Time for relaxation

Friday 26.1.2018

We have a bank holiday for Australia Day today, not that it makes any difference for us.  We still had to feed and milk animals, but there was a storm last night and the vegetables can probably miss out on watering this morning.   It is very humid and now that the sun has got up it is also very hot.  Not a day for hard physical work.

We had our holiday last week when we stayed with Al and Pip in their seaside town.  It has been between 30 and 40 C most days, so some cool sea air was very refreshing.   Edd had a swim and I enjoyed eating food that I did not have to cook.   We went to a restaurant on a peer and had fantastic food on Sunday evening. I ate a cauliflower cooked in cider batter that was amazing.

It was great to spend time just talking with Al and Pip with out the pressure of time constraints.  Pip is now in the last phase of her pregnancy and I wanted to find out what they needed.   It is sad that this Grand child will live too far away for us to have much of a relationship.   Six hours diving is too much for us on a day trip.  Al does it a lot for work but we are past that stage now.  We even find that driving between here and the suburb where Wayne, Dani and Ella live takes an effort that reduces the time we spend together but at least we do not have to spend a night away visiting that grandchild.

Al’s house is larger than their last one but he uses one of the three bedrooms as an office and Pip stores all her medical herbs on a bookcase in the living room so they really need more space.   Luckily the new rooms they are building are coming along well and look fantastic.  Al and Barry have done the stonework and I loved the effect they have created with the colours of stone, grout and timbercrete blocks all harmonising.  Already from the street the house is totally transformed.

The drive down there was awful. with road works, diversions and crawling traffic. We decided to come back on a different route by crossing the heads of Port Phillip Bay on the car ferry.    There is a ferry every hour and we just caught the one at 2pm with out a second to spare.   The boat ride was great and the drive back up the Mornington Peninsular was a lot pleasanter than the drive down. 

We even had time to stop at Garden World, my favourite destination.  The rock collection there is better than any museum or other display I have overseen.  They have many person-sized geodes filled with Amethyst crystals as well as shelf loads of other treasures from the earth.  The plant collections are guaranteed to temp.  I rarely escape empty handed. This time I got some small bromeliads to fill in spaces in my indoor garden.  Many of my plants are too big and need splitting so they are now waiting outside the door for attention.

Back home Bo and Indi had done a great job looking after the farm.  The cat had caused a bit of worry by getting locked up in the donga toilet one night and the milk room the next.   (I had closed the spare fridge doors before I left. He got into the fridge once, and I did not want the doors to shut on him and lock him in with out air!).  He is not at all sure about being a farm cat and has now discovered where we live and wants to join us.  He comes everywhere I go and wants to be stroked.  I think he is regretting the bad manners that got him a job he did not really want!

up a gum tree

Wednesday 17.1.2018

Ted, the cat, is now in training to be a farm cat.  I have been letting him run free during the day and shutting him in at night.  He is actually very friendly and purrs when I stoke him.  Yesterday I took a family on a farm tour and he came with us.  He jumped off the top of the house roof onto the lower tin roof where the solar panels for hot water are and I had to climb over the parapet onto the roof to lift him back just in case he was stuck.

He also tried a straight-line approach to our route and was rebuffed by various fences that failed to bow down before him.    He is probably better informed about farm fences now.   The big question is will he be any good as a hunter?   He showed some signs that he was not totally without instinct yesterday when he spent the afternoon chasing fluff balls in the shed.   Today he was rather more ambitious and decided to hunt chickens.  The chickens were alarmed but intrigued so that it was difficult to decide who was hunting whom.   I saved his dignity by going into the pen and rescuing him.

His next experiment involved shooting up a big gum tree.   He got well up too and the small branches were shaking alarmingly under his weight.    He soon decided that he was not actually very happy about his position and had to work out how to get himself down.   At one stage he stretched between two tree limbs and was stuck for a few minutes looking very comical but he worked his way out of this dilemma and once on terra firma dashed off to Edd’s shed.

An unusual co-incidence

Saturday 13.1.18

The storms from our North coast reached across Australia and hit us at the bottom corner today with heavy rain.  We have been hearing rumbling thunder since Friday night, but the weather stayed hot with insignificant showers.   I feel very relaxed now that the hay is in the shed and the accounts done, so we drove up to Woodend, near hanging rocks, today and picked up a farm cat from the vets.  He was advertised via our Face book friends’ network with uncanny timing.  He even looks like a younger fitter version of the cat we lost and they were so desperate to re-home him that he was a gift. 

I have been worried about how we would cope with out a cat. Before the last one arrived we had rats and mice in plague proportions.  All our tomatoes and pumpkins got chewed and rabbits multiplied. I was most surprised when the message about this cat came up on the computer.  It was a weird co-incidence, as I have never had this type of message before.   It will be a bit before we know if the cat is pleased with his new circumstances.   I have put him in the Donga so that he is safe and gets a chance to settle down.   Luckily Edd had a bag of kitty litter from his fungi growing capers.

We start the new year with hay making

Friday 12.1.18

The New Year has begun and the hay is in the shed.  This year we have been very lucky and had lots of help to achieve this.   Last night was hot and muggy but Ben and indi and Bo, Simon and Ollie worked well after dark helping us.  The hay was baled just as the sun went down so we needed a team with the ute and a team loading the tractor and trailer.  The bales were very heavy and all I could manage was rolling them down the hills into rows for the others to pick up.

Ben was quite amazing throwing up bales with apparent ease but Indi looked beautiful in a long, light, cotton dress so I suppose he had someone to impress.   Edd brought in the last load with the tractor well after dark and I drove behind him trying to use my car headlights to gain him visibility, as the tractor lights don’t function.    Simon worked hard but there was also his beer, cold, and very desirable when most of the work was done.  We all sat round in the hay shed, hot, dusty but triumphant and the men demonstrated many of the ways a beer bottle can be opened with what ever is to hand.

Last week we got the hay from Ben’s parents place.  This was a daytime effort but we had Graeme and Bas and their ute and trailer, as well as our own, so it was all very civilised.    It was also a cool day so we got hay in for both parties with out too much stress.   We were very grateful, and took all the Healesville mob out for a meal as a thankyou.   This year it has all seemed like an event from the past where people all worked together to help each other with the aim of providing animal food for the year ahead.

Food is very plentiful just now.  Today Edd and I ate sweet corn, cucumber and lettuce for lunch and I have been talking bucket loads of zucchinis to Bo so she can make preserves for the restaurant.  The amazing thing is that the grass is still fairly green. Even the paddock we got hay from last night was green underneath.  Usually at this time of year everything is colourless and burnt crispy.

I wonder if this is part of the climate change experience.  We hear that America is having cold storms like we saw in the movie “the day after Tomorrow’ and California has killer mud slides where the winter fires removed all the vegetation.  We know all about this because we had a river through our property after the bush fires with black waves and it carried away whole trees.  Luckily our house was well clear of the danger.

The goats, not being prone to speculation, are loving the odd conditions.  They come home every night looking alarmingly round.  They are all beginning to look glossy in their new summer coats now that the cashmere undercoat and dry faded winter hair has dropped out.   Milk production is staying up but there is a reduction in the cheese yield that is normal for this time of year.  The tomatoes are large but still green, so I expect they will be the next glut I have to process.