Bredbo Valley View Homestead

Top of his Year

2011-12-14T19:23:00.002+11:00

Young Ben is the proudest kid in Bredbo this morning – and rightly so. Last night, unbeknown to him, he was awarded the top of his year at Monaro High School. He was also awarded the top in two subjects and received an award in recognition of his achievements in Maths outside the School. Both Mum and Dad had a tear in their eye when he walked up to receive his award – we are so proud. He's the one on the right – check out those curls!

we've got mail

2011-11-23T14:16:00.001+11:00

This is an enmail I recieved last night from a pig I sold a couple of weeks ago (I didn't know it could type or I wouldn't have sold her).

Dear Martyn,

I did not realize at first what was happening but I am deeply disappointed that you abonded me in such a way without even saying good bye. I arrived at this strange place where I had to stay over night in this awful trailer next to a strange pig lady with some funny spots on her coat, she was not nice to me at all, next morning we were unloaded into a paddock and I felt so lonely. Then there was this man with this foreign accent who tried to touch me all the time.

But finally I have settled in , the other pig lady is quiet nice to me now - her name is Lotti and we eat from the same plate, and I enjoy by now the different diet - no boring Wonder White anymore but some green grass and would you believe it some organic ( don't know what that

means) Coconut flour in the morning for breakfast and some potatoes for dinner!! The only problem is that there is a constant garlic smell in the air! Very annoying indeed.

All in all I feel very happy and at home now and I do not miss you at all anymore!!

Warm Regards

Olga (they call me Olga now - not very funny)

The Cooks Chooks

2011-11-17T12:21:00.001+11:00

The Cook has decided to start a Chook breeding program for Plymouth Rocks. We already had a Rooster and after some hunting around she managed to get a couple of hens. However the Plymouth Rock is one of those chickens that is a good layer and great eating bird - but a lousy mother.

So I managed to borrow a couple or three hens from friends and was given some fertile eggs from another friend who had recently bought a couple of hens that were running with a rooster, but had wormed them and didn't want to eat the eggs - sigh!

The Black ones are Plymouth Rocks

Anyway, The Cook had troubles with the incubator and had thought that the eggs wouldn't hatch , but come Sunday evening chirping sounds emanated from the incubator and we now have 9 Plymouth rock chicks - maybe more when we get home. She put a dozen eggs in and getting nine to hatch is pretty good for us.

In response to our current snake problem Old Nev sent us one of those Snake Repellers, they work on sonic waves and deter the snake from coming to close - Thanks Dad, we'll let you know how well it works. We'll put it in the garden first as that's the place we see the most, and The Cook spends most her time.

Yesterday we received a package from the Diggers Club, The Cook had put in a combined order with another friend, thanks Annette, for some seeds and plants. So we spent an hour in the pouring rain last night planting things.

Speaking of rain we've been getting some, Spring rain is great! However alot of farmers are concerned that we didn't get any winter rain and that will affect the pasture growth later on in the year - we'll see how it goes.

In the Garden

2011-11-14T11:40:00.000+11:00

Gardening has been the major activity around here for the past few weeks. Growing enough for a year is a real challenge, and puts a lot of emphasis on getting things right first time. The Cook is the head gardener ad I am just the muscle, however this year I do have my own gardens – one of Red Indian Maize and another of two different varieties of beans. I'm planning on doing another this weekend for pickluing cucumbers

Our Garden 13 Nov 2011

I’ve also built two trial Hugelkultur beds, unfortunately for me the Cook has planted Zucchini on them - not my favourite. Hugelkultur is a system where you mound earth and sod over a pile of logs, the logs are supposed to do two things; firstly they contain a lot of the nutrients from the soil and when they decay those nutrients are released into the soil and are made available to the pants, secondly the wood absorbs a lot moisture and stores that in the ground. A third positive is the growth of soil biota is increased and helps transport the moisture and nutrients to the plants.

Although most people recommend using a Cedar type log for your Hugelkultur mound mine are Poplar because that’s what we have here. In the long run it will mean that our mounds don’t last as long as they could, but we have a fairly good supply of Poplar so I’ll just have to rebuild them every other year if they work out.

Same Garden 13 August 2011

We have a huge potato crop, it’s about 400 m2 and it’ll be interesting to see how many potatoes we get and how long they last us. For the first year the Cook is trying Sweet Potato, it’s only a couple of plants to start as a test.

Ben had a birthday recently, his favourite present is a rocket set. We’ve had two successful launches to date. These things are pretty amazing and for a pyromaniac like myself a lot of fun, so far we have launched the rockets 180m into the air, Ben has ordered larger rocket engines to see if we can get higher.

We’ve also been experimenting with grain. We are planting wheat whenever we move a pig pen, so far the results have been good, apart from the bit where the goats stuck their heads in and ate around the edges of the plot. We’ve been using old water tank halves to grow the wheat in to keep the pigs away. Unexpectantly we’ve had oats come up as well, I’ll have to talk to my feed man about that.

We’ve continued on with our Holistic Farm Management course, we’re finding it enlightening. We’d really not had a plan or a method for analysing our decisions against our goals. The course has covered a lot of ground, last session where on grazing management and how properly managed grazing can increase the triple bottom line.

We’ve sold a lot of pigs lately, by the post Christmas sales we’ll only have a small number of growers, about 8 and our breeders left – I may be able to take a holiday with the family. It’ll cut our costs for the rest of the year, most of the breeder sows should farrow some time in February which will give us pigs in time for next Christmas.

Next lot of Growers

The little black and white pigs are growing in front of our eye’s. We’ve never had piglets grow as quickly as this. They are a real scream to watch run around the paddock, they travel as a pack everywhere they go, sleep together and eat together.

Weeds are still and issue and all those Serrated Tussock plants I didn’t get are happily seeding at the moment, I think in the balance of things I am getting the upper hand and should have that problem well and truly under control in a couple more seasons.

Our bees are happily going about their business, filling their boxes with the nectar of the gods. I’m hoping this year I’ll be able to harvest my fair share. The garden hasn’t started to bloom yet, so once that flow starts we should be right.

We’ve been getting so many eggs from our chickens it’s hard to know what to do with them all. I think we live on quiche, we’ve been having it three times a week. I’m still not exactly sure how many chickens we have – yes I know count the legs and divide by two, for a few days we were getting 22 eggs. It’s slowed down now, some of the hens have decided to start sitting, and we had our first brood hatch the other day in the bottom of the spit roaster. With another forty or so eggs to go it doesn’t look like chickens are going to be a problem for us this year. I’m hoping to have our Strawbale Chicken Coup planned and teh foundation s down over Christmas.

A friend of mine from my army days took our goats away the other day. They’ve gone down the coast for a job getting rid of Blackberries and Fireweed. My friend, let’s call him Phil, kept the goats locked up and fed for the first few days, then let them out to graze. Unfortunately he had a massive storm that afternoon, and the goats used to living in our shearing shed during storms decided to find some shelter – and haven’t been seen since. So if you’re driving between Bombala and Bredbo and see four goats, two white one Boar and a ginger one with dread locks let me know.

Ssssssummer time

2011-11-13T16:09:00.000+11:00

Snakes are out in force this year. this is the third Brown one in the house yard in the past four weeks.

A Forward Pack the Kiwi’s would desire

2011-10-18T09:41:00.003+11:00

The Cook took this photo on the weekend, reminds me of my days as a lose head prop in the Army Rugby Team. These guys have really been fun to have a round, they stick together, they make funny noises and they turn up in the strangest places. Last week I was doing the pigs water, I heard a piglet grunting – I thought down by the river. It was getting dark and I thought maybe one of the piglets had been caught by a snake. So I grabbed a shovel and headed down towards the gate. As I went past the old windmill I heard the little grunting sound again, I looked down the well and there was a piglet! Luckily we still have one small child, he was lowered down into the well to rescue the little fellow. The well is only eight feet deep and dry, luckily filled with old leaves so it was a pretty soft landing.
These guys also ended up in the Canberra Times on Grand Final Weekend – with 22 of them and all being black and white I thought it was a sign that it would be a Collingwood final

Permaculture Update

2011-10-12T16:47:00.001+11:00

I thought I'd gather together all my threads of thought about our permaculture going's on into a single post. I'm also doing this from Word 2007 which has a publish to blog feature.

Zone 1. Well so far this has been a total disaster – let's ignore it for a while longer.

Zone 2. This is where the action is, all except one of our newly planted fruit trees has survived the winter. Unfortunately one of the locally acquired apple trees perished – these things happen, and luckily we have a couple of replacements in pots ready to move in. The cook is busy exploring the garden beds and picking out the weeds between all the things that she let go to seed. She has never had much success with carrots until now, seems self seeding is a good way to grow them. And like everything else in our lives we have no control over it.

We've made a huge potato bed this year which has been filled with a variety of different spuds. We're planting them under layers of mulch this year – so I've got to get more mulch. It was interesting to see after about an inch of rain the water began pooling in the contours of the potato patch – which is what is supposed to happen.

This weekend I'm fencing around the Solar Power Station and we are turning the ground around that in to gardens as well. I'm planning to grow pumpkins, beans and corn in that area. Once I've fenced I also need to move the water trough as well.

Our asparagus is shooting up, tasty little suckers they are, I've only tried a couple so far. The strawberries are all coming back after the pigs dug them up at the end of winter, so we are interested to see how they bounce back. The raspberries are spreading as well and we're looking forward to a good crop of those.

I've almost completed transporting my 1000 bricks from Canberra to home. Once I have them all at the house I can get the bobcat in to level the pad area for the outdoor kitchen, the bricks are for the smoke house and the base of the wood fired oven.

We've installed a proper watering system this year. I'm using wobble tees on four foot posts to water the veg garden and potato's, I'll do a similar thing for the pumpkins and corn. It works – but you can't have too many on a single line and, to make it work better I need to step down to 1 inch pipe from the 1.25 inch.

This weekend is the Murrumbateman Field Days, which we always go too. The Cook spied cheap mulch out that way the other day so we are taking the trailer to bring a load back – permaculture involves a lot of mulch and the sooner we can make out own the easier it will be.

The Bees are busy, all the hives are active and working hard, I'll have to check the Queens in the next couple of weeks to make sure they are up to the season. I'm hoping to harvest enough honey to see us all the way through the year.

Last year I built a worm farm, but we decided not to put worms in it until spring – I filled it with cow manure from the paddocks and let it sit. We were having problems with one of our bathtub troughs so the Cook decided to change one of the worm farm tubs for the trough – she discovered that we had been farming worms all along.

Zone 3. We had a nice surprise the other morning; our Black Angus cow 'Becky' had her first calf, we haven't been able to get close enough yet but we're pretty sure it's a heifer.

Zone 4/5. Due to last year's season we had an explosion of Serrated Tussock, I'm still dealing with is around the house and front paddocks. Out the back it just dominated a lot of places; I decided to get in on the councils helicopter spraying and we managed to get 16 ha of unmanageable weeds dealt with. I know spraying isn't a permaculture type solution, but we needed to compromise on this to stop the problem deteriorating.

Who's your daddy?

2011-09-21T14:06:00.000+10:00

Bredboshire Spotted

I’d like to introduce the world to the rarest pig there is – The Bredboshire Spotted. This breed is not only the rarest breed of pig there is, but the newest. Currently only 16 are known to be in existence, and all are located in a farm on the banks of the Bredbo River.

Penny keeps the piglets together

A big red horse

2011-08-11T13:31:00.000+10:00

Got to tell you I had better things to do then blog the last few days, the weather here has been fabulous, nothing below zero and days have reached 20 Deg C. It’s just like Spring!

This the hole in the bathroom window - the window is covered in ice -it's 9am

But of course, things are still happening. We had kids’ soccer on the weekend, visitors up to the wozzu and jobs that went undone.

I bought the Cook a new toy, it’s big and red and hopefully will make her busy life a little more bearable. It’s the biggest garden tiller you’ve ever seen. You may recall that we use our pigs to do a lot of the digging around our place, but sometimes we need to finish things off a little better then the pigs are capable of, and the poor old Cook has a crook back, so digging isn’t something she likes doing. Hopefully as the ground becomes better we won’t need to dig.

