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.
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