Parties and a funeral

Rosemary

This will be my last blog in 2015.   We have been having a very eventful time and I am slack in my reporting.   This week we have had yet another party.  This time it was for Edd’s birthday and everyone came out to the farm where I cooked roast lamb and lots of vegetables.     Our kids had all been off to the coast in various directions and all reported heavy traffic and slow tiring driving.  Edd and I were very glad that we opted for a quiet Xmas alone on the farm.   We actually got some work done when the weather cooled.

Al had helped our young UK visitors buy a car and they have set off driving north up the east coat.    They plan to get to Sydney for New Years Eve.   Josh and R had to work so they flew back to Brisbane and celebrated Xmas with their rats and fish.   What do you give a fish for Xmas?   I heard something about the rats getting sleeping bags.  

Xmas for us is a time of catching up with friends through phone calls, messages and parties.   This year, sadly, we added a new mode because our lovely friend and oldest Wwoofer, Rosemary, died and we went to her funeral.  Rosemary rang up years ago and asked if we wanted an old but very willing worker.   From that time she has been a regular at the farm.   She lived independently and took in boarders most of the time we knew her. Only for the last year she moved into a nursing home and left her lovely garden behind.

A garden is really a relationship between land and people.   When a person dies their garden also starts to decay or change.  Our friend, Judy, tells us that already Rosemary’s garden looks diminished.    We gave Judy a lift home after the funeral and I realized that even though we are both Rosemary’s friends and wwoof hosts, we have a very different outlook on life. ( Rosemary was a most amazing woman. She had many friends of all ages and has lived a full life.)

 Judy says she loves funerals because she feels good vibes.   I hate them because they mean I have lost someone I care about and they often seem done to a formula.   I think we should have farewelled Rosemary in the open air in a place she loved.   May be I should put her a special stone in the garden here the same way as I do for our relatives.  

Judy is also expecting a settlement from the bush fire class action that will solve her problems.  I prefer to think we will get a token payment.  If we do better I will then get a pleasant surprise rather than be disappointed.    We all filled in our bush fire claim but we have heard nothing back yet.   This is not a surprise, they took us weeks of work to do and they will probably take weeks to check.

We had one great party at Kinglake with four friends that we worked with in the Tanami desert.   We drank wine, had a BBQ and told funny stories about our experiences in the NT.    We have also heard from our friend, Patsy, in Alice Springs.   She tells me that they now have a dialysis machine in Yuendumu and that our other good friends have moved back there to use it.   That is very positive news.   Often the needs of the Aboriginal people are very neglected.

Heat and Fire force changes to our feast

The temperature is back in the Twenties today and we have had a sprinkling of rain over night. Not enough to do much except damp the dust a little but still an enormous relief after three days in the forties!  On Saturday we held the, mid- summer feast for our clan.   The plan had been to party in the ruins where the kids could use the pool but we woke on Saturday morning to learn that we were in the red risk category for bush fires and Al was already loading his cars to evacuate.

Ti’s mother put and embargo on allowing him to come anywhere near the Yarra Valley and her worries were not altogether unfounded because fires were starting everywhere.   We all decided that it would make people feel safer if we could move our party to Bo’s house in Yarra Glen.  She has the advantage of living a few doors away from a fire station with lots of trucks just there.

We all know that we would be safe in our new house but the drive here from Yarra Glen would be the problem.   It is surrounded by trees and the road is narrow.   In the 2009 fires it was quickly blocked and the other routes out of our place are rough steep tracks and not a good idea.

The good thing was that we had all bowed to climate change and opted to have a cold feast instead of traditional fare.  I had already cooked turkeys and had them sliced in the fridge on plates.  (I had even boiled up the bones and frozen the stock and dog food that resulted from this.)  Even the tables and chairs were easy to transport in the ute and set up on Bo’s new large veranda.  The plates, bowls and cutlery had been cleaned after Bo’s work party and were all ready in their boxes.   The napkins were boxed and ready too, so we drove it all over to Bo’s place.

Setting up should have been easy but the day before Bo’s eldest son had decided to move around all her furniture.   He had even been under the house and moved the cables for the TV so it could be in the kitchen.    The only thing left in situ was the grand piano, so there was some remedial activity needed.    Luckily Pip and Al came over and kept the kids busy making the Xmas crackers.   I had taken over all the bits, fortune cookies I had made and wrapped, bangers and balloons but they still needed to be assembled.

