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.