What - no pictures????

Has it only been a week? How time flies. Lots has happened over the past week, we’ve had hot dry winds, sold some pigs and fixed the Jeep. Everything is drying out really quickly now, twice last week we had hot winds over 90kph lasting all day.

The Jeep has come back, new water pump and all – works wonderfully. Unfortunately we had to sell one of the children to pay for it. The pig paddocks are bare dirt at the moment; hopefully we will get some new fencing in over the next couple of weeks which will help solve that problem. They are still digging the incredible holes in the yard – for what purpose I don’t know, but it doesn’t appear to be escape as I first thought.

I managed to get out into the back paddocks and clear away a lot of the brier bushes over the past week as well. These things are extremely thorny rose like bushes that grow anywhere. I’ve noticed that they are growing right across the district, but I am amazed they are growing so well in the dry.

OK, you might have noticed that here is no photo today – well, we had a little accident with the camera – did I say we? No I meant the Cook had an accident with the camera. She was going into Cooma with the kids, I’d left the camera on the front seat of the car so she could take some photos. Not wanting to take the camera to Cooma (it was a high end Sony DSC F757) she thought she’d put it in the washing machine for safe keeping. When she got home, she decided to do a load of washing – chucked it in and off she went. The morale to this story is that digital camera’s don’t survive the spin cycle. So I don’t know what I’ll do for the short term, I wonder how many pigs I need to sell to get a new camera.

So I was pretty upset. Anyway, this weekend we went to an open farm day at an Organic farm over near Gundaroo (that’s near where we got the sheep from). It was an interesting day and we ran into a lot of people we knew, and caught up with others we hadn’t seen for quite a while. It was interesting to see how other people approached the market garden side of things, we took away a few good ideas and the Cook walked away with some new tools. Looks like more fencing and a lot of irrigation to start putting in.

The sheep are settling in to their new paddock, we’ve lost two that we know of. Probably from age, but I’ve got to go up and take a look at them tomorrow to see how they are holding up. Hopefully I’ll get them down for crutching and drenching in the not too distant future.

Beccy the calf is a bit of a wag. Harry has been feeding her lately but he went for a camp over the weekend. So we went out to feed her, she had come right up to the back of the house looking for dinner, she had her tongue out ready to take the bottle but just wouldn’t. She wouldn’t take it from the Cook, Ben or me. As soon as Harry arrived home the Cook gave him the bottle to feed her with and she went straight onto it. I think she has problems!

Speaking of problems – I’ve got to find a better way to capture piglets. Our first paying customer arrived on Saturday to pick up her piglets, at the time they were still running around in the paddocks. I hadn’t fed them in the morning figuring I’d wait and feed them when she arrived. This was fine until I caught the first pig and put it in her horse float. After that I couldn’t catch any more. At one stage Ben was hanging onto one whilst being dragged across the paddock. All the two ladies could do was stand and watch the commotion. Anyway we finally got three of the four piglets caught and put in the float. The final piglet, a girl eluded us for about half an hour and three loaves of bread. Finally, she ran out steam – or weighted down by bread and we caught her. Next time I’ll have to feed them lots and try catching them whilst they are asleep.

Well it’s Tuesday already, the next lot of pigs have left the farm bound for Borrowa. They were a little easier to catch then the first lot, which was lucky because both the kids were at school. The two groups of people who came out both had similar stories to ours about run down farm houses with no water and atrocious plumbing, bad electrical wiring and incredible cold. As bad as that all sounds, it was nice to know other people share our experiences – and survive. So I’m nine pigs lighter and have money to expand the pigopylous - what could possibly go wrong to muck this up!

BTW – lots more happening, just haven’t had tie to put it all here yet so keep checking back for updates – photo less updates that is.