In a perfect world, and following permaculture principles of low energy inputs this is more desirable, however we need to get to a point where that is possible for us.

I bought it home in the small trailer, we used ramps to load it on, but I don’t have any of those at home. I decided if I unhooked the trailer I could tip it up and roll it off. There was nobody around when I needed to unload so I did it myself, I untied the tiller and then I unhooked the trailer, unfortunately the tiller was at the back end of the trailer and the trailer tipped up rather suddenly. The tiller rolled down the tailgate and headed down the hill – strait for the cooks car, holy crap! I gave a semblance of a chase and managed to knock it off course just before it hit the car, not so lucky were three pigs, a dog a rose bush and the back fence, I haven’t told the cook yet.

We had the chance to give it a run on Sunday and managed to turn over the whole garden in less then an hour – that used to take us four weeks or more. We’ll have to change the way our garden beds are, but makes it possible for us to really start thinking about our option s for a market garden or CSA.

We had some seriously cold days last week, I think it was Friday when we had the coldest day in the district for 17 years. The diesel in the car turned to jelly and I couldn’t go to work until 10am when the truck had thawed. Unfortunately the Cook pumped water on the Thursday and I didn’t empty the pump, so when I went down to pump on Sunday it was sitting on the side of the river split open like an oyster – bugger.

It’s going to take a few weeks to repair so I’ve had to replace it, we’ll have a spare now I suppose.
I started picking up the bricks for the wood fired oven on Saturday, in the rain with Harrison, 1000 bricks is a lot, specially when your loading them by hand.

Cold - Rather!

2011-07-28T12:28:00.000+10:00

This was the view down the drive at 7am this morning

Frozen thistle - covered in frost

It's lunchtime and I don't think the Cook is out of bed yet. No water for showers or shaving so I'm starting the day a little scruffier then usual.

Mountain Music

2011-07-26T14:30:00.001+10:00

This is something nobody else will care about – but I do,

Where I grew up we had a country music radio station, there’s not one out here, nor can I access one across the internet – and I don’t like the US ones either. So at home we tend to have the AUSSTAR tuned to CMC a lot. My all time favourite country band is Alabama, I grew up listening to them. Theirs was the first tape I bought, the only record I’ve every owned and the first CD I ever purchased and played. It used to be a ritual for me to play the Alabama Christmas album every year, until it mysteriously disappeared.

As a lad I listened to Alabama late at night, as way back as 1980, we listened to Alabama when we made our Friday night trips to the Canungra Pub, or something like the Rathdowney Dance or on bowling trips to the Gold Coast. I could never get the guy who played the music at the local Rodeo’s to play it – his loss (I made him listen to it on the way to work instead). I took my Alabama tapes with me when I joined the Army and listen to them all the way through recruits and Puckapunyal.

I had Alabama playing in the Hilux the first time I took the Cook out , that was in Townsville, and most of the times I took the Cook out. We even managed to go to an Alabama concert when we were in America back in 1993 – it was their last concert for a while and it was in Nashville, Tennessee – I’ll never forget it, I’d wanted see them for as long as I could remember. We even went to their home town of Fort Payne Alabama – people really do drive around with deer tied to the front of their cars.

I often remember their songs whilst I’m doing stuff around the farm – one of the more common ones being ‘I’m in a hurry and don’t know why’ closely followed by ‘Can’t keep a good man down’ – and of course whenever I’m thinking about the Cook it has to be ‘Close enough to perfect’.

Anyway, the other day I had CMC on whilst I helped get the kids ready for school – I was dropping them off. A song came on, I couldn’t see the TV as I was in the kitchen, I said to the kids “that sounds like Alabama – who is it?” We have the smartest 12yr old year 7 kid in Cooma living at our house and he said “Brad Paisley” and I said “are you sure? Sounds like someone else”.

As the song went on I started to recognise rifts and lines from old Alabama songs so I just had to have a look. It was Brad Paisley – he was super imposed onto old Alabama film clips, interesting I thought, then the song followed an old and familiar line and who else but Randy Owens, Teddy Gentry and Jeff Cook singing the chorus from ‘Mountain Music’, they’re looking old, but – I was back in the 80’s, for a second or two.

And the kids nearly missed the bus.

So there you go after 31 years a great band can still make a Bill Board number one hit and bring the memories of those 31 years flooding back like it was only yesterday.

Thanks Guy’s.

(google Old Alabama )

A month later

2011-07-25T16:01:00.000+10:00

Fencing has been high on the agenda again lately, and we are finely seeing some results. The horses have a new paddock, we can keep the cows out of the River and we can give the summer horse paddock a rest. Soon we’ll have a third horse paddock and protection for the shelter belt trees. The boys helped out a lot with the fences, Ben was his usual self, and he had a great time cutting wires with the new bolt cutters – seeing just how close he could get to my fingers. I got tired of it after a while, so whilst he was cutting a wire as close as he could to my finger - I screamed a blood curdling, shocking, howling scream and grabbed my hand. He thought he’d cut my finger off, and the look on his face was priceless. Harry was the first to catch on to what I had done – he’s still laughing; boy, Ben is going to get me back big for this one.

We had our annual weed inspection a week back – that was preceded by a few weekends of weed spraying in the conservation area. I really hate spraying, I think it’s the time of year and it always needs to be done when I have a hundred other things to do, continual breakdowns and malfunctions didn’t help either.

Worst of it all is after a good season the weeds are thick in the back of the farm and I’m going to have my work cut out for my getting too them before they start to go to seed – luckily with the spray kit I have I should be able to get on top of them, plus we will be using a helicopter to get the biggest infestations and the hard to access areas.

The Cook and I have been to a couple interesting events lately, we went to a lecture on Holistic Farming at the Fenner Institute at ANU. The lecture was given by Allan Savoury the founder of the Holistic Farming Institute in Zimbabwe. He talks about pasture management in brittle environments, how to use managed grazing to get the best out of your land. Like me, he’s dead set against burning pastures and he’s got the science behind him to show how bad it is for long term management. The Cook and I have signed up to do the Certificate Course at NSW TAFE this semester.

And speaking of TAFE, I’ve been asked to run a field day for the local TAFE on the farm. They want to look at planning conservation work, incorporating NSF activities in a conservation setting. As well as that I’ve been invited to submit an abstract to talk at the 2011 Harald Jensen Lecture run by the NSW Branch of the Australian Society of Soil Science.

There have been a number of NSF days and meetings, more Field Day planning and general stuff. I attended a talk this week about farm biodiversity and food production which focused mainly on biological farming techniques, which are different to biodynamic farming by Maarten Stapper. It was an interesting talk and I was glad I went as it helped me better understand where biological farming fits into the whole picture.

Our friends Ivan and Svdenker processed our large sausage pig the other week. He was huge, we had him for three years and he was the last pig from our very first lot of piglets. They invited me over to their home to try some of the sausage they had made from previous pigs and check out their set up. The air dried hams was delicious, they still had one hanging and it was great to be able to see the process. I tried the sausage and it was good as well, more like a chorizo then pork sausage – the boy’s will be happy when I pick it up.

So the pig was killed on the farm – first time for us. The boys took the left overs up to the sky burial rock on Donkeys Knob, it’s a long way form the house – it’s a long way from anywhere. Anyway last night I took some rubbish out to the bin, it was dark, raining and just horrible out side. I had a torch, and as I went to drop the rubbish in I shone the torch into the top of the bin, all I saw was the shiny little eye’s the big tusks – and I started screaming like a 9 year old girl. It had slipped the Cooks mind to tell me that Shadow had dragged a 15kg pig head home from Donkeys Knob and deposited it on the front lawn. The Cook had come home and discovered it on her way to feed the chooks – in the light. I mentioned to her that it’s not a particularly pretty picture, a huge head staring straight at you out of a wheelie bin on a dark stormy night in the torch light. I think I have to burn those trousers as well. We are also considering installing one of those on the wall defibrillators you see in shops near the bin, just for me.

Sausages drying on wine barrels

I had to drive into town and pickup the pig’s bread in the snow the other morning – not something I normally have to do. It was a pity it was dark, I couldn’t take any photos and it was all gone on my way back. We’ve planted more fruit trees in our food forest and I picked up some black Mulberries last week to plant this weekend. I’m off to fetch another 22 tree’s tonight, these ones are feijoa and peach I think.

And we have a busy time ahead, the boy’s are doing their school snow sports again this year and The Cook is still studying. Just to give you an idea in August we have a weekend where we have the local chapter of the NSF AGM, the South East Permaculture Convergence in Bega, our Holistic Farming Course at Tarago and more.

I called in to visit - nobody was home, but I know what they do when they aren't making gardens!

Future Events

2011-06-03T10:52:00.000+10:00

After a lot of discussin the Cook and I have decided to start a new venture here on the farm. This has all been a while in the planning, but we are now happy to announce that come spring we will be running a series of workshops here on the farm. The first will be - "Building a Straw Bale Chook House", some time in October. The following workshop will be "Building a Masonary Wood Fired Oven" sometime in early November. Both workshops will be two days, we have lined up some really good instructors, lunches will be provided and people will we welcome at camp over on the farm.

The workshops will cost around $150 for each weekend, and numbers will be limited to 15 people per course. If your interested leave a commetn with a contact and I'll send you more info closer to the date.

Winter is here

2011-06-02T13:45:00.000+10:00

It’s official – if there were four of me I’d still be to busy to scratch. I mean, I can’t even sit down for a cuppa tea without something or somebody needing some attention. It’s been a awhile, so I’ll probably miss a few things out – but I better not forget to say thanks to my Mum for coming down from Queensland and paying us a visit, doing ALL our washing and being nice to the cat. And that seems so long ago now.

We had a field day out here a couple of weeks back and built some ditch and berm swales for the Cooks Food Forest. It’s all small steps, but we now have a couple of pears and plums planted. Unfortunately I managed to pull out an apple tree I thought was dead much to the horror of the Cook – for which I am unreservedly sorry darling.

Of course I’m still fencing, and last weekend saw me finish the first phase of the river boundary fence project. I still need to put in the gate, but once that has been done the horses and cattle have a new paddock for winter. I then need to extend the new fencing past the front of the house to keep the cattle on the river – on the river and not the Cooks garden.

Our Solar Array is up and running and we are taking energy from the sun and feeding it into the grid. We’ve already passed 100kwh feed back into the grid. We’re not to happy with the NSW governments decision to retrospectively reduce our tariff, luckily our local member only won his seat by the skin of his teeth – if it goes through parliament he won’t be getting our vote next election.

The Cook and I attended a Natural Resource Management Forum a couple of weeks ago, managed to meet up with some of our friends from the local NRM Groups including the local Catchment Management Authority. The forum was very interesting for the most part – the Cook kept passing me notes about the speakers as the day progressed, we’ve never been able to go anything like this together before, and it’s nice being able to compare notes instead of having to try and remember everything during a kitchen debrief – hopefully we organise the time to do things like this more often in the future.

I’ve finally planted (well, a month ago now) the Stone Pine trees that the Duckherder gifted us - I started to plant them whilst I was on my permaculture course and the Cook and the boys finished putting them in for me. If you’re out there Mrs D we need more, we are using them in our shelter belt along the western side of the farm. The plan is to plant them with other leguminous trees and some others probably nuts – possibly pecans, but oaks go well with conifers as well.

I finished my Permaculture Design Certificate over the Easter break. I met a lot of really nice people and learnt a lot as well. The course covered a lot of theory, but due to it not being a live in course there was not a lot of hands on. The Cook mocks me now because I tell her things she has been trying to tell me for years – I know – she’s always right, I should listen to her more – I’m a bad, bad man.

I wanted to catch up with Mrs D but the days were too long and I needed to get home to get things done for the next day, sorry about that Mrs D – I’ll catch up with you soon hopefully.

So we’ve had our first permaculture day, we built some swale or ditch and berm works for our new food forest. Starting small we’ve planted four new trees to compliment the three other fruit trees in the food forest area. I need to do more fencing – no really – I do, so that we can keep the infernal goats out before spring.

There are a swag of piglets running around at the moment and this weekend we’re moving some of them into the vegi garden for our winter clean out.