Josh and R arrived from Queensland, we were lucky to have them; they told us that they had to take a later flight because the machines were broken in the airport.   Wayne arrived with baby Ella and his wife and her mother and the party got underway despite the extreme temperatures.  As it got dark it cooled slightly so we were all able to sit outside and dine.   There were even a few raindrops but we all enjoyed them!

In the end we had a wonderful night with family and friends.    Josh and R came back to stay with us and Wayne and family came round next morning so we all sat round and talked again.  What a joy to see my two youngest son’s so happy with such wonderful partners.  Nothing could have been a better Christmas present.

hot and deadly dry

I have been too busy to blog for the last two weeks.    Firstly it has now got deadly dry and there is lots of extra work giving plants and trees water to try and keep them alive.    It is extremely dry for this time of year and the hay has been cut already.   At least it should have been but one paddock down at Judy’s got left because the men we asked to cut it have let us down.   Their bailer broke down and now the grass is burnt off.

I collected my cousin’s grandson and his friend from the airport and they have been staying with us, well, actually they are sharing the donga with Indi, but the eat with us.  It was useful having extra hands to help us get the first lot of hay in but we have a problem because the water is fast running out.   We spent $100 buying water for the dairy tank and we only have a tiny bit of drinking water left.  We have not had to buy water for years, so we have not really budgeted for this.

The dryness also means that the grass has stopped growing and the paddocks are turning to dust.   Luckily we sold Donna and the calf Max to some people in Gippsland where the conditions are better.    I was sad to see her go but we really have nothing left here for her to eat.   We think that we should sell the horses next.

The goats are managing OK.   They are eating their way through the blackberries in the gulleys and mopping up dead leaves.  They are still giving enormous amounts of milk and I have to make cheese most days.   Luckily the guests enjoy the cheese and are eating lots of it.  In the garden we have snow peas and lots of zucchinis.    We have strawberries and raspberries for breakfast and salad for lunch.   The runner beans are dashing up their poles and the cucumbers have flowers.

some problems solved

Donna and Max

More cow news. Indi found the neighbours’ cow, that was lost for so long, out on the road and managed to get it into the yards.   Then she and her boy friend got permission to take it straight over to the butcher.  It was pretty wild, and impossible to handle or contain, so our community is heaving a collective sigh of relief now it has gone.

Donna is doing a good job with her calf, Max, and he now takes enough of her milk that we do not have to milk her.   This is also a great relief. Max is growing very fast and we have castrated and dehorned him so we are happy to let him grow on for a bit.   The trouble is that the grass is dying off really early this year with the lack of rain.   Everyone is cutting hay early because of fire danger and there is not going to be a lot of it.

Bo, Pip, (Al’s wife) and I met in Healesville last week for a party meeting.   Once again we have agreed on small consumable gifts, preferably home made except for the children.    We have decided to have salads this year because the vegetables are always cold before they get eaten what ever we do. The idea is to have a smorgous board and let everyone pick what they want.

I went for the month’s shopping trip yesterday and ordered two free range turkeys that we can eat hot or cold when we get a better idea about what the weather is going to be like.   Last year we ate outside in the ruins, which was very nice and easy.   Bo has just had her works party in the ruins.   All the employees from the restaurant and the brewery came along and Bo provided a meal. Everyone seemed to be happy and several people camped the night here. Indi cooked them pancakes for breakfast.

Morgie did the cooking for the party more or less unaided. He is only 13 but he managed like a professional. All the steaks came out well at the same time as the warm breads and everything else. I was very impressed.   The camp kitchen is proving to be very useful. 

Bovine news

We were all set to send Donna, the Ayrshire cow, off to market today. She must have known because yesterday she had a change of heart and began allowing her calf to feed from her. Edd says Max looked embarrassed when his mother finally began to lick his hair into shape. He was accustom to her knocking him out of the way whenever he came close.  We can now milk Donna once a day and we hope we can sell her with her calf.

We are gradually completing the list of assets that we need to supply to the lawyers for the class action. The amount of stuff we used to have is totally horrifying. No wonder I struggled to look after it all.  There are pages and pages of stuff and I cannot imagine how anyone is going to deal with it. At least when it is done it is some one else’s problem and I can finally forget about it all. Edd and I had stuff left from our early childhood. I was aghast to find out the present day price for my Dolmetch recorder that I must have had about 60 years!

