

A friend brought over the research DVD that was made about trauma after the fires. We were pretty worried about this as we endured hours of interviews and might have said just about anything! Luckily the girl who made the film was very kind on us all and it was not as embarrassing as we feared. It was pretty sobering though because it questioned the sensibleness about living in these fire prone hills. Basically, no one is really accepting the danger that is part of the natural cycle of this type of forest. At least we had built a house to cope.

November 3. 2013-

November started with a taste of summer weather. Yesterday we had blue skies all day, and my grandkids and their friend got hot enough to enjoy leaping off the boat into the dam and making mud slides.  We are not at all worried about wet muddy children, everyone is thrilled to see them having old fashioned fun rather than fiddling with screens.

I have completed the curtain making and have even sewed covers for the sofa and chairs in the solar hall room. I had just draped fabric over the seats before which looked OK if no one sat on them for long. Edd has also made all the doors and today Stevo came over to help him hang them. The blokes only got one door hung but we did a lot of catching up and relaxing, after all it is Sunday.

Now the big challenge is the shower. We can have showers in the donga again now that it is empty, but we do have to do our own one here. The blokes put up the architrave around the doors in the mudroom too so I now have no excuse to avoid doing the rest of the tiling.