Last weekend we had a moment of confusion when Harry came in and told me we had a wild pig in the pig pens. I went out to look and low and behold a young boar had managed to force his way in with the sows. He was a very handsome young fellow, black and white – he looked like a Bentheim Black Pied, a rare native German pig which is crossed with the Berkshire in Europe, the only reason I say this is because I saw an add for one the other day (look them up on google).

I have done a little research and found that nobody has a record of these pigs ever coming to Australia – but somebody has one advertised for sale 100km from our place – in the same catchment. I’m pretty sure he was wild, but he did seem rather at home with the sows – anyway, I had no choice but to dispatch him. The Bottle Tree Creek/Rock Wallaby guys had a pig incident the other day as well I read – I wonder if they got that one?

I’m not a big reader – but since my course I’ve got dozens of permaculture ebooks to read. Somehow I’ve got to find the time, there is one I’m downloading at this very moment titled ‘Trees on the Treeless Plains ‘ by David Holmgren and is a revegetation manual that provides a design system approach and principles applicable everywhere to assist in the development of local strategies and design solutions. I reckon I’ll find this very helpful for our place and for a lot of the places we visit doing NSF work. I might even do a review.
It’s busy going forward as well, weeds to kill before an inspection in July, Kimberley from up at Jerangle is coming down to look at pigs this weekend, more field days to organise – not here thank goodness, and a long weekend of fencing – somewhere in this lot I’m going to have to get more pig food as well.

Jeez! I nearly forgot about one of the most pleasant days we’ve had out on the farm all year. Back a couple of weeks ago the Cook organised with another family or tow to have an apple crushing day – her hope was that somebody would be able to work out how our fruit crush works so we could make some apple cider.

So anyway we had a yard full of people, some copping, some mashing and some crushing, there were kids and dogs and by the end of it we had more juice then any of us knew what to do with. We’ve still got apple juice in ice cream containers in the freezer. So we now know how to crush the apples next is making the cider – Mrs D any ideas, you’re the alcohol specialist?????

Its cold now.

2011-05-16T14:35:00.001+10:00

The front gate post at 7am this morning

A ton of pork

2011-04-14T14:22:00.000+10:00

Honey Lotus

It’s been busy, we are down to 15 pigs – to think before Christmas I was worried I’d still have 100 by winter. My weekly 2am starts have finished and the lady down at the Sydney Markets has almost a tonne of Valley View Pork. By all reports she’s very happy with the quality of the product. This makes us happy about the way we are doing things – even if it is a little harder then the norm.

Thinking back over the past few weeks it’s all been a blur. We had a weekend of field days - that was fun. People were picking up pigs, tractors slashing, and new electricity poles going in, a lads sleep-over and day to day life.

I spent one weekend driving out to Griffith to collect two lots of pig feed. The car towed the two tonnes of grain well – unfortunately I had a blow out of a trailer tyre on the way out, fortunately I was able to get a new tyre in Wagga and continue the trip. I’ll be up for another one of those in the near future.

Our solar power station has been put back until August now due to a lack of photovoltaic cells. Luckily for me they have also changed the way they anchor the posts (our system is too large for the roof) so now I don’t have to dig 20 x 1m deep postholes.

Spreading Seed

Myself and Tanya a friend of ours from up the road at Jerangle (wave), went out to Lynfield Park at Gunning and had a look at the amazing tree plantings out there. I’m not much on which tree is which – but that’s all changing (sorry Matthew). I was really impressed by the modification that planting trees can have on the microclimate of an area. It was my first real encounter with fodder trees, something I’ve recently become very interested in. The man who runs the property, John Weatherstone was great, he gave us a great briefing on the history of the property, his vision and how he accomplished what he had. As a bonus - at the end of the day he filled the back of my Ute with wool packs of seed trash, which is the pods and stuff left over from seed collecting. The trash contains loads of seed still and is good for sowing across rip lines in a paddock; we saw the results of John had done at Lynfield Park. I was also lucky enough to be given some Palonia seeds for the Cook – she has been wanting to try growing these for years, she was very happy when I arrived home, seeds in hand.

During the week on the way home one evening I spied a grove of Honey Locus trees on the side of Adelaide Avenue. These are great fodder trees and resist cold better then the carob trees. Animals feed on the large seed pods they drop in autumn. I pulled over and filled a feed bag with pods and took them home. Unfortunately, the pigs have found the bag and I’ve lost some of the pods – but at least they like them.

So the next Saturday a friend, Paul, from the NSF and I spent the morning out on the quad bikes seeding the top gully, I think we managed to do about and acre or so – now we need to wait for spring and see what germinates.

I attended a presentation about the water/plant cycle and its affect on Climate Change. This dealt with the establishment of micro climates to help cool the planets surface and about how if we control the amount of solar energy used to do activities other then just heat the soil we can increase productivity and mitigate the some CO2 generating processes.

Rip Line

The kids had a group of mates over for a sleep over as well; it’s a highlight of the school holidays for them. On the Saturday before everybody was due to arrive I had gone into Cooma to get some supplies. Whilst I was out Fatso the pig knocked over a beehive which is located quite close to the house. The Cook asked me to go have a look at it when I got home. The lid had come off the box and it was laying in pieces on the ground, I walked over top it and had a look, the bees appeared to be calm so I thought I’d give putting it back together a go. But they weren’t quite as calm as I had first thought; resistance began to grow, so a deliberate withdrawal to the house was in order.

I got into my bee suit and ventured back to the hive and began putting it back together. No sooner had I got out there and bent down to pick up the first box when a very savage bee managed to sting me right on the end of my rather big enough already nose. I swear he took a run up – I saw him coming, it was like a kamikaze – it all happened in slow motion. I’ve been stung before – but this ‘really’ hurt.

Wolf Spider

The rest of the bees seemed to sense victory and in a few seconds they were all over me – a second withdrawal was in order, this time I was perused and harassed for some distance. I returned after a short break to regain my composure, I took a long walk around the paddock trying to avoiding bees which were still following me.

A little while later, after I had managed to break contact with the bees I went back and fixed the bee box and made sure they were secure. I went inside to ice my throbbing – now humungous nose.

All the Cook was do was look at me and laugh, she had me sit on the lounge and put a bag of frozen corn on my face – that didn’t help, but at least I couldn’t see her laughing at me, just hear it. Poor dogs got a couple of stings as well.

The Cook has had her fair share of pain and agony this month as well. Whilst I was away one day she had to help somebody load some pigs. One of them was an awfully pregnant sow. Now, we tell people to bring a trailer, that we don’t have a ramp and that it’s hard to load up a ramp. And then people turn up with 4WD’s with crates on the back and we have to try and lift 120kg moving, thrashing, squealing pigs into it. The only guy’s that have done it well were the two Police Officers just before Christmas – but they have a lot of experience.

Seed

Anyway, the Cook is helping this fellow load his pigs, luckily the tractor driver turned up to do some slashing and was able to give a hand. But, in the struggle, the Cook managed to get her hand jammed in the side of the crate and crushed her thumb. She told the guy’s she needed to get some ice and ran back to the house – were she nearly fainted on the floor. Once she had regained he composure she stuck the bag of frozen corn on her hand and went back out to help the tractor driver change a tractor tyre. How’s that for tough! That’s why I do what I’m told.

Other news – I’m off to do my Permaculture Design Certificate next week. Looking forward to this, I’ve had to do a lot of reading prior to the course – which I don’t really like, but it has been very educational. I must thank Tanya again for loaning me some great books from her library.

2011-03-17T14:08:00.000+11:00

Firstly – Happy Birthday Dad! St Patricks Day again.

Things are slowing down in the garden, I think we are getting the last of the zucchinis’, the cucumbers are slowing down and the strawberries are just a trickle. Can’t wait until our pumpkins ripen – from the one vine we’ve got almost a dozen large pumpkins!

I helped run the NSF booth at the Cooma show, we met a lot of nice people including Tristan and Jessica, they were great because they read the blog – see it really was me!

NSF Booth Cooma Show 2011

Anyway, they are taking over a property to the south west of Cooma and are keen to do things right, including using biodynamically. Hopefully our group will be able to help them out. Unfortunately it rained a bit at the show which kept the numbers down, it was also obvious that old heads aren’t as interested in NSF as all the visitors to our booth were either new land owners or hobby farmers.

Lamb after Cooking

We had a large group of people around on Canberra Day for a sort of open farm for friends. One of the pigs obliged by having piglets the day before, and the rain held off until everybody had left. We didn’t cook a pig this time we had a lamb, and keeping up the tradition managed to set it alight as well. But, having learnt at least one thing from last time we didn’t have it under a tree. The fire was quickly and calmly managed, I didn’t even know it had happened having been dragged off by the kids to see the piglets. I came back around the house to here somebody say (whom was linked to the last fire) ‘Help me scrape the burnt bits off before he gets back’.

The lamb was delicious, the cake table was superb, the company was great and the afternoon turned out to be very pleasant and enjoyable. We were so impressed at the generosity of everybody, we had so many salads and deserts, homemade rolls and bread it was truly astonishing.

Lamb after eating

Mrs D was in attendance and she brought with her a new Drake for our Khaki Campbell girls – it was love at first sight and I don’t think the girls have let him out of there sight since. She also bought the most magnificent mint jelly made by one of her neighbours – it was just perfect and made the lamb taste even better, hot and cold. Luckily she left it behind, I’ll return the jar for a refill later (the Cook would like the recipe hint hint).

We had a couple of set backs this week as well. Our pump got submerged for the umpteenth time after the creek rose suddenly on Friday. We had about 65mm on Thursday night/Friday morning, I left early Friday and the Cook didn’t notice the river – it probably hadn’t changed much at the time – by the time we got home it was well and truly up and the pump was bobbing around at the end of the pipe under six foot of water. I cleaned it up, but didn’t manage to get all the water out; sadly now she has had to go off to the Honda shop for a rebuild this time (yes because I tried to start it – it blow smoke for a second and seized, crap!). No showers for a week kids! The amount of rain we have had this year is unbelievable – nearly 200mm just this month alone.

Our feed supply man Greg, has come down with a sudden and very serious illness – I hope he gets well, and the Cook and I wish him all the best. Unfortunately we can’t get our feed that cheap or as good a quality anywhere else, so I’m off to Griffith this weekend to pick it up, that’s about 350km away to the west. It’s still cheaper then getting it here, and if I get a double order cuts down on the extra cost as well.

We’ve sold so many pigs this year. I’ve lost count of how many have gone, and last week we received an order for 20 over the next 4 weeks. So as well as driving to Griffith I’ve got four trips to Sydney in the next couple of months. On a rough count, we’ve gone from nearly 100 pigs to about fifteen or less by the time these leave. We plan on getting back to just our 5 foundation sows, their piglets, Little Pig, Floppsy and Fatso and the two boars. Specially now our feed man is out of action.

We have a couple of regular customers Ivan and Zvenda (sp), they have ordered another two weaners and are taking our oldest barrow to make into sausages/salami’s for us – half each. They are lovely people and ply the Cook with home made wine for a reduction on prices. They bought over a lovely shiraz the other day which we shared at the open day – I don’t drink, but was told it was very good.

Our Solar power station goes in a month which is very exciting. I’m waiting for the design drawings to come so I can get the holes and trenches dug – another job to do.

We’ve almost finished the first stage of new fencing for the Permaculture project and, probably not this weekend but the next, will have that finished. The small bull is back and the other bull and our cow are somewhere down the creek just waiting for it to be finished. I’ll get it slashed next week so that it’ll have fresh growth in time for winter.

So we are looking forward to apple picking and acorn collecting over the next few weeks as well – they say there’s time to sleep when your dead.

The seasons change

2011-03-02T11:22:00.000+11:00

So much has been happening over the past couple of weeks, lets see if I can remember.

We had our field day with the Permaculturalists and the NSF the other week; it went really well with lots of good feed back, more about this later.

