Hot, dry and dusty

                                            Edd digging on the roof looking for the lost pipe.

                                               Dan oiling and sealing the house windows.

The pipe is now joined to the end coming up from the dam

March 1, 2019

Yesterday Our two Finnish workers came to see us again before they set off to SA in their van. We were all really happy to see them again and had a great time. They helped us put the top on the gazebo that Dan started assembling . We would never have got it on without the extra man ( and women) power.

Edd is working hard on the dam water system.  Since finding the end of the pipe he has connected up a tap and a line to the dam and filled in all the holes he dug in the roof during the pipe search.  Today we brought a new pump to go on the tank and he is busy connecting that up.  Our water situation is deteriorating.  We have lots of dam water, but the drinking water is going down fast and there is little hope of enough rain to put the situation right. 

The land continues to dry out and keeping plants and trees alive is a battle. It is a good thing Dan stayed on because there are not enough hours in a day for me to water everything. We read on the news that there are wild fires in Scotland.  It seems unbelievable.  More unbelievable is the fact that our leaders are still doing nothing that might help the earth deal with this crisis. 

Bo is working hard to establish a career as a music therapist and she is really happy about the positive feedback she gets.  Working in the restaurant was a pretty thankless job.  She was criticised for not being profitable enough and everything else.  She was doing the work to help her husband’s brewery but somehow that fact got lost in the detail.  Yarra Glen looks a bit lost without people sat under the umbrellas on the pavement. 

Al and Pip have been away this week in Brisbane attending a conference, but they made time to visit Josh and Bobby and introduce them to Pele.  I wish we could visit them too, but we have lots of bookings now that Summer is officially ended.  Next week we have building students and on the 18^ththe first school camp. As usual it will be winter before we get to go anywhere.

A very busy week

February 24  2019

We are all exhausted. It has got hot again too. Suddenly we feel lost without Bo’s restaurant.  Normally we would head into Yarra Glen at this stage and sit at the tables out the front and talk to  family , friends and neighbours over leisurely drinks.  Sadly, we had our final  party there last Sunday and Yarra Glen is no longer our gathering point. On Monday Edd and I spent the day helping clean and sort out inside the restaurant, but Beth still had to clean out the fridges and cold room. Her final act was borrowing the big ladder and painting out their sign at the front of the building.

This week end she has been able to spend time with her family. It is the first time for years that she has not been working as chef or floor service. Yesterday she watched Silky have a riding lesson and today she has gone down to the beach.  She certainly deserves the break, so we will just have to suffer over the loss of a much-used amenity.

We have had a busy week. 23 Permaculture design course people arrived for a tour on Saturday morning and left after breakfast today having camped here for the night. Some brought tents and the rest found places in the house and donga.  I had to provide morning tea and cheese testing when they arrived ,an evening meal and breakfast before they left.  We used the ruins because it has all the tables and other gear needed but I had to have most of the food prepared in advance.  Indi helped with the cooking and made a cake for the morning tea and Bo cooked deserts for the evening. We must have done OK as everyone ate a lot and looked happy. Thank goodness I had family help and Dan to help with the farm work.

To make things more complicated we had 62 students from the Montessori program for the day on Thursday.  They wanted to show the new intake kids the farm before the camps start so they organised activities.  Only one gate was left open and we got the goats back in before they did too much damage.  The school has got very good at cleaning up when they leave, so there was not a huge amount of work we had to do.

It is forecast to be hot this week, but we are getting cool nights.  The Autumn glory sedum flowers are turning pink and the Virginia Creeper has just started to show red on the leaves. The zucchini glut is slowing but there is no sign of mildew on the leaves yet. Pumpkins are swelling, and we have some huge, odd, knobbly, green ones that do not look like anything we planted. The silver beet seedlings I rescued are beginning to shoot up as are the snow peas.  Plant life is definitely going into Autumn mode. Indi is also sporting a very pregnant shape, so we wait and wonder what our first great grandchild will be like.

Dan has started to put up the outdoor furniture I brought at Seymour show last weekend.  It is all very exciting. Edd found the lost water pipe and is now connecting up the dam to the green tank by the shed. Once this is done we will have dam water available at the house and we can plant out Toby’s garden.

The end of an Era

The flowering gum

Harvest and increase

February 11  2019

The weather is much cooler this week, hardly reaching 30C.  I have taken the opportunity to plant seedlings. I found enough silver beat for a row, but I had to buy snow peas and beet root.  We get this time in late summer when the soil is still warm, and seedlings can thrive.  It is too early for broccoli and cauliflowers with white butterflies still looking for caterpillar homes.

Last night Indi gathered the family up at Beth’s house and Tilba told us he will be a father in July! This was a surprise.  He is very young for all that responsibility, but it now looks as if we may have not one, but two great grandchildren this year! The funniest point in the evening was when Indi asked Morgen ( who has moved out of home and rents in Tilba’s house), how he was going with his washing.   His face went a complete blank and he had no idea what she was talking about. It looks as if he is on a big learning curve too.

On the farm Dan is proving as good at painting as he is at gardening, and much to my delight unfinished jobs I that have been annoying me for ages are now getting done.  The sparrows have been evicted from our house entrance, the ceiling has been painted and the walls have been washed.  This really needed doing but somehow it never got on the priority list.  I just tried to avoid looking every time I went outside.