I have tried very hard since the fires to avoid getting over loaded with belongings but we still have a problem with letting things go and as a result get bogged down with work. Other people’s stuff also tends to collect here. Al came yesterday and made sure the boats were OK.   Al and Simon had put the boats in the large polyhouse so that they could be repaired, but once it was broken they no longer had any protection and were in danger of getting more damaged.

Our new neighbours came up again this weekend and we had great excitement when a friend of theirs landed a small plane on Hargreaves Hill!  It was a pretty risky venture dodging power lines and coping with rough paddock landing on a hillside, but it came and went with out disaster. The plane gave all the animals an enormous shock. The goats must have believed that they were being attacked by an enormous, albino eagle! The noise also flushed out Craig’s missing cow that had been hiding somewhere on their land! We were all very relieved to clear up that mystery.  All round the cow situation has now stabilized.

Next we must prepare for Xmas. Time is going much too quickly and I will be in difficulties if I leave things much longer! Everyone else in the family is equally busy so goodness knows how we will plan our mid summer feast. I also think that Bo is having a work party here soon, but I have no more work related events planned.

mystery of the missing cow

Maxin his shelter we made by the stock yards

flowers in my private jungle

Donna, the Ayrshire cow, has now recovered from the birth trauma but will not accept her calf, Max. Twice a day we have to milk out two quarters and then tie her feet so the calf can suckle on the other side. It all takes quite a time even though Edd has now got the milking machine going again.

For the first two week her milk contained antibiotics so we could not use it but this it is OK now so I am making cheese. The plan is to sell Donna because this is all rather more work than we can handle. We should have enough goats’ milk to feed Max, but we will need to teach him to drink from a bucket.

One problem remains. Our neighbour, Craig’s cow was in the paddock with Donna having broken through our fences. She was quite settled there so we fed her with our cows whilst we waited for Craig to fix a fence at his place.  When the vet left after the birth trauma I looked around for Craig’s cow but she had disappeared. We expected her to turn up, but this never happened. We searched the hill and Craig searched his land, but basically the cow just vanished!

Cows are rather large things to just disappear and even after checking with all the neighbours we have no idea where she is. We did hear gunshots on the hill where she was born, but our new neighbours there say a builder was shooting at rabbits with a rather too large gun. The mystery remains.

Apart from cow milking sessions we have also been handed another big problem. We are involved in a class action to try and reclaim some of our losses from the power company that has been blamed for the fires in 2009. The lawyers have asked everyone to supply a detailed list of what they lost costing new for old at present day prices. That means looking up the price of everything. So far I have done 15 pages on spreadsheets!

It is all very upsetting because it brings everything back to mind. After the fires we all sort of thought that over time things would be back to normal. This did happen for houses on small blocks with out land, but for farm blocks we began to look for what we considered a “new normal”. Quite a few of us have achieved this and though we realise that our lives will not be the same as we had before we have come to terms with what we have. Others like Brian could not get to this stage and have sold up.

Anyway, this is a horrible job whatever way you look at it so I have decided to get it over with as quick as possible and forget it. I have worked for hours for the last two weeks and I am getting somewhere. I cannot see how the lawyers can check or deal with all this information so I am not expecting any results any time useful.  Obviously we had far too much stuff because with the host farm we had three houses fully stocked as well as the farm stuff.  In some ways I am relieved not to be responsible for it all any more.

On a happier note we are now getting strawberries and raspberries for breakfast and snow peas. The first zucchinis are about ready too. I so look forward to the first ones but by the end of the season we are over them.

Drama on the school camp

November 2 2015

The school campers have gone home now for the long weekend of the spring racing carnival and the rain has set in. The plants need it after the warm sunny week of the camp but right now I don’t.  Last Thursday Donna gave birth to a bull calf. She was up and walking round in the morning and the calf had been licked off but I had a sort of feeling that something was wrong. This turned out to be true. One of the young lads , who was especially good at stock work, checked her at lunchtime and found her collapsed under a tree looking very sick indeed.

The school group helped Edd get the calf up into the goat shed whilst I phoned around to try and get a vet. It was not easy to find anyone, but Yarra Glen sent up a young woman who turned out to be a godsend. By the time she arrived the cow had a huge prolapse but Edd and a teacher had managed to get her supported in a better position and the kids had fetched straw bales to prop her up and water.