The Cooks Pumkin Vine

The Cook has been cooking. I saw over on Mrs Ducks blog that’s she’s been doing the same. My cook, beloved that she is, has made up a big batch of the best plum jam, bottles of spaghetti sauce and many, many cakes covered in wild black berries or choking with fresh rhubarb and zucchini. This woman is amazing she can turn a beaten up cucumber, an egg and two radishes into a meal fit for a King (or me – which ever). Her garden is going wild at the moment with fresh garden vegetables a hilight of every meal, hopefully Autumn will be kind to us.

The Cooks favourite

We had a visit from the Cook’s townie sister as well. She didn’t like Ricky the rooster and his 2:30am crowing. The first night she tried to sleep through it, the second night she tried to evict him off the veranda with her foot and the third night – she got out of bed, picked up the rooster and toddled off with him down to the vegie patch. She dumped him in the tomatoes and stomped back to bed. About two minutes later, after thinking about what she had done, she realised that if a fox took Ricky the boys would never speak to her again. So off she toddled back down to the vegie patch, curlers in her hair face cream on, and spent the next few minutes looking for the rooster (she said he was lost – I’m pretty sure he was hiding). When she found him, she tucked him under her arm and carried him back to the house (I didn’t tell her he had caught lice). She placed him back on the railing where he perches and went back to bed – if only Ricky could speak, I’d love to ask him what he thought of it all.

Harry helping fence

We’ve been doing a bit of fencing- as usual. The Cook and the kids have been helping out as well. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve extended the garden out the front and started on the fence along the river. By the weekend we should be able to keep the neighbours cows out and our in. Once that’s finished, we’ll slash the front paddock, graze it over winter and then have the pigs plough it during the first rain and plant some feed crops out there for the next winter.

We had a visit form Lisa the Saddle Back pig. She was dropped off to be covered by our boar Tiberius. I have never seen a pig dig so much in my life. Our pigs have never turned the ground like this one. It was like the difference between a 100hp John Deere and a 15hp Kubota lawn tractor. Might have to invite his pigs over when I want to dig up my front paddock. The other thing she did was tip over the water trough – everyday! There wasn’t a single day were I didn’t have to jump in with them and turn the trough back over. In exchange for services we did receive a bag of very nice Biodynamic apples and a bag of Biodynamic Garlic – the Cook was very pleased.

Tiberius sitting and Lisa Laying down - water trough tipped over.

There’s been some big snakes about lately as well, and for the first time I‘ve encountered a rather large Tiger Snake. The tally for this year around the house has been seven brown and the tiger.

Lucerne Paddock - the little pigs love this.

Fencing the Urban Homestead

2011-02-28T14:20:00.001+11:00

Firstly I’ve got to catch up on the fencing. So far we have looked at where to fence and our tools – next is materials. These are the essential elements of a good pig paddock;

1. Hinge joint fencing – you need the 8x 80x15 wire. This means the wire is 8 strand, 800mm high with 150mm spacings. Pigs don’t jump so it doesn’t need to be high and if you need more height because of stock in adjacent paddocks you can always put on a top strand of wire. This comes in lengths of 100m. If you are only fencing in your large pigs you can use one of the larger hinge joint sizes - which all come in 200m rolls.

2. High tensile plain wire – best off with the 2.5mm, it somes in 1500m rolls.

3. Medium tensile tie wire.

4. 165cm steel pickets, one for every two metres of fence.

5. Electric fence stand off’s – one every three steel posts.

6. End insulators – one for tying off the start and finish and one for each corner or bend in the fence.

7. I use gripples to tie my wire so you need one per join.

8. Gate and hinges. The larger the gate the better, you may need to get a tractor into the paddock or back up a float to transport a pig.

9. Gate posts and corner posts. I use the steel water pipe strainers, this is because I plan to move my paddocks around and want to be able to re-use as much as possible. I almost forgot to mention stays - you'll need two for each corner and one for each gate post.

10. Insulated wire and joiners for the electric fence.

11. Cable ties, and

12. A good sense of humour or the ability to swear like a trooper.

Homesteading Humour

2011-02-24T14:44:00.001+11:00

This came from a Queensland Newspaper after the recent flooding.

Our story this year is also about how ordinary people survive extraordinary events. Part of what it means to be a Queenslander is to laugh in the face of adversity. As I travelled through flood ravage towns I witnessed our sense of humour act as a source of strength.

At the Helidon evacuation centre I met an elderly couple from Grantham whose home had been taken by the waters. As they stood shivering before me the elderly gentleman was too overcome with grief to speak.

His wife, who was missing her top row of teeth, stepped in with all the tenderness of a lifetime partner and said; "Premier, this is my husband. The waters rose fast and I had to leave my teeth behind to save him. Right now I'm not sure I made the right choice."
They lost everything, but they still had each other, and they still knew how to laugh.

Stories like this that have been told and retold across the state. They have raised a smile amongst the misery and have they raised our spirits in our darkest hours.
These are stories told by Queenslanders, like Baralaba piggery owner, Sid Everingham, who was asked by a local reporter if he'd suffered any stock losses in the floods.
"I've had 30 sows and pigs go down the river," he replied.
The next day the front page headline said '30,000 PIGS SWEPT AWAY - PIGS FLOAT DOWN THE DAWSON". The locals wondered how they'd missed the avalanche of pork. Maybe pigs do fly after all.

Homesteading

2011-02-22T20:49:00.000+11:00

Ha ha! see this Homesteading

Fencing Part 2

2011-02-10T14:58:00.000+11:00

I made a decision when we moved to the farm to always have the right tools for the job. Fencing tools can be expensive but I’ve found that expensive doesn’t always mean best quality. Ask around for what people recommend, field days are a good place to compare both quality and price.

Here are the items I’ve found essential for building your pig fence;

1. Good fencing pliers. Fencing pliers can range in price from $25 to $100 and as time goes by you’ll lose a few. I like to have a pair with the rubber grips for doing electric and a set without for tying Cobb & Co hitches.

2. Wire spinner. I bought a good one of these from Waratah; problem was it took me two years to work out how to use it. Since then it’s been a dream, you can’t run wire with out one.

3. Wire strainers. I bought an average priced set of strainers years ago and they have never let me down, I also bought two sets of the waratah ones when I bought my hinge joint strainers and they are just crap. They don’t always chain, the jaw springs gave out after a couple of uses and the wire grips chew the wire – I would avoid them at all costs.

4. Steel post driver. I have two and a pneumatic one. The mandrolic version is good for quick jobs, but if you’re putting in a hundred posts nothing beats the pneumatic driver. Steer clear of the Chinese copies (about $599), I got mine from Marchant Engineering in Sydney (about $2000) with a petrol driven compressor, it works a dream. I’ll probably invest in more air tools as I go.

5. Steel post lifter. You can’t get steel posts out with out one. Make sure it has a good solid large foot plate other wise you’ll just sink it into the ground when ever you use it.

6. Fence post shovel. You need a good one, I like the wooden handle version, I’ve had mine now for twenty years.

7. Heavy crow bar. You’ll need one with a tamping end. Don’t get the light weight versions, they may be easier to pick up but they bend easily.

8. Bolt cutters. For cutting wire, much easier cutting wire with bolt cutters then fencing pliers.

9. Shifting spanner. For attaching hinges for gates.

10. Level or plumb bob. For getting those posts strait.

11. Tape measure. Make sure it’s at least 5m, you loose a lot of these – and I’ve buried a couple down fence post holes as well.

12. 10lb sledge hammer – everybody needs a sledge hammer, don’t go cheap here. I’ve broken the head of a Chinese made sledgy, a rather large piece sheared off and hit me in the face whilst banging in a post once, so go for quality with a good handle.

13. 20 Litre bucket – for wire off cuts and carrying tools.

14. Fencing clip pliers. These are used to attach chicken wire or mesh wire to your fence. There are two types, and we use both, made by white’s wires; the plier’s type is fine for small jobs. The other is a spring fed pliers; they hold about 50 fasteners and are great for bigger jobs.

Lets talk fencing - Part 1

2011-02-08T10:35:00.000+11:00

Okay, let’s talk about fencing. I’m going to spread this out over the week so I can cover everything in as much detail as possible. So firstly here’s a list of considerations for where to locate a paddock or pen for your pigs;
1. Are you farming free range or are you just running them in a pen. This is important because it relates directly to paddock size and the amount of materials you will need. From our experience pigs are happier in paddocks then pens. They do less damage to the paddock the bigger it is, and as long as they are well feed they won’t try to push out of the paddock.

2. To minimise materials, pick as flat a piece of ground as possible, small pigs will take advantage of any weakness in your fence and undulating ground provides many.

3. Make sure it is close to a water supply or somewhere you can run water to.

4. Ensure there is shade in the paddock. Remember shade moves and changes through out the day, so check the area you are putting your paddock during different times of the day to ensure there is always shade available.

5. Make sure it is close to power, solar energisers are good but prolonged wet weather or a break down can get ugly if you don’t have a backup plan.

6. Keep your paddock close to your loading/unloading facility, vet crush and sorting yards – it’s probably best having them integrated.

7. Better to build the fences for the smallest size pigs you are going to have first. So if you are planning on breeding your pigs, it’s important to start by building a fence that will keep the piglets in and the predators out.

8. You’ll need to use electric fencing; there is no other option – honestly.

9. You need to identify an area to isolate any sick animal – you can use temporary fencing like sheep panels for this. But again it will need shade, water and electricity. Isolation paddocks are best located at the front of a property were access is easy and people, like vets, who may need to see the animal don’t have to come into contact with healthy animal and risk contamination.

10. Although a flat area is best ensure the area you pick has some drainage and is not located with in a flood plain or an area that runoff drains into a dam or creek. The high level of nutrients in the soil can cause problems, like algae blooms, for you after big rain events.

11. Pigs can cope better with the cold then they do with the heat, so it’s very important if you live in a place which has regular temperatures over 25 degs in summer to have a wallow. Wallows also help with the control of parasites and other skin conditions. We live in an area were lice are a real problem and the only way to control them with out chemicals is if the animals have access to a wallow.

Please feel free to ask any questions.

Some re-assembly required

2011-02-02T09:15:00.001+11:00

It was really, really hot last night. Normally, when it’s that hot we have a fan in the bedroom to help keep things cool. The Cook decided that she was going to watch a movie so the fan was left in the lounge room and she promised to bring it in to the bedroom later when she came to bed.

After a while of laying in bed sweating, I decided to liberate the fan and forcibly relocate it to the bedroom – not hard she was asleep on the lounge with Dirty Dancing blurting out of the TV. At about 2:38am, the rooster started to crow, the Cook had in between managed to sneak into the bedroom and into bed. Something happened and the rooster startled her and she left the – walked past the fan, on her way out.

On her way back she trip over the fan and sent it crashing to the floor – boy, can she swear. The next half hour she spent, with a torch in her mouth, trying to reassemble our $10 pedestal fan from Aldi’s. She swore and swore, she couldn’t find parts and couldn’t fit bits back together. Finally, she stacked up enough of MY clothes around the base, a suitcase and other miscellaneous items that the fan stood on it’s own accord – but now it doesn’t rotate.

Some how she thought that all the swearing and banging and crashing hadn’t woken me up. As she very carefully climbed back in bed I rolled over and said to her – “If you had of asked, I could’ve driven a steel post into the bedroom floor and wired the bloody thing up, would’ve been quieter”

We’re still married.

And, Mrs Duck, after telling you the Ducks weren't laying the other day, they've layed two eggs between them in the last two days, isn't that a coincidence!

2011-01-28T14:12:00.001+11:00

We are having a farm planning workshop with the NSF in a couple of weeks so we’ve started getting busy readying for this. If your reading this and interested in attending send me an email via the blog.

The aim of the workshop is to introduce people to the ideas about blending NSF with other alternates farming principles like permaculture and biodynamics. The topics we will addressing include;

1. Healthy landscape,

2. Healthy soil,

3. Sustainable production,

4. Drought proofing.

5. Food security

It’s taken me a while to discover the links between all these things, about how NSF, Permaculture, biodynamics and methods like pasture cropping are key to establishing a sustainable farming enterprise. And sustainability is the goal – in any type of season, which means all inputs have to be from on farm, non chemical and non petroleum based.

