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.