Finally it rains but it is school camp week

March 25 2017

This week we have had a school camp here with 22 teenagers working on the farm and practicing their farm and camping skills.  The students take over all the routine jobs for the week and then tackle set projects, know as major tasks.  This time we cleaned up the paddock between our eastern neighbours and us by removing the burnt fence that bisected this area and collecting up all the old vineyard posts that Ben and his gang had pulled out with the digger.

The second group of students worked on the old drive where they removed dead and dying trees and dug out blackberries.  They also took down the temporary fence by the gulley because this is to be replaced by our local fencer.  The plan for the old drive is to use it as another chook run.   It already has netting on two sides and established trees for shade and shelter.  Both major tasks were completed so we are now ready to go on to the next stage.

If this sounds like really hard work, then that is pretty accurate, but these kids are very good workers and enjoyed the tractor rides that were part of the proceedings.  Edd had also worked really hard fixing the filter on the pool and getting it all working so that everyone could cool off if they got too hot. The students cooked their own food in the ruins were they have an open-air kitchen. I noticed that they cooked really healthy food with loads of fresh vegetables.

We had one problem when half an hour before lunch it was discovered that the chicken was still in a big frozen ball when it should have been all ready for a meal of butter chicken. With a bit of encouragement it was decided that a vegetable curry and rice was the only alternative and everyone ended up well fed at the right time.  This year people are starting to use the herbs and vegetables from the garden, but we made no impression on the glut of tomatoes.

We started the week hard with a thunderstorm, heavy rain, and suffocating humidity.   Amazingly everyone coped really well and it mostly rained when the main farm work was over.  The subject for afternoon study was maths, which does not sound too exciting. We set tasks of measuring how much water was stored in the tanks and the pool, trying to work out how big a net was needed to cover the new fruit orchard and working out the economics of goat keeping.

I was most surprised how enthusiastically these problems were tackled. One group measured the pool from the outside and one from the inside. It has two rounded ends and various methods of calculation were tried. The average of the results was pretty accurate and we could even work out how much it would cost to fill if we brought tanker loads of water.

Gradually, over the week the weather got dryer and cooler and on the final night we were able to have the usual bonfire to get rid of the old tree branches and other waste that had been collected up into a burning pile. The pizza oven was also fired up and heated to very high temperatures so that this year lots of really wonderful pizzas were made very quickly.  From our point of view the camp was a good one, no one was injured, work got done and mostly everyone looked happy. I hope the people from the school felt the same way.