The map shows the area we will concentrate on for the project, after the workshop we will further cut it down into phases.
And why do we feel it’s important to create a sustainable farming enterprise, go here and read this - go here!

2011-01-27T16:56:00.001+11:00

Yep – been fencing, a lot lately. Still need to get my electric fence up and running again. It’s been down for a couple of days now and it won’t be long until the pigs work that out. Weed chipping has been another priority this week with things drying out we need to get the majority of the weeds out before they go to seed.

Safe!

This weekend is going to be a couple of days of spraying weeds in the conservation areas. The tussock weeds have really taken off this summer and need to be contained and removed before they spread even further.

We’ve had a couple of snake incidents this week as well. Both down in the Cooks garden and both brown snakes. One keeps getting into the chicken shelter under the compost tubs. I was down there the other day and a smallish snake had managed to get in with the chicks, the mother hen was fighting it off and the seven chicks had climb up to the top of the wire and were hanging upside down watching the fight.

I managed to get between the snake and the chicken, but trying to get the snake out, stop the dogs getting the snake and protecting the chook was a challenge. It ended slithering out under the pumpkin bush back to the gully. The other one was a little more exciting, I was going out to move some fence posts, luckily I was carrying the shovel, this one was laying along side the steel water pipe stainer posts and when I picked one up I disturbed it. Unfortunately the snake turned on me and I had no choice but to wacked it with the shovel before he had a go at me. I really hate snakes!

Floppsy leaving her bath

I got up the other morning to squeals of delight coming from the old bath tub water trough next to the house. It was a lovely morning, probably about 23 deg and still, I went out to investigate and found Floppsy the Pig taking an early morning bath in the trough. I tried to get a photo but she is a little shy and prudish, so I only got her as she left. I could just imagine her sitting in the tub wearing a shower cap and washing her back with a loafer.

List number 1

2011-01-27T10:59:00.000+11:00

Here are the 10 things I’ve learned about pig fencing over the last few years –

1. You need to use twice as many steel posts as you thought.

2. You’ll never keep them all in.

3. You’ll need three times as many steel posts as you first thought.

4. Pig fences don’t have to be high – until they learn to jump.

5. You’ll need four times as many steel posts as you previously thought.

6. Don’t put a fence between a pig and its food.

7. You’ll need to buy steel posts by the pallet.

8. Don’t throw away the pallet – you can use it for pig fencing.

9. Pig wire only comes in 100m lengths – you’ll need 120m to finish the job.

10. When you think you’ve finished fencing – the pigs will have dug enough soil out from under your fence to make you have to move them all.

Work to do

2011-01-20T14:05:00.000+11:00

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

Boomerangs

2011-01-13T15:55:00.001+11:00

I hope everybody has survived Christmas; ours was quite and mostly restful. It did take me 10 days to mow the lawn with the brand new 21 inch cut, 190cc lawn mower that I bought the Cook for Christmas. Normally we buy second hand mowers from garage sales; I’ve broken three since we’ve been on the farm so this time I splurged on a new one. Apart from being able to start it first time every time, it mows twice as wide rows as the others. It’s made a huge difference to how long it takes to mow the lawn, but it hasn’t made any difference to how fast it grows back.

The lawn had grown so long that it was up to my shoulders by Christmas, Ben had been lost in the yard for a day and night and nobody noticed, we all thought he was doing the waters. He was finally able to follow one of the pigs out at feed time. By the time I made it to the last few rows I had to scythe the long grass first, hunt out the tigers and then mow it a couple of times.

As is tradition at Valley View we had a Christmas Day litter of pigs, ironically it was from the same sow that supplied us with our Christmas ham. She gave birth to a lovely litter of fine piglets ready for this year’s (2011) Christmas.

We have also had a great deal of chickens hatching with clutches of chicks all over the house and yard. Unfortunately only one of the Lavender Araucana’s green eggs has hatched so far. With any luck the other five or so eggs will hatch out over the next couple of days.

Our most exciting news was the first jars of Valley View Honey! The bees had built honey comb on the lid of one of the hive boxes and when I went to add an extra super to the hive I decided to remove the comb so the lid would fit again. I obviously need to put a mat on the top of the frames in that box. The girls did us proud and from just a small amount of comb we managed to extract three large jars of honey, almost enough to last a few months if the cook can stop giving it away. She did do all the extraction and received a sting on the finger for her troubles. And it tasted just divine. We are still only amateurs as far as the Bees, there’ll be a lot of learn as you go, luckily I have Mrs D’s number if I get stuck!

We sold a lot of pigs over the break; every other day pigs were going off. I now only have about 25 grower pigs left for next year. As the majority of these are boars I’ll probably have to take them down to the pig sales in February. We have about twenty piglets which we are keeping for hams for this years Christmas. I’m planning on having no piglets over winter this year and resting the sows.

Somebody whom bought pigs uttered a side ways word about their wife wanting goats, the Cook’s ears instantly pricked and she was off like a dog with a bone.

She had the goats organised the people over and all four loaded in their truck before you could blink, Bendy and Nudge even allowed themselves to be caught with out putting up the usual fight. The Cook waved them off and felt satisfied she was finally rid of them – until today.

The people who took the goats called just after lunch. They found that our beautiful, lovely, placid goats didn’t want to integrate into their herd (what ever that means) so have decided to bring them back – The cook has been bitten on the bum by KARMA! I hope they had a nice holiday, I’ll be there to welcome them back (I’m laughing to myself) and build their new paddock behind the house.

Flaming Pig

2010-12-16T15:43:00.000+11:00

Things are starting to dry out and get back to normal at last after more then 200mm of rain over the past couple of weeks. Not that I really know what normal is, maybe I’d be better just saying less messy. Floppsy has been breaking out the last few mornings, I’ve figured out where she’s getting out and now I just need to fix the hole she has made in the fence before she entices more pigs to escape. She’s a real pest when she gets out and if she gets into the Cooks garden then we are both toast.

The river peaked again on Thursday, only slightly lower then it has on previous occasions. It’s still running well and if it stayed like it is for the rest of the year we’d be happy. We love the sound the running river makes, at night you can here the water, the banjo frogs bonking away, the water various birds and rustling of the leaves in the poplar trees. It’s so peaceful I lay awake listening for hours – probably why I’m tired some mornings.

I was lucky enough to be up just before dawn this morning and watched the sun rise over the mountains, there was a slight summer mist and heavy dew on the grass. The pigs were up early as well, snuffling around in the paddocks it was so peaceful and tranquil. It’s such a shame it only lasts for a short while before the traffic, planes and flies drown out the serenity.

Over the weekend began to make the Cook her wheat garden, the pigs (hog tractors) had done a great job in clearing and digging up the area and all I needed to do was fence it and turn the ground over. So hopefully by autumn we’ll have a nice patch of wheat ready for making into winter bread. The Cook was looking at the patch last night and we were talking about the wheat, she asked how were we going to husk the wheat when it was ready, we’ll work that out when we get to it I said – I’m pretty sure she’s gone to work and the first thing she’ll do is Google it.

The latest batches of piglets are getting bigger, and there mums are looking great – summer piglets are so much easier on the mums. We’ve got pigs going in all directions at the moment as well. It seems every body wants there own, which is good for the industry and good for small farmers.

Yesterday we had our first venture into spit roasting a pig. I had picked out a nice little pig (36kg without head) to try out my brand spanking new 40kg rated pig spit! If it went well I was taking it to the world. So I arrived at 5am at an undisclosed location, in Canberra, with all my equipment on a trailer. Unfortunately the ranger couldn’t get there before 8am to unlock the gate so I had to push the trailer last 200m. This took me back to those PT sessions in the army when we pushed trailers full of water jerry’s around Lavarrack Barracks – SGT Lawson always said we’d be grateful to the army for training us to do this one day.

Anyway, I got everything set up and working by 6:30am, lots of joggers in Canberra around that time. We stuck the pig on the spit and realised it was six inches too long, that was no problems – we had a saw. So, at 6:30am me and another guy are holding this pig down, covered in a sheet, on a park bench – somewhere in Canberra. Sawing the head off was pretty easy in the end and onlookers seemed to disperse quickly. We got the fire going and had the pig nicely rotating over the coals. Everything seemed to be going well and my off sider decided to clear out and pick up some more heat beads.

So off he trundled, I sat down and started to get the baste ready for the pig. I suppose the spit had been going for about an hour when the counter weight must off broken off and threw the pig out of balance, this inturn broke the shear pin on the motor and the pig stopped turning. I walked over to the pig to take a look at what had happened. The pig was too heavy for me to take off on my own and the coals were going well at this stage, so I decided I should hand turn it. I walked over the trailer to grab the handle when I heard the fire roar into life, the pig had been dripping fat onto the fire and things started to get exciting. We had placed the spit under a very large elm tree, the branches were well above the spit and in the beginning we thought it would be fine. But as the fire took hold of the spit and the pig it started to catch the tree as well. So, there I was watching the brand new spit, a 35kg pig and a rather large elm tree burst into flames only 200 metres from Parliament House – crap. I tried to rescue the pig but it was just to heavy, then I remembered I had put a bucket in the trailer, so I grabbed that and ran down to the lake to fetch some water. By the time I got back everything was well alight, so with a fairly large feeling of helplessness I started tossing water on the coals – with much relief the water worked and after the second bucket the fire had died out.

So now I just had a very black pig, a scorched tree and a burnt out spit to fix before 1:30 pm. Luckily some people form the office arrived and set to scrapping the black off the pig and somebody else fixed the motor, by 10:30am we had the pig turning over a nice bed of coals with a bucket of water at arms distance just in case.

By 1:30pm the pig was done to perfection, the Cook turned up to inspect our achievement ( I had rung her earlier for advice, but had to hang up because she was incapacitated by side splitting laughter) and was very impressed. I haven’t had the courage to check the spit out yet, I think I’ll leave that for the weekend.

It's a jungle out there

2010-12-06T17:14:00.000+11:00

I managed to get stung by bees twice on the one ear on Saturday. I spent the weekend with one giant ear and one normal ear – very uncomfortable. Worse thing is now I’m down two bees.

We’ve hatched a nice brood of chicks this week. I don’t recall how many there are now, but they are all looking good and healthy. The Wellsummer and the Arcona chicks I picked up the other day are looking good as well. They are getting a good covering of feathers and should be ready for the out side soon. Unfortunately we lost a duck last night to the foxes, just one is unusual, I’ll have to have a look around with the spotlight tonight.

We’ve had a lot of rain, over two hundred millimetres to date in the past couple of weeks. The poor old pigs houses are flooded out and they are sleeping under the stars at the moment – I need to get in and scrape out the mud. We’ve sold a few as well, which is good and usual for this time of year.

The bees have been keeping my busy. I had to make up some frames for the hives and then discovered a new swarm had occupied one of the boxes in the shed – that’s how I got stung. The Cook never told me about them, she knew, and I walk across their flight path twice, she did ask if I was allergic.

My lawn mower is dead and the lawn is shoulder high at the moment – it’s got way past being scythed. I do the paths and around the taps still with the scythe – but I think I heard a Hoop Snake last night so we’d better be careful. There’s a big bunch of piglets keeping the dog occupied as well, she just loves following them around and making sure they don’t get too far away from mum.

We’ve also invested in a Solar Farm for the property. It’ll be erected in February and be producing electricity for both us and the grid. It’ll combat future price rises in electricity for the time being, but nobody knows what’s happening there.

The Cook has been making some great bread rolls lately and Sunday lunch was a true testament to her talents. We had beautiful bread rolls made from freshly milled organic wheat, fresh ham from the farm and garden salads. All this followed by her now famous rhubarb cake – just delicious, wouldn’t swap her for a tractor!

Last week also saw the last of this year’s pigs go off to the abattoir, I thought we would have trouble hitting 60kg dressed on them but the biggest came in at 73kg which was excellent and of the five they averaged 58kg which was perfect. One is destined for the spit roast which is why the average is a little below 60kg, my spit roaster can only handle a 40kg pig.

I had a chance to visit Mrs D during the week and was lucky enough to try a selection of her Mulberries – very yummy!! I’ve never had a white mulberry before, they were very nice. The Cooks berries are going well to, we went down the garden last night and tried some red currents and ‘a’ logan berry I think. She was so proud of it, it was very big and very juicy – it fell of the bush whilst she was showing me and Ben nearly snapped it out of her fingers, she managed to get half!

