Work to do

Harry Cooking Breakfast

 It’s full steam ahead on the farm at the moment, we’ve managed to cut back our pig numbers, noticeably and this has allowed me to free up some money to invest into the Cooks Garden. We are extending the front fence and pig/goat proofing the whole area so the Cook can plant her orchard and not have to stress about animals eating everything she plants. I’ve also built her a brand new double tub worm farm, using old bath tubs. They are high enough off the ground that she can have a bucket underneath collecting the worm juice. And to finish it off she has a brand new barrel for her seaweed tea using the seaweed she towed back from their holiday down the coast last week.

The Rooster

I’ve just spent the last few days hobbling around the place finding it very difficult to walk. I couldn’t get out of bed on Monday. Of course the Cook doesn’t like me laying around the place making it look untidy, she had my crippled body out doing jobs which included digging post holes and mowing the lawn – albeit very slowly. And the culprit? Not a farm accident, not my old army injury or even a fall from a horse or quad bike, no, none of those things. Nothing even slightly funny, exciting or even dumb. Seems I have a Magnesium deficiency and all I needed was a supplement and everything would be better. A day later and I can almost walk again, hallelujah!

Our lawn whilst being mowed

The Cook has been busy in the garden and it looks great. I hope she is down there now filling up her brand new worm farm with lots of treats for our next load of micro livestock. She was telling me a few moments ago about how she had just about sliced off a finger with my sickle harvesting some Lucerne, the big cry baby, she had to hang up so she could try and stop the bleeding – I guess I’ll hear all about it tonight. At least its better she did it in the garden then the kitchen – I hate having to fish through dinner looking for loose digits. She runs the risk of the rooster grabbing hold of her finger and running off with it.

We got a little surprise in the mail today, a bunch o f books arrived I’d ordered on Amazon for Christmas. Most of them were for the Cook, but one was for me! It’s about building smokehouses and meat smoking – can’t wait to get stuck into it. The cook got books on Poly Tunnels, Preserving and small scale grain production.

Our experimental wheat patch has progressed, it’s full of Lucerne at the moment, we sowed it fairly thickly as the main aim is to enhance the nitrogen in the soil, the wee little pigs in the pen next door keep sneaking into the patch, but they’re currently too small to do any damage. We decided it was too late to plant summer wheat; we’ll leave that till next summer and maybe put some oats in the patch over winter.

The Rooster is keeping us all entertained. He continues to sleep on the front veranda and start crowing at 3:30am each morning. I think I’ve just about managed to ignore him now as he didn’t wake me up this morning, but the Cook did ask me if I had sharpened the axe since winter yesterday morning and we did have roast chicken for dinner last night – I wonder?

The farm dam

We had a bunch of NSF people over to help us do some more work on our leaky weir in the gully. We’ve suffered a small amount of new erosion with all this rain so working to fix it before our next deluge is becoming a priority. Luckily the weir we installed worked well and has silted up a lot quicker then we expected – probably due to the new erosion in the gully above. I think we’ll need to get some machinery in to do some of the work as there’s large head wall erosion close to the main dam wall.



Helpers at the leaky weir