The vet organised everyone into a working team and we gave the cow calcium and magnesium into a vein and then subcutaneously. The teacher then supported the mass of bloody matter that had fallen out and the vet slowly started the difficult job of stuffing everything back inside the cow.  She has since admitted that she could not have done this without the help. The amazing thing is that whilst struggling to do this she also talked to the school group and explained everything.

The first effort failed when the cow moved unexpectedly. She is so heavy that I was knocked flying off the bale I was sitting on trying to hold her head up. The second try was more successful and the vet used tape to stitch the cow back together. The teacher and I helped press against Donnas skin to hold it all in place whilst the vet gave her a second injection to stop her pushing. Donna was then given antibiotics and we just had to leave her to try and recover. Luckily she had enough strength to get onto her feet and we could walk her slowly up to the yards.

The little calf was very weak and for the first day all I could do was force-feed him goats milk. Luckily he started sucking on Friday and by lunchtime we were able to put the cow in the bale and he started to feed from her.  This made a very happy ending for all the kids who had worked so hard to save them. Donna has not really accepted the calf but she allows it to feed from her twice a day in the bale whilst I milk out the extra four litres.

The next problem was to get the calf, Max, a shelter. We had an old stock crate outside Edd’s shed that was the right size so we moved it next to the yards and made a roof and protective wall from corrugated iron that the kids had salvaged from the old chook yards. A huge thunderstorm hit when we were doing this but we just kept working until we could get the Max under shelter in a bed of fresh straw. I towelled him down and then went down to the house to change my clothes because I was soaked to the skin.

The worst problem on the school camp could be blamed on an avocado. One poor girl cut her finger badly whilst chopping it for the evening meal and a teacher and I had to drive her to Maroondah hospital where we met her mum. She needed surgery to repair the damage so we had to manage the rest of the camp with out her. Everyone was most upset because she was such a good cook.

People everywhere!

Camp kitchen in action

Edd working on camp kitchen roof

Ella aged 4 months

October 28.2015

It was the power outage that killed the Internet line. The batteries in the box went flat and some software failed. After a week someone was sent out to fix it and we finally were able to communicate again. The power did go off on Sunday too, whilst I was running the goat’s cheese making workshop, but I had got up early to heat up the boiler for pasteurising the milk and I had filled bowls and buckets with water in strategic places so we were not really too troubled by it. Right now everything is working again and we are already half way through the school camp.

On Friday night I hosted an accidental dinner party for 15. Our friends were staying from NSW and Wayne’s’ partner, Danni brought our youngest Grand daughter, Ella, for her first stay on the farm. Then all the rest of the family decided to join us for the evening meal and we asked Indi and her boy friend, because we could not leave them out. Bo’s whole family came but she also brought a fantastic roast of slow cooked beef.  Everyone brought something so there was just enough food to go around.

The following morning we had another early start getting ready for a Permaculture tour. Over 20 people came but they were all very nice and it was a pleasure having them. As soon as they left Edd and I had to dash down to the ruins and continue our work on the camp kitchen. Edd made a frame for the sink top whilst I ran the cheese workshop on Sunday and the kitchen was ready for action when the school camp arrived on Monday.

The camp focus this year is on preparing food from basic ingredients so every inch of the new kitchen has been used. The cupboard is the old fridge from the dairy that broke down and we added a 4-burner wok on a trolley to join the BBQ plate. The camp brought 4 camp stoves and boxes of cheap cooking sets and absolutely every thing has been fully used.

The kids also help with the farm work. They do the usual chores helping feed animals and milk goat and the shepherds have learnt how to crutch the sheep and mark the lambs. The chicken keepers have cleaned out the chook sheds and the gardeners have re-potted seedlings and herbs. For main tasks a group have cleaned out the large poly house and moved the plastic from under the wood chippings. We are going to plant new fruit trees there next winter.

A second group have moved the corrugated iron fences around the old chook pens and we are recycling them as walls for new grow beds in a permablitz operation on the small lawn by the ruins.  It will become an area of grow beds for vegetable production. Smaller groups are trying to locate the water pipes that ran from the old house to the big tank and if people get too hot they are catching the tadpoles that have invaded the swimming pool. In the afternoons every one goes to help clear the Northeast fence line so we can repair it to a goat proof condition. The weather has been hot so this is followed by boating activities in the dam. Last night we burnt the huge burning pile of waste timber and some people slept out by the fire.