Going Slowly

2010-11-25T13:48:00.000+11:00

Keeping moisture in the soil may not seem a real challenge if you live somewhere like Central Queensland, Kent or Maine. You may never have to experience the depth of Drought that we have just emerged from here in the South East of NSW. But it sends a clear message – use this time to prepare for the next one, because the next one will probably be worse.

The other day I talked about change and this preparation is all part of that. The solution we have arrived at is a blend of NSF, Permaculture, organics and biodynamic and, of course, our own experiences. The solution we are moving towards involves constructing a number of swales across the length of the farm paddocks, the swales are lined with deciduous trees on the up hill slope and fruiting trees, shrubs and bushes on the down hill slope. Between these swales we will run our pigs on a linear rotation with smaller paddocks for winter and larger paddocks for summer. This will also involve portable water and pig arks to complete the system.

The idea is that the pigs will live amongst avenues of trees providing both shade and a food forest for ourselves and the pigs. The deciduous trees and pigs provide the nutrients for the fruit trees and the swales transfer the water and nutrients back into the soil. The trees also provide the shade and protection from wind which decreases the amount of surface evaporation.
This is very close to the Dehesa Farm (thanks Emily) style from the Iberian (Spanish) Peninsula where the famous Spanish Bellota Hams are produced – start to see the idea. Unfortunately we’ll probably never get to the point where our pigs can roam between the trees – but the kids should. The Spanish use acorn trees, which we will also use, as well as, Hazel nuts, apples, pairs and persimmons. In thirty years we’ll have the most beautiful autumns you could imagine.
This, unfortunately, isn’t going to happen over night and it means a lot of planning, fence moving, tree planting and water pipe installed. Not to mention the earth works!
Thanks to Russell for his link to Sugar Mountain Farm as well, I read their Blog often and have watched some youtube videos they’ve done. I didn’t realise they ran their pigs in the woods however; again a little slow on the up take!

The Cook went off to listen to Joel Salatin from PolyFace Farms speak about his farming system, I had seen his DVD, read some of his book and seen a farm using some of his methods - so I stayed home and help feed the pigs. She was impressed with the apprenticeship and intern programs that farms like his run in the US, another farm I’ve read about called Nature’s Harmony Farm has a similar program. The folks at NHF, Tim and Liz, have a podcast which is really good and worth listening to as well.

We have totally underestimated the demand for our – now famous Bredbo Valley View Farm Christmas Hams. The Cook and I have been inundated with requests for more hams this year. Unfortunately our problems getting a butcher mean we couldn’t do hams this year. I’m trying to organise the means to get a pig or two processed so I can do my own – but it’s becoming a race against the clock.

Changing

2010-11-23T15:20:00.000+11:00

Most people wouldn’t have given it any consideration, it never crossed my mind until recently – but now it’s going to change the whole face of the farm.

Back in April I talked about change and renewal, about how we were reassessing what we do, why and how. We looked at moving the farm to somewhere with more rain, Tasmania looked nice, but for various reasons that didn’t work so we decided to stay put. So that change didn’t happen – sorry Dad, I’m not going into politics.

So, to continue in regard to change. We attended a talk at the Natural Sequence Farming AGM; it was about farm planning, trees, permaculture and general farm philosophy. We had always intended to raise our pigs as naturally as possible and we thought that meant free range, but included pens, straw, shelters, wire and gates. But then somebody, out of the blue, made a statement “you know pigs are forest animals?”

I didn’t know what to say, I’d never even really thought about it. But it made sense. And put it all together with planning, trees, permaculture and animal welfare and it made perfect sense. We’d even seen it, talked about it – but never put it all together.

As an example, the pigs in the front paddock. They have trees, and they love nothing more then laying in the shade on a summer’s day, both the Cook and I have talked about it but never really connected the dots. Additionally we’d also had a sow escape and have a litter in the bottom of the paddock a while ago as well, we didn’t notice until a few days after they were born that the pig was missing. But the piglets were the healthiest and hardiest we have ever had. They had no shed, no shelter just long grass, shrubs and trees. They survived frost, rain and possibly foxes huddled together in the nest mum built in the low shrubbery.

We now let mother pigs out into the paddock to farrow, there are only mothers and piglets in the paddock and we try for one sow at a time. And it’s working, better then we ever expected. The other night, Harrison accidentally locked a mother pig up; separating her form her litter. The next morning I went looking for the piglets expecting the worse – but there they were, camped under a bush totally hidden right were she had left them. Mother and piglets were reunited after feed time and every thing was fine.

Climate is the other consideration; it has become obvious that the rain in our area now falls in pulses. We get large amounts over small periods with large drying gaps between events. We need to condition our farm to deal with this and thrive, instead of standing back and praying it will rain before everything dies. Fortunately, it appears there is a relatively simple solution to all of this and the results will speak for themselves.

I’ll talk about our plan in my next post – til then.

Attack chook

2010-11-18T11:35:00.000+11:00

Monday night I went to pick up the Bees from Monika. It took a while for all the Bees to come home to their box – but by 8pm I had them on the back of the truck and heading home. Monika help load them – I don’t think she was 100% sure about what we were doing (don’t tell her – neither was I). I unloaded them as soon as I got home and hopefully they awoke to a nice Valley View sunrise this morning. Surprisingly there was no rain this morning, its forecast for later today, and then warm and fine for the rest of the afternoon.

I had to get myself a new hoe handle, broke two on the weekend chipping weeds; weeds in these parts can be pretty tough. But it was probably the rocks that broke the hoe, weeds just hide them – it’s a conspiracy.
Of course I didn’t get home until late Monday and the pigs were very pleased to see me roll the feeds out at 9:30pm, well after dark. I managed to get everybody penned, fed and looked after, including myself by 11:30pm ready for a 4:45am rise to collect the bread in the morning.
And the $23 chicken the cook bought – just superb, we haven’t had a chicken that good for a long while. And with Harrison at school camp there was even some left over for lunches.
Tuesday night I came home to find the house driveway had subsided into the gas pipeline. Unfortunately the previous leaser of the TSR had ploughed across the drainage channels we had put in and helped cause the problems. I didn’t see the holes at first and had dragged the trailer load of bread across it before I realised what was happening.
More mushrooms coming up in the garden – but I’m not the only one eating them now, looks like the Possums are helping them selves to some as well.
I walked in the house last night and The Cook was limping around the kitchen, I asked her what was wrong and got;

“Bloody rooster! It attacked my foot today” to which I replied,

“Okay, the rooster is only so big how did it hurt you that bad?”

“It spurred me in the foot – it went right through my gum boot!”

- at this point I'm thinking it isn’t going well for the rooster, her foot had swollen up like a foot ball and was turning a nice shade of blue. I was starting to think that Coq au Vont was for dinner.
It didn’t help when I said “great now I have something for the blog”. The rooster survived, I'm borderline.
In the next couple of weeks we’ve got pigs going off for processing. Unfortunately we couldn’t get any hams done this year, we couldn’t find a butcher. Maybe we’ll have some during the year instead. I’m starting to think I might make my own for this Christmas.

Wet, wet, wet.

2010-11-15T16:39:00.001+11:00

The rain keeps falling, so far this month Valley View has had 95mm of rain in the gauge. We are luckier then some, Cooma has only recorded 40mm and others only a couple of kilometres down the road had less.

It’s all about weeds at the moment, whilst it’s to wet to spray in the paddocks; I’ve been chipping out weeds around the house yards. My hands feel like balloons on the end of broom sticks, and I can barely close one because my fingers are swollen, guess I’ll just have to harden up a bit more.

I was driving home on Friday afternoon, as usual listening to the ABC when I heard a familiar voice. Great interview Mrs D, Great topic – compost, and you came across as very professional and elegant – well done!
We had some friends come out for a visit on Saturday afternoon, Little Pig was on her best behaviour and took all the belly rubs on offer, at one point even Floppsie got in on the act.

On Sunday I managed to fit in an NSF Field Day out at Braidwood, Peter Andrews was there and the rain managed to hold off until the end. The Farm we visited was very impressive and the difference between the NSF property and his neighbours was telling. It would have been interesting to see the contrast during the worst of the drought. The owner had placed compost heaps containing dead animals, road kill, plant waste, discarded soil form dam bottoms, rock dust and other biowaste around his farm on the top of slopes, you could see the nutrient plumes flowing down the slope by the way the vegetation changed.

Sadly on Sunday we also lost one of our longest living farm critters, poor old Licorice the Guinea Pig died after seven years of squeaking, we noticed something was up the day before when he stopped squeaking for his food, so we sat him out on the lawn in the sunshine for the morning and he was gone by that afternoon - the Cook is going to put him under a rose bush today. I think he had a good life.

Have you ever really considered the real cost of food?? The Cook went off to the farmers market, she met a friend on the way in who told her she needed to try a chicken from a certain stall holder, she then ran into a stall holder we know and he told her the same – farmers market version of viral advertising! Anyway, off she trots to buy one of these great chickens. To look at the chicken you can see it’s something special, firstly it’s large, larger then normal store bought chickens. It’s got a healthy looking skin, sounds strange, I know – but it looked good. It was packaged in a simple plastic bag with a label. The chickens are pasture raised, down the coast some where; I’m not sure if they are grain fed as well.

The price for this treat, $23. Was it worth it?? We’ll see tonight, the Cook is doing her magic on it, can’t wait to try it – I’ll let you know how it goes. And what do I think about a $23 chicken?? If it’s more nutritious, tastes better, is grown better then $23 is the price we’ll pay. But first I have another hive to pick up, I left a box with Monika so she could paint it, and low and behold before she could do anything a swarm set up house in it.

2010-11-12T09:49:00.000+11:00

It ends like this, this is our farm track to the house.

Keeps raining

2010-11-12T09:48:00.000+11:00

Storms coming - we haven't seen these for a while

Little Pig says hi

2010-11-11T16:07:00.000+11:00

Hi!

Drought is over - for now.

2010-11-10T14:34:00.000+11:00

Snakes are about again – my favourite time of the year! Shadow nearly got bitten on Sunday, she put herself between a big brown snake and a bunch of boys staying for a sleep over. I was standing about twenty feet away chipping weeds and didn’t see a thing until it was all over.

It’s also that time of year again for AGM’s. we had the Bredbo Landcare Meeting a couple of weekends ago, a very informative talk from Martin Royds, a local farmer who won the carbon farmer of the year award a couple of years ago and is up for a farming diversity award this year. He talked about the importance of soil condition on the nutrient value of food and how he uses native species to drought proof his property.
We had the Natural Sequence Farming AGM the other night also, we had a presentation from Matt Kilby from Global Land Repair, he talked about different processes, the cross over of NSF, permaculture, soil biology and the relationship between trees, grass, fungi and bacteria.
I had a birthday, but I’ve still failed to grow up any, it passed quietly and the less said the better. I’ve sold a few pigs, some as pets – Scruffy has gone to a new home to be cared for by a family and she took a young fellow with her as company and ten other girls have gone out to new homes as well.

The Cooks garden is looking a treat and the strawberries are plentiful. Young Ben browses the bushes on his way in from the school bus. There are hundreds of young berries all over the patch; we haven’t had a crop like this since we arrived on the farm.
And the rain, last night alone we had 50mm, the road to the house was a river, dams on the TSR overflowed, our dams are all over flowing and luckily I pumped on Saturday because the river is up and brown once again.
Our total for the month is above 80mm, which isn’t bad when the monthly long term average is 65mm. It’s bringing on the grass and the weeds, so early December is going to be pretty busy for us.
With the rain we have had a bumper crop of mushrooms all over the farm. The Cook carried a monster lot up from the garden the other day and decided we would have them for dinner. She cooked them up; they smelt great, made some toast and scrambled eggs to go with them. I love mushrooms; I dished my self up a nice plate full and grabbed a couple of pieces of toast. I had started to eat them when I noticed she was only having eggs, I asked her why? She said “I’m not 100% sure they are safe to eat, so I’ll se if you survive and then I’ll try some” - I survived, the mushrooms tasted great, she’s eaten them since now she’s satisfied they are okay. At least now I know I am useful!
I’ve nearly finished the pig yards and just have to fill the loading ramp yard with dirt. We gave them a test run the other day without the dirt and it went pretty well. We got all the pigs we wanted onto the trailer with a lot less fuss and bother – I didn’t even swear which made the Cook very happy.
We are going out to have a look at a farm near Braidwood later in the week, on the farm they are using a lot of the NSF principles, native grasses, increased soil fertility and strict rotational grazing regimes to great effect.

