feral foes

June 30 2017

Things have gone better this week.  It has been relatively warm today so I cleaned and aired the house. Yesterday I baked and the loaves came out really well, there is a great satisfaction when I load the freezer with good bread. I used to make up to nine loaves a week when we ran the host farm, but recently baking has not been a priority. I have also made up a months batch of muesli, this is all packed away in glass containers in the cupboard so I am all organised for when Edd returns on Sunday.  One more day to survive, what can possibly go wrong?

The worst thing this week has been the feral deer.  They have discovered the young trees in the stone pine plantation and have destroyed several years of work we have put in down there.  It is just heart braking when despite all our efforts things go backwards.  Wombats have also been busy digging large holes under the new fencing and basically reducing it’s stock holding capacities.  The wombats do not confine themselves to one route but are happy to dig a new passage each night if a fence is in their way.  Wombats may look cute but they are hard to live with.  The deer have bred up from escaped farm stock so I will not even try to be tolerant about them but will do what I can to persuade them to eat elsewhere.

I am glad that our new orchard is under the old polyhouse frame and is very well fenced.  The deer and kangaroos are down from the hills in large numbers this year probably because it has been so dry.  The kangaroos feel pretty safe and sit around in our paddocks all day.  Luckily they do not do a lot of harm to infrastructure but they do eat the grass we grow for our animals. So they are not totally benign.  All this wild life was great when we ran the tourist business but there are fewer positives now.

I have moved my orchids into the house for protection as all three have flouring stems.  We have a frost expected tomorrow so I have moved in the chilli peppers too.  They still have fruit on them and actually look quite decorative.  They survived last winter but will need re-potting for next year.  My next spring cleaning job is in the sun room where my jungle needs all the dead material moving and plants need pruning or putting into larger pots.  I usually bring in the coffee plants but it has been doing very well in the porch all summer so I am inclined to leave it there.

The mango tree has sprung to live since I brought it in but I have left the tea bush outside, as it does not like the sunroom conditions and nearly died in here last winter.  The other plant that is struggling is the pepper vine.  It is still alive but I nearly lost it once.  The vanilla orchid is much happier but will be hard to re-pot as it is entangled with all sorts of things.  All this and the accounts are the next tasks to be tackled.

Most of this afternoon was taken up listening to hold style music courtesy of our phone company. They have cut off my inter national calls so I cannot have my usual nightly talk to my mum.  Mum is blind, immobile and lonely so for her to miss this chat time is a big deal. Luckily Edd will probably visit her before he sets off home so that will make a difference while the phone company tries to put things right.

The evil truth about gumboots

Ella. Two years old last week.

June 25 2017

This week has been hard.  The first challenge was the sick chick that has been sharing the house with me.  I had found her on her back being attacked by the other chicks and when I moved them she still could not get up onto her legs.  I could not find any obvious broken bones so I hoped her condition was temporary and that she would recover with a bit of extra care.  Sadly she just got worse and several times a day she would end up stuck on her back cheeping for help.  Her condition continued to get worse so I began to realise that I had to kill her to stop the suffering.

I have to confess that euthanizing terminal cases is always Edd’s job because I chicken out. However, with Edd not being expected back for two weeks I had to do something. For several days I weighed up options.  I have never wrung a bird’s neck and was not sure I could do it properly.  I was also not sure about the ethics of drowning or suffocating.  On the plus side I am accurate with a hatchet because I chop kindling every night so in the end I decided decapitation was my best bet. I did the deadly job very fast but I hated killing the one living being I have been sharing my life with for the last month.

The chicken box was too heavy for me to move by myself so for several days my eyes were immediately drawn to it every time I passed because I was in the habit of checking the chick and could even hear her at night if she called out for help.  That feeling is easing now, thank goodness. The next drama was my good friends grandson who had a suicide attempt.  As a society, in our community and beyond we are totally failing some of our young people.  I feel I need to learn a lot more about this situation.

The week’s problems did not end there. The goats needed fresh straw in their pen and the only bales left were right at the top of the haystack in the shed.  I have a knee that is not functioning too well and then there is the gumboot problem.  To do the animals I need waterproof foot wear. It is easy to buy nice looking, comfortable, boots that flex well and make walking easier but sadly they do not stay waterproof for more that a couple of months and then I have to revert to heavier less flexible boots that make walking much harder to say nothing about mountaineering up hay stacks.

With this in mind I climbed very carefully and took no risks whilst rolling bales to the edge to the stack and pushing them over towards the ground. I descended with equal care but my foot slipped between the last two bales so that I was tipped over backwards. I managed to get my right hand out behind me to break my fall but I was still winded. Later that day my hand became very painful and I could not even hold a toothbrush. 

For the last few days Bo has come over after work and looked after things but I think I can now take over again. I milked this morning and my hand is still Ok. Another friend is back from holiday and she came over too so today has been much better all round.

Home and away

 Edd and relatives in Scotland

Sun riseat Brockspur

June 17 2017

I seem to have found a rhythm that gets me through the work here in a fairly relaxed manner. My mother used to tell me that whenever I walked anywhere at home I should carry something that needed relocating to where I was going and I still use this principle when feeding animals.  It makes getting through the chores much quicker. I am even having time to read books and do some knitting.  

I start work at 8am just as the sun is rising over Hargreaves Hill.   One day last week the sky was an amazing red and pink colour at sunrise and later the valley was filled with mist so that the hilltops were invisible.  On days like this I always feel thankful for being able to live in such a beautiful place. Most days we are getting some sunshine and the house is toasty warm.  It is dark by 5.30om and then I light the stove and the snug fire and let them burn for a few hours before I go to bed. 