I am picking and treating food for freezing.  Tomatoes, nectarines, sweet corn and all that sort of thing freeze well.  The zucchini just sit in piles hoping someone will need them before they get soggy.   We must have eaten zucchinis and cucumbers  every day for months now.  We are still eating strawberries for breakfast, but I should make time to pick blackberries.  We cook them with apples for winter.

We have started to wean the goat kids, starting with the boys who are the eldest.  The evening milking can now be done by hand and it looks as if we can drop it altogether by the end of the month.  Barak is walking much better on his leg that was broken and is showing a healthy interest in the females.  Mating season could arrive early this year.  The does are all looking fat and sleek in their shiny summer coats and we will soon start drying off the does who have milked for two years. It is sad, but Nola and Petra are on my selling list this year.  They are the oldest goats after the three golden oldies and if we keep them longer they will be too old to sell.  Petra was one of quads and has the habit of diving behind the bale looking for oats that the others have spilled. She is a big brown goat and we will miss her. I hope we find her a good home.

Accidental success

February 4, 2019

Yesterday was another stinking hot day.   The bleached grass crunches as you walk on it and all the plants I wish to save need watering twice a day.  The only greens that seem to cope are the native Warragul greens, and the conditions are too harsh yet for planting new seedlings.

Everyone found the day difficult and a surprising number ended up in our pool.  Wayne came up with Ella who had a swim and then Simon brought up Sylvie.  The main group were friends of Indi who all had a pizza night in the ruins and cooled off in the pool with their kids.  It was lovely to see everyone relaxed and happy, but I am just praying that they will clear and clean everything up before our next school group come on Wednesday!   I really do not want any extra work in this heat.

9 February 2019

At last the weather has broken and we have rain and coolness.  The long hot spell got harder as it went on once all the moisture had been driven out of the air.  We have been really worried about friends in Tasmania who are close to huge fires burning there, but hopefully the rain has saved them too. They went to Tassie to escape the climatic problems here, but it seems that with a warming earth there are no safe places to escape to.

Today I am cooking the first pumpkin of the year and preparing sweet corn for the freezer. This week has been hard because it is the tenth anniversary of the big bush fire that caused so much destruction in our valley.  We would have just let the date slide past, but money was given to put on events and it has all been talked over on radio and TV.  Edd got roped into a radio interview and altogether the only way to escape would have been to go on holiday.

At least we had a distraction in the week when we did a day for a group of Montessori Students from Taiwan. They were a delight and with staff numbers almost equal to students the day went really well. I did learn though that we will have about 60 kids here when the school has its orientation day for new kids , which is rather a worry. It seems as if we have launched ourselves into another business by accident.

Another good accident is down between us and our western neighbours.  I brought various cheap native trees and planted them along the fence line as a way of preserving our view. One of them is now covered with red flowers. Edd has been trying to grow a flowering gum here for 40 years without success but it seems that one of the cheap trees I brought has turned out to be better than I expected.

A very hot summer with helpful workers

                              Keeping cool by the river with work away people , friends and Indi

February 2, 2019

We are having a long spell of really hot weather. Over 40C on some days and no rain.  It has been a real struggle to keep plants and animals alive. Luckily the “work away” travellers have been helping and so far, we are OK.   The pullets are now sheltering under the trees in their new pen and all the goat kids are in small crofts where they can have shade and any cool breeze available.

Dan is doing a great job in the ruins garden tackling all the really hard bits that no one has got around to sorting.  The bank is now a cool place to sit under trees rather than a jungle of weeds.   It is amazing how much work has been done.  Yesterday I took the Finland couple to Whittlesea where they are meeting their next host, but Dan is staying on. This is good because we are getting all sorts of bookings for farm visits and it looks as if it will be a very busy year.

Last week we left our workers in charge and had a day off the farm.  Firstly, we called in at a Garden world, my favourite garden centre and then we went to Mornington to pick up our wool from the place it was being processed. I was surprised at how much there was. The people had sorted it out into 4 colours and washed and carded it ready to be hand spun. The white wool was spun into yarn so that we can go on with dying experiments during the school camps.   We left the wool that was shorn last year down there to be treated.  This year we have grey wool as well as brown, black and white.  I would love to start spinning but there is still too much work in the garden to be done.

After exchanging our wool Edd and I took the car ferry across the heads to the Bellarine Peninsular where Al lives.   Baby P is still under a year old, but he is now crawling everywhere and getting into things, as babies do.  Al and Pip still have a lot of work to do on their house to get it more liveable, but the new offices Al added for their work spaces look great.  They are both faced with a pale stone and are all that is visible from the road. 

We all went out for an evening meal in a restaurant stuck into the ocean on a jetty.  Luckily, we could sit outside and watch the sun going down which was wonderful.  Less good was the electrical storm that we had to drive through to get home.  I fell asleep as soon as I got in the car so Edd had to do all the work on his own.  Next morning, we were pleased to find that all the animals and plants had been well cared for, it would not have been possible to do this trio without help.  So far, I am totally thrilled with the work away system. We started having Wwoof workers about 19 years ago, but I was worried that we were getting too old to manage this type of help.  We seem to have slotted straight back into the swing without too much hassle.