They're back

2010-10-18T21:21:00.000+11:00

They’re back – and everything is well in the world again. I managed to survive a couple more pig maulings, one in a most delicate place and a month of cooking for myself.

I’ve managed to procure a number bee boxes at a good price, it involved a quick trip one evening down to Bega, but now I have enough to get myself started. As you may recall, Mrs Duck had provided me with my first swarm, temporarily housed in a broccoli box. Mrs D was going to give me a hand to move the bees into their new home, but she convinced me that I’d be okay to do it myself.

I now wonder if she has ever really read my blog? Surely she knows I stagger from one disaster to another, I appreciated the confidence – but, as Mr Spock would say – ‘Logic would suggest Jim’.

Ben and I moving the bees

Not being a skilled bee keeper in any fashion I knew one thing, or maybe two. Firstly I needed a bee suite and secondly, I probably couldn’t do it on my own. So, I borrowed a couple of bee suites and recruited a trusty off sider. Ben was wrapped that I asked him, just having celebrated his 12th birthday he was pretty chuffed he was going to do something so grown up. And operating the smoker was right up his alley.

So, we donned our suites and under mother’s watchful eye made our way to the bee box. Mrs D had told me it was easy, just plonk the frames full of bees into the new box, tip the left over bees in front of the box and that’s it. So we attentively lifted the lid – expecting the bees to swarm all over us in a very angry manner. However nothing could be further from reality. The bees stayed on the frames, we placed then in the same order into the box, shook the rest of the bees out of the old box and walked away. The bees were very well behaved, no angry girls, not much smoke and no stings. Unfortunately, I only had one box ready, so I need to put foundation on some others, get a queen excluder and stick a second super on them.

What I didn’t say was when I picked up the new boxes a new swarm was busily making one of the boxes its own. These boxes had been in storage since 1992, the guy had dragged them out for me to look at in the morning and came back to find the swarm hard at work. Its not a large swarm so we’ll see how they go.

So Mrs D confidence was well founded, her gifted bees did her proud and are now busy making the cook a fine box of honey for her winter cups of tea.

What else has happened – well over 60mm of lovely rain. The river is up again and the grass everywhere is green. I’ve never seen it so green and every dam in the country between us and Canberra is over flowing, we have never experienced such a great spring. Of course, with that much rain the pig’s house got as bit flooded, but that has dried out now and everything is well.

The Cook’s garden looks a treat, her potato’s have grown six inches and strawberries are thick and flowering – luckily we have bees, and the asparagus has been glorious. She spent the whole day in the garden weeding and planting today – she’s pretty happy with her new tap as well.

Unfortunately the rain has delayed the finishing of the pig loading ramp and yards, but the rain was well worth it.

Bee'n Buzzy

2010-10-08T23:07:00.001+11:00

Our new Bees in the tempary home

I've had a number of messages on the phone over the last couple of days - but none more welcoming then from the wonderful Duck Herder. Somehow, karma had alerted her that I had managed to track down some second hand barely used bee boxes. I don't know how she knew - but she did. She rang me with the news that she had a swarm and I could have it if I wanted - hell yeah!

I thought there was a bee meeting on that night so I headed into town, I'd pick up the bees on the way home. No meeting - I was a week early (I can hear the Cook sniggering from here) Anyway Mrs D turned up at the designated spot, smoker and tape gun in hand and we rustled them all up and stuck them in the back of the truck. I could here them buzzing about as I drove home and, to tell you the truth it was a little bit eary. By the time I got home and puilled up at teh spot I was going to leave them in it well oast 9pm, I opened up the back door of the truck and was a little concerned by the number of bees - outside the box! There wasn't alot I could do, I needed to get themn out of the truck so I decided I just had to suck it up and walk them over to their new home. But luckily they were all well behaved and polite and stayed on the box for me. It was a little bit concerning that I had to walk across the paddock in the dark carrying them.

I am constantly being stalked by the Bredbo Black Panther, he marches around the farm following the same track all day. He meows at me as he goes past and will sit on the trailer whilst I do the pigs breads in the morning, happy just to watch. He follows me everywhere in the evening so I don't forget to feed him and ends up on my lap most of the night.

We have had some new visitors the past few nights outside the kitchen window. It's the first time we've seen possums here up close - I had seen one down the river last year but this is the first so close to the house.

I can't wait until everybody gets home, it's been three weeks and I'm ready for my own holiday now. It takes me ages to feed up and water on my own each morning and night and add watering the garden, pumping, a few odd jobs that pop up and time really escapes from you. I was planning on doing so much and really have managed to do so little, oh well hopefully the new loading ramp and yard will be finished before they get back.

I got an earfull

2010-10-02T15:04:00.001+10:00

Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking, most of the times I figure that I don’t think enough, I suppose it could be laziness or just an over dose of self confidence – luckily the cook wasn’t here to hear me swear ( I think I made a pig blush!). How hard can it be to lay a couple of hundred of metres of poly pipe and fit some taps?? I think the easiest part was getting the roll of pipe off the truck by myself, chasing it down the hill and rolling it back up was a little difficult, and time consuming. I knew it had all gone wrong when I cut the ties around the roll and it exploded like an out of control slinky toy.

Anyway I managed to get it untangled and dragged out, with only a couple of kinks and one tap in a wrong spot – pretty much a success for me! I just need to wait until it rains so I can dig it into the ground (I’m sitting here laughing at myself – I think I’ve disconnected from my reality drive)

So now we have water to all the pigs paddocks and the kids won’t have to cart buckets of water to some of the pigs and the hoses run much better than before. In fact now we can water all the pigs at once and fill the feeds with water at the same time.

I tried to move the goose sitting on eggs yesterday, which ended in tears – for me. For some reason I think she was really attached to her spot, after coaxing her off the eggs with some yummy wheat, I bent over to pick up her eggs, I was trying to be really careful not to break any, I had planned to put them in the covered pen in a nice corner with some straw and other nesting material, but that was soon forgotten as she grab me by the ear and started swinging. Of course, I swore – which didn’t help, her mates all came running and soon I was on my hands and knees with a goose dragging me by the ear and five others honking and hissing all around me. I think the dogs were entertained, they watched from the safety of outside the chook pen.

Thankfully the goose let go after a few seconds (felt a lot longer), she’s still outside the covered pen and she keeps a weather eye on me whenever I go in there now.

I did a bit of shopping today, at the local rural store. I picked up some gear for a new set of pig yards, I had promised my mother I’d build them for the cook last time she was here – and now she might be coming back so I’d better get that done before she arrives (BTW Happy Birthday Mother OXO). I have a plan, I need a new loading ramp and a race, so I had a talk to the guys at the local steel yard and have all the options figured out – in other words they’ve confused the hell out of me, but I figure it can’t be that hard – right ??

So that’s tomorrows job, I need to dig about seven post holes – that’ll be fun, I love digging holes. I am also planning on having a go at shearing George. I got the shears out the other day and sharpened them up, they are an old set of hand shears, but I’ve got them nice and sharp. I took them out yesterday to see if they were sharp enough – normally I can just walk up to George and give him a pat, but he took one look at the shears and headed for the gully and blackberry bush and didn’t come out until I went back into the house. Next time I’ll take them out with me when I do the bread and have a go whilst he’s feeding his face out of one of the buckets – well that’s my plan.

End of another week

2010-09-25T00:38:00.000+10:00

Well, The Cook has taken the kids for a little break and I’m here looking after the place on my own. It was a frenzy of massive proportions the two weeks before she left. We had to spray 500 over the paddocks, get the cattle in and all the general organisation of going away.

We managed to do it with about five minutes to spare and the loss of only one finger – just kidding mum!

Since they have been away I’ve managed to reduce our poultry numbers somewhat. I made a pond for the ducks – it’s rather deep so the ducks and geese can have a good time diving and swimming. I didn’t realise that the roosters would try swimming as well! I’ve lost two so far and have to only open the pond when I’m in the chook pen, I feel like a life guard – and even with me standing there I’ve still had to drag a couple of roosters out of the water. Roosters aren’t the only things I’ve lost, three ducks have died and I wasn’t sure why – but now I know – the Turkey has been standing on them trying to mate, so know I have had to lock up the turkey, until spring is over. I must track down a hen for him in the next week or so.

Sadly that’s not all, I went out to feed Archer tonight and found he had died in his sleep, he was stretched out in his sunny spot and had just gone to sleep and not woken up. So tomorrow I need to dig him a great big hole in the flower garden. No more trips to the pub old fella!

Archer, in blue collar, Penny and Shadow

I had planned to do a lot this week – apart from the duck pond, but I spent a far bit of time collecting acorns in Cooma and sorting out animals. The horses led me on a merry chase down the river – my boots are still drying out, and I’ve lost the cattle out the back again.

I have to try and shear George this week – with the hand shears, he's overdue and it should be fun being his first time.

I got a great big bite from a pig this morning whilst I was feeding out the bread. It’s left an impressive mark, a bruise and drew blood. Luckily she got me on the elbow joint and not the arm proper, I think she would have broken it if she had got me on another part of the arm.

Had my first snake contact on Sunday, I lifted a box to make way for some feed and it slithered out at me, I lifted my skirts and ran screaming like a girl to the house, the snake was quickly moved on and I don’t think it’ll be bothering me again this year.

We’ve had a pig napping incident as well. Five pigs in all were taken, all small one’s – don’t know how they did it. But the Stock Squad found them bought them home – in the back of a ute. I’ve had to keep them separated from all the other pigs for the last six weeks. I also had to put tags in their ears – that was an experience, the boys helped, they tackled the pigs to the ground whilst I fixed the tag. The first one was fine, didn’t make a sound – we were all worried because we had never done it before. The second one squealed wildly and made us a little shy about doing the rest – but after five minutes we had them tagged and a month later they are still in – thank heavens.

So, this coming weekend I’ve got fencing and weeds to spray, I need to fence off the duck pond – that’ll need a roof as well and general tidy up – never a slow moment here. I need to check the Cooks garden as well, the days have been lovely and warm and I may need to water some things.

Time to pick a fight

2010-08-19T13:14:00.000+10:00

Just when you thought it was safe to post your latest Blog update you come across this http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/19/2987197.htm I urge anybody reading this to follow the link and read the article.

Monsanto is already the ugly big brother of modern agriculture. My personal belief is that their patenting genes related to food production is immoral and unjustifiable. If we, as a society, allow this behaviour to continue we risk affordable food production in to the future.
So please read the article and leave a comment – I don’t want this to go unchallenged!