Somewhere amongst all this we used the newly completed yards to load Donna’s large female offspring onto a borrowed trailer that Edd drove to market.  Indi’s boy friend helped us get an ear tag into this large beast and push it up the ramp. The yards are a success! One cow gone; now we have to find a home for Donna and get the neighbour’s calf back to the neighbour.

Everything speeds up

Clancy and Indi

Spring flowers in the ruins

Edd and the big cauliflower

October 10.2015

Why does everything happen at the same time?  After a quiet winter we are plunged into the hectic progression of spring events. The weekend after this  one I have a permaculture site visit on Saturday morning and I am doing a cheese and goat keeping workshop on Sunday the 25th.  On Monday the Montessori school is arriving with 26 kids and some teachers for a weeks camp and activities!

Today I find a letter in my mailbox telling me that the power will be off on the Sunday 25^th!.  How could they!  It was off all Wednesday this week and when it came back on in the evening the internet would not connect. I tried to get it going in the afternoon whilst Edd was fetching oats and he tried in the evening when he got back.

We rebooted the modem, fiddled with plugs, connectors, and lines and basically ran out of things to try until Edd had the brilliant notion of phoning Eva the neighbours on the land beyond us in the bush. She had the same problem but had found out that someone had dug through the optic cable and we would be off line for a few days whilst it was repaired. This is not fair. I bet it was the electricity people who disabled the internet line too! I wish we had installed  a back up battery system, but we are waiting to do this at a time when the technology has been developed further.  We still need power for water pumps to work the taps in the dairy and fill the toilets at the ruins and the donga. The power was off for a day last time there was a school camp and it made things very hard.

Edd has almost finished his work on the stock yards. Today we hitched the tractor to the top of the tallest of the ramp poles and pulled it back straight. We have the old over head metal bits in place now and they will old the poles firmer in position.  I am cleaning out the ruins and surrounding gardens. We have broad beans forming pods and snow peas in flower. We have eaten all the brocholi and have started on the cauliflowers and bok choi. We have had several meals of asparagus and still have kale and silver beet.

Unfortunately all the weeds grew just as fast as the vegetables and each day I remove basket after basket load. I am waiting for Edd to complete his yards and then help put the roof on the camp kitchen. We brought the roofing iron today, and I found a camping stove top with four burners when I went to pick up bottles. We will have to find a way of supporting the sink and workbench. That will keep us pretty busy next week!

Indi rode her new horse over here this week. Clancy is a good looking Bay with a high wither and a slightly worried eye. He is watching everything but stays wonderfully calm. He is 14 or older and very experienced at everything from dressage to barrel racing. He seems a very suitable horse.  Indi does seem to find sensible animals. Her dog Rosa is the best behaved dog in the family. Bo’s new dog is an escape artist and needs careful watching.

Pasties and football

Wayne and Ella

Goats' cheese and pasties

taking time to concentrate on football

October 4.2015

Yesterday the Aussie football finals where on, and Friday was declared a bank holiday in celebration. Not all our family are sports fanatics so we have our own celebration to ease things along. This is the one-day a year that Edd, and helpers, make traditional Cornish pasties and eat them. We harvested all our swedes in honour of the occasion and chopped up carrots and onions. Grand mothers made pastry, (mine was not the best), and Beth and Edd managed to deal with the ingredients and produce a feast.

I had savaged the rocket to make pesto and prepared finger food featuring goat’s cheese, our own olives, humus, and kangaroo sausages and Al and Pip brought very special bread and cheese so that we had lots to nibble before the pasties cooked.  Simon provides beer and was forgiven for being actually interested in the sport.  Ti had a slack rope for his birthday that was strung up from a fence post on the house roof and this provided an alternative activity as everyone tried to walk along it.  Pip turned out to be the supreme champion and helped Silky and I along so we did not feel left out.

We were really looking forward to Dani bringing Ella for her first visit to the farm but someone crashed into their car when it was parked and they had no transport.  Wayne was far to serious about the football to want to mess with pasty eaters, but his team won, so he was happy anyway. Today the hour changed and everyone is taking time to recover from all the above.

In the week Edd and I achieved our aim and moved the smallest chook shed up nearer the sheds so that we could move the 20 chicks who had outgrown their second cage.   We managed to tip the shed onto the back of the ute and move it all in one piece, which saved time. The new position already has three sides of an outdoor pen so the next stage is to complete the final fence and let them out on the grass.

