The weaather comes up trumps

The sun shines and  school campers arrive

work starts on Toby's garden

May 28. 2017

It is pouring with rain and very muddy outside today but who cares.  We were so lucky and had warm, dry, weather for the school camp last week.  I am sure I am not entitled to complain for weeks!  That aside, it would have been easier if it had been dry today because it is Edd’s last day on the farm before he heads over seas for a month and he has rather a large “to do” list.

We are just having to get things done between showers.  The school students put up a new chook shed last week and today Edd put in the chook door and the chook wire on the gates.  With help from Ben and Indi we put new collars on the goat kids too.   They had grown too large for their baby collars and they all look quite similar so it was important to keep them labelled. 

The school camp got lots of work done.  They harvested the pumpkins and put in winter crops, built new goat pens in the big shed and removed the temporary fence stopping the animals from going up the hill.  They also planted trees, worked on our water garden and started to clear the area for Toby’s garden.  Al came to stay for a night in the week and he has started working on a design for the garden and the spa gazebo.

Once the chook pen was up we moved all the chooks around so that we now have a shed cleaned and ready for point of lay pullets.  I had some jobs ready for wet weather and so one group of kids painted the walls and ceiling in the dairy milk room.  It smells much better and looks clean and bright now but I think I will need to do another coat of paint to complete the job. Then I suppose I can start tiling.  I am back cheese making again and doing feta cheese today.

May 20 2017

The sun is sinking down behind the small hill at the end of a glorious warm day. We seem to have missed the massive rain that was moving down the East coast from Queensland.  This is really good for us because we have dry weather to prepare for next weeks school camp.  I mowed the grass during the week when Edd went off to collect a ton of oats, and Edd is doing the edges today.  The vegetable garden is a mess but sorting it out is a job for the campers.

Today we picked up the last of the materials we needed for the school programs. Now we just have to pray that the weather stays like today and avoids being too diabolical.   The last thing I need is a week with 20, wet, cold, upset, campers.  Edd goes to the UK the Monday after the camp so we are preparing for that too.  He will be away a month so we are struggling to get the farm to a state it can be managed by one person and I am also trying to get enough washing clean and dry for Edd to take.  I am not panicking yet.

The main issue on the farm is to get the fence down the hill secure. Edd has been struggling up and down that treacherous slope trying to get the wires back up and tight.    The poor horses are still confined to a small croft and are mostly living off hay, but they are elderly now and need better living conditions before the cold weather sets in.  The goats always have the option of staying in their shed so I am not so worried about them.

The weather is so mild that the plants are behaving in unexpected ways.  We have tomatoes germinating and pumpkins still growing more fruit. The fruit are developing on the mulberries.  We will be very lucky not to loose this year’s crop to a frost.   We are still getting strawberries for breakfast and the new lemons are ripening. I have ordered some stuff to try and make olive oil but I don’t think it will all be ready before this year’s crop ends.

We have several olive trees that fruit every year and young ones growing so sooner or later oil production should be possible.  Indi and Ben are managing an olive orchard on French Island and they are making oil on a commercial scale so I am getting lots of helpful tips from them.  Indi tells me that the beehives here that came from Al are recovering but she has decided not to harvest the honey this year to give them an extra help along.  The other thing we need to complete a balanced diet here is a source of starch.  Grain production might be too difficult so we will have to improve our potato efforts.

Bo has nearly finished the first semester of her music therapy training.  A lot of the training involves practice rather than theory and the stories she tells us are fascinating.  She seems to be really enjoying herself and getting more involved as time goes on.  Al also tells me that he loves his work and has several really interesting architectural projects. One is a temple in Canberra for the Tibetan Buddhists, which is a very different sort of job.

The good news is that Edd has received E-mails from Arj in Germany and they have set a date to meet up.  I do hope this works out. We have not seen Arj for over two years and miss him. 

Harvest season continues

 Olive harvest

 plants for Toby's garden

A sunless day in my jungle

May 14 2017

We picked up the chook shed yesterday.  It came in 5 pieces and we need to build a floor of concrete to put it on so that it is easy to clean and foxes can’t dig in.  I hope to get this done when the camp is here a week tomorrow.   The trailer is ready to collect.     It comes with a stock crate so that now if an animal is sick we can take it to the vet easily.  The last time we did this was when Josie was a young calf and we put her in the back of my little car.  This was not ideal for the calf or the car.