I have mostly given up on the TV; it seems to get increasingly boring.  Luckily I have discovered an Internet site that sells books very cheaply.  Usually I buy books in charity shops, but the disadvantage is that when I enjoy a series of novels I find them in the wrong order and some in the series never seem to be for sale.  I am now able to get hold of all the missing parts of stories that I have lusted after for years and it is bliss.

Edd phones me every few days and tells me about his travels.  Last week he was with a cousin in Scotland having a wonderful time with Gaelic music and seeing the country around Inverness.  On Sunday he is off to Germany to visit our eldest Grand son.   Then he has a trip to see friends in France so he still has lots more to see and do.  It is relatively uneventful here.

Yesterday I did some weeding in the vegetable garden and around the trees in the new orchard.  They still have leaves so it is too early to start pruning them yet. Indi is a lot fitter now having finally beaten the flu. This morning she unloaded the hay from the new trailer and stacked it for me.  This is good because now we can move the trailer and drive through the shed again.  I have to use the car to get firewood every evening so being able to park nearer the wood heaps is a real help.

A difficult day

Sari starts to weave her leg through the fence panel, it got worse than this!

June 9 2017

Some days sort of gather problems, and yesterday was one of those days.  It started all right, and I got all the animal work done in record time. Just as I was about to return to the house Sari, the youngest brown goat attempted to jump over the pen wall and failed.  Her rear foot caught on the fence and by trying to kick herself free she got her leg woven through the rails and ended up with only her front feet able to touch the ground.

I was quickly with her but there was no easy answer as her leg and foot were sort of woven through the metal and her own weight locked her firmly in place. I tied in vain to free her leg but it was impossible.  I then fetched a stool and lifted her up onto the stool but she was not high enough to make things any better.  I tried lifting her further with a sling but the more I tried the more I could see that to free the leg she needed to be over a metre in the air.  It also dawned on me that even if I had an extra person to help we would still have a problem.

A different approach was needed. The section of fence was to locked in with other fence sheets to be taken down easily so I searched the shed until I found Edd’s angle grinder.  I have never used one before but once I worked it out I was able to cut out the section of fence around her leg and once on the ground she freed herself.  Amazingly she walked off relatively un-scathed; in fact I think the whole adventure had left me sorer than she was!

Back at the house I discovered a young chicken had also been injured and was being attacked by the other chicks.  I sorted this out by relocating the fit chicks into the pen in Edd’s shed and keeping the injured bird with me in the house.  I cannot tell if she will survive but at least she has a chance now. From there the day improved and I had a nice lunch with Bo but on my return I discovered a buck kid had got out by opening the bars on the bale in the yards.  I caught the escapee and then fixed the bale with extra planks.  That seems to be working, at least in the short term.

Today things are going a bit more smoothly. I have planted out the elephant garlic and cleaned the house, both fairly safe procedures.  Sari does not seem to have done herself any lasting harm and the chick is still alive but not very mobile. We now have three lambs with twins born to the second dorper ewe. The lambs all play around Zulu the alpaca who they see as a family member. He looks quite happy about this too. I wish I could move their feed trough closer to the drive but it is very heavy and took a super human effort just to relocate from the dam paddock to the closest fence in the house site.

chooks and lambs complicate life

June 3 2017

The sun is finally shining again after a very wet cold week.  I am still feeling very grateful that the camp was over before the weather changed.  It has not been the sort of week that anyone would choose for outdoor jobs.  I have been doing my two hours each morning, milking and feeding, and my one hour at night and been happy to stay under cover the rest of the time.

Most of the week has been take been taken up by chooks. I took Edd to the airport to set off on his Europe trip on Monday and on Tuesday I collected 12 point of lay birds, clipped their wings and put them in the olive orchard shed with Ruphus, the red rooster who rules that area.  After a couple of days acclimatising I let them out into the run and luckily Ruphus got most of them in again at dusk.  I had to catch a couple who could not work it out, but that is not bad for day one of freedom.  It is lovely to see them today scratching around under the trees and tasting green grass.

The older chooks are now settled in their retirement home and have started the job of cleaning out the weeds from under the lemon and fig trees. They also look very content.  The school kids did a great job putting up their shed and the door Edd fitted works well. Luckily these chooks did know to put themselves to bed without help.

The chicks in the house were more of a problem. (I am not at all happy that Edd hatched them just when he was due to go away for a month). They need to be kept warm, but late at night their bulb stopped working. We did not have a replacement so I had to get up in the middle of the night and refill a hot water bottle for them.  I brought a new bulb next day but once again, after the shops had shut it broke so I had a second night of chook duties. The following day I drove down to Bunnings and brought four bulbs and even the first of these is now working fine.  Last night was a lot more relaxing and at least they all survived.

So, I was just thinking life was about to get easier when a lamb turned up with the rest of the sheep for their evening feed. This means our lambing season has begun a month early, bother.  Yesterday I moved the horses back onto the hill and moved the sheep into the new paddock below the dam.  In this area they are in view most of the time so it is possible to check them several times a day with out a lot of extra walking.

The other drama this week has been with Rosa, Indi’s dog. She found a large packet of rat poison in Indi’s donga and scoffed the lot. This of course meant another trip to the vet and lots of bright green poo everywhere. I think that dog must have more lives to risk than a cat but so far she has lived through every drama.