Now that the chicks have room to cope Edd is back working on the yards because the sale for the young cow Sharron, is next Friday.  Last Friday our neighbour, Craig worked with his huge digger to move the trees that have fallen over our boundary fence. We need the fence restored so that he can have his cow his side and our goats stay our side.  In the six and a half years since the fires the fence that the volunteers erected has been mostly destroyed by fallen trees and mud being washed down the creek. 

We hope we can clear enough space to put ringlock on the upper section where the animals graze.

This dry sunny weather is really helping. But having such nice helpful neighbours is more important. We can see that the new lot have stayed on Hargreaves Hill this weekend but we have left them to settle in.  No one moves out here unless they put some value on privacy and it is a fine balance to get the feeling of being part of a community and privacy in proportion.

moving cows and neighbours

Edd making stockyards

Native mint and rosemary in flower

September 27.2015

Mum got it right and her friend is now living a few rooms away from her. I am really glad because this week Mum’s phone is broken so I have not been able to get through for our daily chats. Once again we have had a warm sunny weekend and we have worked long hours outside.

During the week we collected our cows who have been on our neighbours property to visit their bull. Our cows followed Edd on the tractor but another neighbour had a young steer who has been with them and he was very difficult. Eventually we got all three animals about to go through our front gate but at the last minute the steer leapt up the bank and went straight through the fence back onto Hargreaves Hill!  We did not bother to go after it because to tell the truth we did not really want it in our place.  Two days later it went through our top fence and into my tree plantation but I was able to get it out and into the paddock with our cows.  At least it is not being a traffic hazard on the road any more and I hope it will stay here until our neighbour can fence it into his place.

The neighbours moved out on Wednesday . We took them up Hargreaves Hill beer and cheese on their last night and said a tearful good by. It is the end of an era. The Hargreaves family have been on that land for many generations but they have been living with out a house in a draughty shed since the fires and had had enough.  A new couple have moved in this weekend . They are not here full time and have a house somewhere else for now. We invited them down for a cup of tea and a look around. The shed on their hill looks directly down on our green hill with its chimneys, so we are probably their closest neighbours though we do not share any boundary fences.

They do seem very nice but we were horrified to hear all the conditions the council has imposed on them before they can get permission to build a house. We did not even know that we have been rezoned into “green wedge”.  It seems now that other people have the right to decide every aspect of our lifestyles. We are so lucky to have grown our children up in a time when there was so much freedom and space. I would not like to do it again today in these times.

We had cooler weather in the week and I spent two days doing the grouting for the bathroom tiles. I am really pleased with the results. Edd has kept working on the stockyards and they are nearly finished too.  Other than that, we are just planting our new season vegetables and I am clearing up in the gardens. I have chopped back the mulberry trees so that I can mow under them and today I moved a large dead hebe and cut back the ornamental vine that was trying to choke the one remaining avocardo tree.

September 9 2015

Last weekend was bliss. Warm sunny weather and blue skies brought us all back to life and we were able to tackle various garden issues with enthusiasm. My broccoli is now ready to eat and we have planted out the first tomatoes and a capsicum, both protected by polythene shelters. The snow peas have started to climb up the frame I made and the new lettuces are growing fast. I need to get the new bed built as fast as possible to accommodate all the new seasons stuff.

We have several new lambs and yesterday Edd and I drove down past Colac to pick up a young male goat kid. The traffic on the Western Ring road was awful and took hours to get through. A lot of new housing estates are being built on the west of Melbourne and the traffic from them shares the airport road. It is all a bit of a disaster, or a planning failure. Along with a new male goat kid we have also got a new prime minister. This is a big relief. Well, both of them are. Perhaps we should call the kid Malcolm, but we might regret that later.  At least this new PM is prepared to listen to scientist about climate change and he is aware that we live in the present times.

Today Silky is in hospital for minor surgery and I am due to pick up Ollie from school. The school holidays are about to start and Bo plans to take her family to the Gold coast where Simon has some beer business. Indi is going off for two weeks to run outdoor Ed programs for school kids but Ti has to stay in Box Hill with his mum who has decided to cancel their holiday. Edd and I will also stay at home; with all the baby animals it is a busy time of year. Indi has brought another horse. This time it is an older one that she can ride. She is agisting  at a place not too far away that has horse facilities.  Her young stallion, Monti, is getting very frisky now that the spring grass is coming through.

