minor worries

                                          We have tried to make the jade vine comfortable.

Toby's garden nearly ready for planting

September 29, 2018

We have now gone back to showery cold weather.  I am over it. I am much happier with the heat of summer.  Today I am stressing over a Jade vine that Josh sent me from Brisbane.  We have all done everything possible, but it still has to survive all the disturbance.  They are an amazing plant with large wisteria like blooms that are an amazing shade of turquoise. I would dearly love it to do well in my jungle.

We have several worries at the moment.  I am incubating eggs that should hatch next week, and our incubator is old, and the eggs have to be rolled by hand each day.  It has worked before.  Even last year when the power went off for several days and we had to restart the operation. I have also ordered day old chicks to arrive at the same time as a back-up, but I still care about the home-grown ones. The other worry is our new buck kid, Barak.

The week before the camp Edd and I took the old milking machine down to Warragul to be checked for life and called in on some friends to look at bucks they had for sale.  They have stock bred from American Alpine goats that have been brought into Australia as embryos.  This is a very costly and involved process that I have stayed clear of, but I was very keen to benefit from other peoples’ efforts.  We chose a buck kid who was carrying the looks and colour of his American ancestors and he travelled home in the car on my knees.

Once home he got very lively and was reluctant about taking milk from a bottle.  We raised the fence height of his pen but he somehow managed to leap the raised barrier and must have landed very heavily.  The vet took an X-ray and found he had a compression fracture in his back leg from landing too hard.  Two weeks later I was worried he was not right, so we took him back to the vet and they did a second x-ray. This showed that despite their treatment the break in his leg had actually got worse.  They have now put on a plaster so that his leg is off the ground in the hope healing will help.  I do not think he will ever have a straight leg though.  I usually set broken legs myself but as we did not breed Barak I decided to pay the money and let the vets do the work.  Now I wonder how much worse I could have made things!

In the big scale of things these worries are not too bad.  Edd is still working on the chook fence and I am concerned that we should both be getting ready for the school camps.  They start again in a couple of weeks, so time is running out.  The trouble is that I need help to get on with the jobs I am doing.  I need Edd and skiddy to move the rocks into Toby’s garden before I start planting and things like that.  Edd is also the expert with getting the pool water clean.  As usual after winter it looks thick and green but Edd can work magic when he tries.

My winter project doing the splash back is complete and next I plan to mosaic a top for the outdoor table. It’s glass top blew off and shattered due to a freak wind, but a mosaic top could be fun. I have two old beer kegs which are the right height for seats and it would take a lot of wind to shift them and they are probably impossible to damage so they are very suitable for our use.

The sheep work hard to keep things tidy

September 22, 2018

It really feels as if the winter is over, though we are still getting frosts.  Today at our community market I was among several women who had laid aside winter woollies and donned lighter clothing.   This afternoon I was out in a shirt shovelling more earth into the new area for Toby’s garden.   I could start planting now but I am worried about how the sheep will react.  They have been grazing around the house and doing a good job removing weeds between the stones but I need plants that they will leave alone.

Bo has had a bad week because her new chef resigned and forced her back into the restaurant kitchen. She is in the last few weeks of her music therapy course and really needed this time to get assignments in. I cannot  think of any way to help her, I certainly am not skilled enough to be a chef.  Al was very pleased with feedback he got after our open house marathon.  He is off to the UK  where he is giving a paper at a seminar next week.

It is now a school holiday period, so we have no more camps for a couple of weeks. We did have a walking group here last Thursday though for a tour and morning teas.  They were lovely people and ended up paying me much more than I asked for which was rather a surprise.  I try to give better value than people expect for their money and they are usually happy with that.

The goats are almost ready to kid so we will soon enter a very busy period.  Already I get up early to give the buck kid a bottle and Edd stays up for his night feed.  We have eggs in the incubator and chicks on order.  Last year we paid a lot of money and brought rare breed day olds.  These were a total disappointment.  Some were roosters, some were not the breed they were meant to be and none of them laid when we wanted them to.  This year I have gone back to ordering chicks from our local commercial place.  They may not look very good, but they are all the right sex and lay well.

Edd has planted out the first tomatoes.  We have them covered with mini glasshouses made from chook feed bags in the hope that they can survive the last few frosts.  We have zucchini seedlings in pots that we put under cover at night and it is time to start growing the other seeds we need for summer vegetables. Last year’s raspberries canes have leaves but the new ones planted this winter are yet to show signs of life. Raspberries are my favourite fruit, so I am keeping a hopeful eye on their development.

I have finally finished the splash back in our kitchen.  I did the last bit of grouting on Friday, it seems odd as I have been working on the project for several weeks and collecting the tiles for months.   I just wish I had managed to get it done for open house day.

very busy week

                                                   The soil goes in for Toby's garden

                                                   The splash back is half completed

The students pack up to go home

September 17, 2018

It seems amazingly quiet this afternoon.  The sun is shining, the sheep are peacefully grazing around the house, and there is no wind to shake the creamy wattle blossom. Edd has gone off to buy a ton of oats and I have spent the morning mowing the grass which has now began to grow fast. 

We did not have any time for farm activities at the week end because Sunday was open house day for sustainable homes and Saturday was the only day we had to get ready after the fur and feather school camp left on Friday.  We have been unbelievably lucky with the weather.  All week when the camp was here the days were warm and sunny and the rain held off.  We got some well needed rain on Saturday, but Sunday was fine and the afternoon sunny. Better still it was cold outside, so all the visitors could experience how warm and cosy it was in the house.

I had thought that after having big crowds last year it might be quieter this time, but I was wrong. We got even larger numbers, nearly 200 people walked through the house on Guided tours conducted by Al.  He is the best one for this because he designed the house and can answer every ones’ questions . Pip and baby P manned the front desk and booked everyone in and Edd kept a perpetual tour orbiting the place on the outside.  This left me to deal with people waiting to join the next group and to take quick tours for people in a hurry.

We were all totally busy all day, but the feedback was very positive.  I had worked hard to try and get as much of the splash back in the kitchen done as possible and I got to the stage when I had done half the grouting.  The school students had helped by moving composted material around the new paving Andrew did in Toby’s garden.  This covered up the bare clay and did wonders for how things looked so the west end of the house looked really finished compared with how it was last year.  It is a bit odd having so many strangers looking at the house, but they were all very polite and as before at the end of the day you could not tell that anyone had been there!

We felt pretty run over though.  Al and Pip set off down to Ocean Grove and Ben, Indi and I were just discussing how we could get out of any cooking or further work when Bo phoned up and invited us all to supper at her place.  At this stage no-one cared what they ate as long as someone else did the work. Bo set up a sound system and got everyone in turn to choose a song.  By some miracle of modern technology even the most obscure songs were found and payed whilst we ate.  It took all the stress away as we had to work out what song we would choose next and what memories it brought back.  I think we are all benefitting from Bo’s music therapy training already, and she still has a few weeks of the course to complete before she qualifies.

The other good news is that the buck kid we brought is now getting better. When he first arrived, he dashed around so much that he eventually sailed out of his pen and landed hard enough to get a compression fracture.  I could not find the actual injury site, so we had to take him for X-rays at the vets.  He is now confined to a small area with his leg strapped up, but he is finally taking milk well and looking happier.  The horses are looking better too.  The students led them up from the paddock every day last week for grooming and attention.