It is mother’s day today, and I have had phone calls from my younger two sons. We had a dinner at Bo’s house on Friday to mark the occasion.  Bo was held up with car troubles but Al turned up with more plants for Toby’s garden and a bottle of pink champagne. He and I scoffed this with the cheese and biscuits we had brought as our contribution to the meal.  Luckily Bo is a genius, and when she did arrive she instantly produced a gourmet meal for at least 6 of us (I was past counting at this stage) out of thin air.

The weather has been warm and sunny this week and we were all outside as much as possible.  It is a much duller, damper day today and I have lit the stove so that we get hot water for washing.  It will also help dry the olives before they are packed in glass jars under oil.  Last week they were in big jars with salt to leach out the bitterness. I now have at least a years supply so perhaps it is time to try and produce olive oil.  Ben and Indi are already getting oil from an olive grove they are managing, but they have a set up already to use which helps.

Edd is pretty much ready for his trip over seas at the end of the month.   He has a complicated timetable visiting lots of friends and family members all over the UK and Europe. I am staying to manage the farm this time and I have been trying to reduce the work that needs doing every day.  Edd has not helped by rescuing some eggs he found outside the chook shed and hatching out four chickens.  They are now in a box in the kitchen.  Just what I needed!

The sheep are starting to look very pregnant, which is also a worry.  They are doing a great job mowing all the grass on the house roof and in the house site. The vegetable garden is much more of a mess but I am leaving that so the school kids can harvest the last of the crops they planted. I have also started to make feta again now that the kids are weaned. Feta and roasted pumpkin go very well together. A friend told me this week that she gets into her pumpkins with a hammer and chisel.  I have not tried that yet.

Pumpkins and kangaroos

 Early morning sunlight arms the house for breakfast time.

Pumpkins condition ready for storage ith some plants brought for Toby's garden.

May 5 2017

We have woken to a frosty landscape twice this week. It seems early for this but perhaps the summer just went on longer this year.  We located the new owners for Feta and Wilma and they have now been relocated.  I am confident that they will be happy and well cared in their new home, which makes parting with them easier.  Now there are eighteen adult female goats and seven doe kids so the shed looks unusually empty.  Strangely this has encouraged rather than stopped bullying behaviour and I have to give six goats their hay first before the others come in to make sure they get their share.

We are letting the sheep out to graze on the house roof during day light hours. The grass is lush and green up there and the sheep love it.  So far they have not made any dangerous forays onto the parapet.  The goat would be up there in no time at all if we let them into this area so Edd is working hard to repair the hill fences so they can graze there this winter.  The fence he is working on crossed the main winter water flow and then rises almost vertically up the hill.  This makes fencing slow and difficult, so the job is taking time.

 We have ordered the new chook shed and a trailer but it takes time for them to be ready for pick up.  This means that we have to wait before we can get any further with some jobs.  The school camp is due in about two weeks so I am preparing for their arrival.  It does not seem a very easy time for camping but we might be lucky. The long term forecast is for dry weather.

Our youngest grand daughter came to visit us with her mother last week.  She is an absolute delight and growing up fast.  It was a sunny day so we walked all round the farm looking at animals and other things. There are kangaroos most of the day in our neighbours paddock so we were able to show her them. A mob of thirty or so kangaroos bouncing over a hill is quite a spectacular sight if you are not used to it.

The kangaroos always come out of the forest even in the daytime during the winter and they are increasing in numbers.  Where our lane makes an L shape around the property below us there are always several by, or on the road.  We call it kangaroo corner and take great care driving round it.  Some of the roos are enormous and are not the sort of thing you want to bump into with a car.

The deciduous trees are now displaying their autumn colours.  Even the sugar maples down the drive have some red leaves this year and the gingko tees are golden.  The olives are ripening and I have several clay crocks in the kitchen containing olives and salt to remove the bitterness. 

The tomatoes were killed by the frost but the pumpkins are still going. These are pretty vigorous, determined, pumpkins but luckily the taste ok.   We grow the sort of pumpkin that stores well but they are also very tough to cut up for cooking.   Some times I do not even try and put them whole in the wood stove oven but you cannot collect the seeds for next year with this method.   A friend once told me you could get into pumpkins by dropping them onto a brick floor and I even tried this today but the pumpkin was totally unscathed by my efforts.