My mum tells me that her friend Jean, who was our neighbour when we were kids, is going to come and live in the same nursing home as she does. I do hope she has got this right because it would be wonderful for mum to have a friend to talk to. So far mum has hated being confined to the nursing home and is terribly bored because she has lost most of her eyesight. She has days when she cannot separate her dreams from reality so I hope that she has got this one right.

Chook pen works dog fence fails

September 6 2015

We had our usual fabulous food at the Indian restaurant with Al on Friday.  He has all kinds of interesting projects to talk about from Buddhist temples to peace gardens in Gaza!   He is lucky having a career that he is so interested in, life would be much simpler for young people if they knew what they wanted to do in their lives when they left school.  Most people have to find their way through the various options that are open and settle for supporting themselves however possible.

I would never have guessed that Bo would end up running a restaurant. Her degrees were in English and music and her doctorate in opera research. She still enjoys being involved with music but meanwhile she runs a great restaurant and employs all the local young people who are in need of funds.  Edd and I had lunch in her place yesterday and it was terrific . Indi, Bo and Morgie were working there and we caught up with other neighbours who were also eating there.

Simon is selling so much beer that the brewery is struggling to produce enough. This is really good for us because there is lots of barley left over to feed the sheep and goats. It has not even got warm yet so it should be the low time for beer drinking. I think now he is selling more in different states it is less seasonal.  I know Simon’s first love is music but running a brewery seems to suit him very well.

Pip had an adventure yesterday when the bus she was travelling home in suddenly stopped because the driver said he felt unwell. He then collapsed and Pip had to take care of him until the ambulance came. Bo has had dog dramas. The new dog is an escape artist. Simon spends his weekends trying to sure up their garden fences but Gracie still gets out. Bo spent Friday night chasing her under the Anglican Church after a search through Yarra Glen.

Back at the farm Edd has completed the new chook fence and it even has a proper gate that swings! This means that the chooks are safe to run free range even when we go out for the day, which should please them. I am extremely grateful not to spend half an hour each night rounding them up. The chicks Edd hatched have started to grow wing feathers and will soon need a larger cage. There are no more goat kids yet though according to the records Wilma is due. Opal has such a large udder that she can hardly walk so I have confined her to a kidding pen.  She is actually due a week after Wilma but we will see.

The goat problem with hair loss has got better rather than worse. I moved the selenium salt lick and have fed the goats a small amount of sulphur with their feed. The wombat on the roof continues to try and dig in and basically we are very fed up with wombats in general. They shit everywhere and dig under all the fences. They dig up lawns and spread mange. Only the babies look cute in my opinion.

New life as spring starts

September 3 2015

There has been lots of action on the farm. The two lambs got sold to a nice new home and we have the first two goat kids in the shed. Zoe had twin does yesterday with a minimum of fuss. One is a very deep chocolate brown and the other is champagne coloured. I have named them Rani and Rita. The stillborn buck got allocated the Q start letter. I spent 24 hours trying too think of two nice, short , female  names starting with a Q that we have not used and decided eventually to pass it by.

Edd’s efforts at egg turning paid off and we have hatched 20 eggs out of the thirty in the incubator. All the green eggs hatched so we now have seven greyish chicks, and the rest are various shades of brown. They are all from the maron rooster who is obviously doing his job. The pen for the other chooks is almost done too. I will be most relieved when we can contain those chooks. We have to round them all up every night and count them into their shed, as they could be anywhere.

Today I have taken a break from fencing to roast more muesli. I have made a mega batch so I hope it lasts us longer this time. I now use coconut oil and honey to coat all the grains with and it tastes really good. We eat it with orange juice and fruit every morning for breakfast. At this time of year we have eaten all the frozen fruit so I am reduced to buying bananas. At least the fruit trees are now in blossom. I must make more effort to keep the birds off this year.

We have eaten all the frozen vegetables too. The freezer was so empty that I cleaned it all out ready for this season’s crop. The broad beans are now in flower and the snow peas are looking for a frame to climb up.  The broccoli has started to form heads but we are mostly eating lettuce, kale and silver beet. I have started to build a new growing area by the ruins where I hope we can put our pumpkins. The tomatoes will have to go in the bed near the pool because the raspberries now take up the bed we would normally rotate them into.  Edd has carefully pruned the raspberries and I have put strawberry runners into another large pot so we are hoping for lots of summer berries for breakfast.