Bees,Future plans and good wwoofers

January 18  2015

Indi swooped in at breakfast time when she came up to check her bees and put a clip on the lid of her beehive. She tells me that the bees are very busy transporting pollen back to their hive and have settled down well. She has plans to build a round yard to work horses in and save money so she can afford university next year. In fact she is bursting over with plans and seems to have lots to look forward to.

We have had a productive week with two German wwoofers staying in the donga. These young men are the same age as my eldest grand son who has gone to Germany. He is staying with his girl friend in the same area our wwoofers came from so I have lost one and gained two, so to speak.  These guys are good workers and have done all the jobs that I was finding too hard.

They have cleaned up the rest of the old drive way and taken all the fallen timber to the burning pile. They have also used the weed wacker on the long grass by Edd’s shed so that we can get at the rubbish buried there. I am very keen to get all the burnable material away from the farm buildings as we enter the worst fire risk period so I am very grateful for the help.

My job has been to keep everyone well fed. Luckily with Edd’s help raising seedlings we have a good supply of vegetables. Lots of tomatoes, cucumber, squash, mizuna, rocket and lettuce as well as basil for pesto. I have harvested all the garlic and we have started eating the capsicums from last years’ plants that I over wintered in the house.  The eggplants and beetroot still need to grow a bit larger and the potatoes have just come into flower.

The grass has dried off in most places and the sheep let us know it was time to start feeding them barley again. The horses and pony are still fat and the cows are on Brian’s hill so they are probably slimming down. The goats are still giving lots of milk and I still make cheese every day. 

We had a very sad event because Edd found that Vera (a large golden goat) was dead when he checked up last thing on Wednesday night. She had her head through the rails to get at the hay bales we stacked and another goat must have wacked at just the wrong time and angle. I am sorry to have lost her. She was unusual in that she had never given birth but she produced lots of milk. With out the stress of pregnancy she had grown very large and fat compared to her twin sister. 

This leaves us with 24 goats including the two goatlings who come in to be fed twice a day in the bale. I am busy writing a business plan to try and work out if we could make cheese and sell it on the open market. It has taken me ages to analyse this years accounts but the actual plan is not so bad because there is lots of help on line. Last time I wrote a business plan was in Yuendumu in the early 90’s for Skill share and we just had to plagiarise a plan from someone else back then.