Floods and droughts

 19.4.2025

 

We are now enjoying the Easter week end.  The weather is still hot and dry but at least Edd has been able to get the round hay bales into the shed. He has two left to move but needs to locate some new pallets to keep them away from the shed floor which gets wet.

 

I have planted out winter seedlings and started to move things back into the donga. I am trying to clear a space in the storage shed for Tilba and his family to use.  We need this before the weather changes and it gets wet. I have moved the lighter stuff but we still have things that I will need help with like the double mattress. No one is living in the donga but I am thinking of using it as an art studio.

Beth kept her art work there so Stevo could make the frames and she has now taken it to be hung at DB’s winery. 

 

The young goats have now been trained to jump up onto the milking bale. They had a hard two weeks learning how to be part of the main herd but they seem settled now. We have called the new buck, Merlin, as he has a long white beard. Actually, it is mating season so he has sprayed his head with various un-mentionables, and his whiteness is not something one sees at this time.

 

The next job is to move him into the paddock with the two does, Nerys and Ursula, who we want mated. I am hoping we can move him when there are fitter, younger, families here to help.  We need to sell the little buck now we have found a better option. We also need to sell some sheep. Hay prices have risen sharply and we need to destock.

 

Up in Qld the flood waters are going down and farmers are left with kilometres of broken fences and massive stock drownings. The floods covered wast areas and it is heartbreaking for the people who live and work on the land.

After the hour change

It is still hot and dry but the over night dew fall has been enough to turn the grass green. Kangaroos come down every night and eat anything green they can find. Nets seem to work and the silver beet and lettuce seedlings have started to grow.  We have sent figs and apple cucumbers to market along with our dwindling egg supply.  This week we have brought eight new chooks but it will be at least a month before they lay.

 

It has been a busy week. Stevo was here on Monday and Tuesday to weld up bits for his shed and frame Bo’s art works. Bo spent Tuesday working with him and arrived with a bowl of vegetable soup for lunch. Now that the hour has changed and the rainbows are back in the house, I suppose it is soup season again. 

 

If it has been dry here it is much worse inland at the other side of the ranges. Yesterday we drove up past Heathcote to buy a new buck goat. All the paddocks were bleached and bare and all the small dams were totally dry.  We found the property with the goats in dry scrub land where the ground was just loose dust. Surprisingly there was a herd of over 30 white goats looking amazing in show condition. 

 

 The buck we brought is about 2 years old, luckily, they had everything ready to help us load him into the stock crate on the back of the Ute.  It took us most of the 2-hour drive home to work out the best way to unload him.  Our original plan was to put him into the small croft we had prepared but when we learnt that he had never eaten green grass we decided he needed a slow introduction to a diet change so we have put him in the stock yards.

 

With the extreme dryness here and in SA it seems odd that QLD still has flood problems and these are spreading down into NSW. Thousands of cattle and sheep have been lost and some communities are totally cut off.