Forget the election

2010-08-19T11:35:00.000+10:00

You all know my favourite thing in life is food. And there is a lot going on in the world of food at the moment. The political parties are biffing it out over who has an agriculture policy, and surely food security and bio security go hand in hand. The intensive pig farmers are trying to get people to boycott Coles and Woolies pork and shop at the farmers markets because of the debate over sow stalls – I say bring it on, for once the intensive guy’s are doing something I agree with. I bet Michael Croft at Mountain Creek wished he had as many pigs as us ready for the markets.
There is a lot out there affecting our food security. Various media reports have suggested that the world will approach peak Phosphorus by 2033, some disagree saying we will be able to reduce our dependence on P before then and can stretch out our supplies for a few more years. Problem with these things is you can never fully understand the way they derive their figures – does this include worst or best case population growth? They are talking about recycling human and animal waste to capture P and send it back to the farmers. The flaw in this argument is that only 50% of food crops grown are actually consumed and that means you only delay the inevitable - not stop it. And unfortunately with current agricultural methods we can not survive without it, our whole sustainable agriculture model depends on P.
It’s back top the same old question – what’s the definition of sustainable?? Is it being able to replace enough nutrients in the paddock to allow continual harvests or is it an holistic approach of managing the soil; it’s nutrients, microbial and fungal communities, the moisture and carbon content and the structure above and below the surface so that farming improves the overall soil health not degrades it.
I think Dick Smith has the right idea, bring the root cause of the problem to the fore. Population, what is a sustainable population?? By definition it’s a population that has no net effect on the landscape. I’ve heard the arguments form the business leaders – no population growth means no increase in productivity, which translates to no huge amounts of money in their big fat pockets. But the true cost of trashing the planet isn’t paid for by them – we pay for it, our taxes pay for it and the third world suffer for it.
I received an email from a like minded soul recently, he asked me if he could write a guest post for the Blog; he’s sent the following –

Guest Blogger Dan Grifen
Sustainability Through the Consumption of Things Conserved
"In other environmental issues we tell people to stop something, reduce their impact, reduce their damage," - US Ecologist Gary Nabhan

Since the beginning of the green movement, there has been a rise in the number of organizations and businesses that are doing their part in the promotion of sustainability through conservation. As human beings, we're told to reduce our carbon footprint, consume less unhealthy foods, and spend less time in the shower! But let's take a minute to step back and look at this from a different perspective; one that http://www.garynabhan.com/ Gary Nabhan strongly suggests.

Gary Paul Nabhan, phD., is a Arab-American writer/conservationist whose extensive farming work in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region has made him world renowned. Specifically speaking, Nabhan is known for his work in biodiversity as an ethnobotanist. His uplifting messages and attitude towards life and culture has granted us access to multiple beneficial theories including his latest of eat what you conserve.

According to http://www.fao.org/ The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, about three quarters of the genetic diversity of crops has been vanishing over the last century and that a dozen species now gives 90% of the animal protein eaten globally. In accordance, just 4 crop species supply half of plant based calories in the human diet.

Nabhan claims that by eating the fruits and vegetables that we are attempting to conserve/save, we're promoting the granular dissemination of various plant species. But this goes beyond what we typically buy in supermarkets, particularly because of price and abundance. We must remember to try new things and immerse ourselves in the very concept of diversity. Keep in mind- the benefits of splurging for that costly fruit/vegetable supremely outweigh the cons. Not only are you promoting biodiversity and further eliminating the needs of farmers to remove rare, less purchased crops off their agenda, but you're also effectively encouraging healthier lifestyles.

Agriculturist Marco Contiero mentioned that "biodiversity is an essential characteristic of any sustainable agricultural system, especially in the context of climate change. http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ips/5cf45c1c04357fdc5183024a327e7952.htm . With sustainable crop efforts being lead by the CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) and the IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) the duo plans to provide a more sustainable crop that can withstand natural disasters, avoiding food shortages like Haiti is experiencing. Contiero goes on to state "We need to ensure this is the basis for the future…" – This is exactly what http://www.spoke.com/info/pHKhAU/DougBand Doug Band, the CGI, and the IRRI are doing by engaging in sustainability efforts.

So remember, next time you're in the supermarket picking out a common variety of navel oranges or strawberries, turn your attention to something that's a bit more exotic in nature. The same goes for salads/salad ingredients; shop outside the norm, picking spices and vegetables that you wouldn't normally incorporate into your everyday diet. During such economic downtime it isn't always easy to maintain the same level of grocery shopping intrigue, but we must also not forget that in this sundry of foods we can find fun!

Dan Grifen – Supporter of all things green and progressive.

Dan rightly identifies the problems we are creating by ignoring biodiversity – and it goes deeper. Genetically manipulating animals so that we exclude the effects of natural evolution is another problem. Our environment has changes significantly over the past decades. People insist on intervening in the natural evolution of both plants and animals to adapt with the new, evolving effects of a changes climate, ultimately this can only lead to the extinction of these species due to their inability to adapt. Now I could go on and on about this, but if you look at this video from Landline you’ll see where we could be headed. http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s2950364.htm .

Lots more stuff to talk about - lots of rain as well.

Brrrrrrrrr!

2010-08-02T16:22:00.000+10:00

Snowy Hills

Back in July I wrote and didn’t post -

Well, the brass monkeys are working overtime here in Bredbo and I’ve been too soft to face the cold of the computer table to up date my Blog – yes, I take total responsibility for the lack of communications.

-12.9 Degrees Celsius – cold enough for me. No hot water for morning showers all this week and last, the water in the washing machine was still frozen at 6pm the other night and we couldn’t wash the kids uniforms – the poor old Cook thought her brand new washing machine was busted. But it’s warmed up now, it was only minus 8.9 over the weekend – lucky us.

It’s even been to cold to chase of foxes with out ugg boots and beanie, suppose I should wear more, but my luminous white body is well camouflaged against the frosty grass and the shock and awe I reap on the fox - if it doesn’t kill him it’ll have him in therapy for years.

So when I left you all the Jeep was sitting in Pambula awaiting a new power steering pump and the trailer was outside Bega awaiting me to pick it up. Since then the Jeep is back on the road – just another example that a combination of lick, spit and a whole lot of Gaffa tape will fix anything. Of course this time I also needed to use super glue, my spit just ain’t doing the job these days. I managed to get down to Pambula and pick up the Jeep, grab the tailer and drop it off home, stop for a pee and get back to Canberra for an appointment before noon that day – which is quite an achievement for the old girl.

Unfortunately the Jeeps long term prognosis is not good. The radiator is showing signs of failure and I have to keep a close eye on the fluid levels, the gauges are all failing and I’ll really not sure what’s going on half the time – with the car. But the game changer happened the other day when one of the kids closed one of the back passenger doors and the front passenger door fell off. It gets really cold driving down the foggy frosty Monaro Hwy with an inch gap around the door. So sadly we are on the hunt for a replacement for the old girl.

I’ve got a step closer to getting prepared for the spring arrival of some bees. I have purchased a stack of timber to build my first boxes, Monika and her partner form the bee club came out the other weekend to help – but it was too cold to stand outside and use power tools so we opted for a cuppa in front of the fire.

School holidays are her and that has to be the Cooks favourite time of the school calendar – skiing starts when they go back, always a highlite for the term.

The Cook spent a week in Adelaide; I think the kids have just about recovered. The work load doubles for everybody when so goes and the cooking takes a noticeable down would spiral consistent with the amount of time she’s away. And don’t ask about school lunches – luckily the kids like (maybe now ‘liked’) vegemite. And I’ve got to find a better way of telling if shop bought ham is off as well.

And as usual with the drop in temperatures comes the colds, Harry and the Cook have both been suffering bad coughs and a nasty tummy bug. Luckily Ben and I stayed far enough away not to become infected.

I tried to do some fencing last weekend, but every time I bent a piece of wire it snapped – a good indication it was just too cold. I managed to get some done this weekend, the pigs are now totally surrounded by pig mesh netting – now I just need to get the electric back on and put in a few more steel posts and we should be right again.

Forward to now.

Snow has fallen on the mountains yesterday and for most of the day it was better spent inside. We had periods of rain, hail and ice and bitingly cold winds. Not that this allows us to rest, there was still pigs to do, things to fix, fences to check and general day to day jobs to do. One of my favourites is the weekly trip to the dump, never go there with out running into somebody and being ski season it’s a full on mission impossible just to get across the highway to get there. I swear it’s only two hundred metres down the road and takes half and hour.

We had a visit from James last week. He spent a few days helping out around the place, we managed to do some fencing, put in a corner post and steel posts – I’d recently purchased one of those pneumatic post drivers – why I didn’t do that sooner I’ll never know. The amount of time and effort this one tool will save is just mind boggling.

Other things that have been happening – we’ve picked up more roosters, and this time it wasn’t my fault. The cook was responsible this time – which takes some of the pressure off of me.

We had an NSF working party and put in a leaky weir to help slow down the water travelling down one of the erosion gullies. It took us all of two hours to collect the rocks from a non conservation site and an hour and a half to build. I still have to get some gravel to make a bed for the overflow and get some reeds during the spring to line the edges.

We also bought in a load of round bales of straw for the pigs. They weight about 500 kg each, getting them onto the trailer myself is a bit of a challenge but I’ve managed so far. It’s about a quarter of the cost of getting square bales from the feed store so well worth the effort. The biggest part of the cost is the transportation; thankfully we’ve found somebody whom delivers at a good rate.

I thought Belle the cow was going to calf the other day, her udder has enlarged and she seems to have dropped her belly. I found her on her own in the paddock, she ran off when I approached, but there was no sign of a calf when I looked around. I am hoping that it hasn’t come yet, but I’m still concerned that she may have lost it.

The horses have been causing problems, a brumby from next door has taken up residence with our three and continually leads them astray. About eleven last night the dogs started barking, I got outside just in time to see the horses galloping down the road towards the creek. The brumby keeps pushing the gate open somehow and letting everybody out. I think they spent five minutes helping themselves to the pig’s bread before they headed off as well.

I still haven’t had time or the space to start my Bee Boxes either. I have the timber, the tools and the screws – but alas not the time. I’d better get a move on before spring arrives, I may have to take some time off shortly to get stuck into this.

What’s bugging me?

I like to catch up on Landline every Sunday – but I don’t always get to. A couple of weeks ago they had a very interesting article about Samoa and how they are trying to convince the locals to eat more fresh food from their gardens and stop importing tinned food. It’s hard to believe that people would choose to eat tinned carrots over fresh, or spam over fresh fish. The change in diet has had many effects on the population’s health and well being as well as a dangerous reliance on imported food.

But it’s not just a problem in Samoa. We are selling off our agricultural land to foreign interests who are farming and exporting the produce with no return benefit to our economy or food security. It’s not just the fact that they own vast tracks our best land; they are also buying up the water. With the MBDA Draft plan out after the election, which rumour has it includes a 90% reduction in irrigated agriculture in the basin over the next twenty years, it’s hard to see the logic in this. Surely it’s in the Governments best interest to restrict the ownership of rural land and secure thousands of rural jobs by making these countries import food from our farmers?

Not for Profit pigs........

2010-06-09T22:07:00.003+10:00

We had a lot to do this weekend and I was rather determined not to let it stress me out. We had sent Ben off to friends for a sleepover Friday night, the rest of us were off to Bega for a Scything day and deliver some pigs to a friend. There was no way I was going to load the pigs Friday night, it was too cold for them to spend a night in the trailer and I wasn’t going to load them in the dark either. So we got things going early Saturday morning, calmly loaded the pigs, and set off for our first stop in Cooma. The Cook had made a lovely Humming bird cake that morning and we happily settled in for the trip. I needed to stop in Cooma to pick up a couple of essentials, we pulled up under some oak trees and Harry feed the pigs acorns whilst I stepped into the hardware store.

In no time we were on our way. Now, the drive to Bega involves the adventurous, not for the faint hearted, or sain, drive down Browns Mountain. So with a dozen pigs in tow we beetled on down towards the drop off. Just before we started our decent I pulled over to let a couple of cars pass, we would be slow so I didn’t want to hold people up at the start. When we pulled over I noticed a strange sound coming from the engine bay of the Jeep. It was one of those really good sounds – you know the one it’s a grating, crunching, bearing gnawing, fingers on a chalk board sound. I figured it ment trouble – but I’d gone too far to go back and Bega was closer then anywhere else now. So we continued down the mountain.

We had made it abut half way when I noticed that the brakes had pretty much gone, and the comments form the Cook about smelling something burning weren’t helping the stress levels either. So, we pulled over, glad I didn’t get out. Smoke begun billowing from the front of the car, the brakes must have been really hot. We waited for a while, started the car, still making it’s horrible noise and ventured on. We finally found the turnoff to our destination and I managed to heave the car around to head down a single lane dirt road heading off into the distant hills. I decided if we were leaving the highway I’d better check out the car first, I got out and lifted the bonnet – holy crap – not a pretty sight.

We had blown the bearings in the power steering pump and there was power steering fluid everywhere, the fly wheel was squealing and the fan belt was on it’s last legs – but I’ve seen worse. It was only a few kilometres to the farm so by unanimous declaration (mine) we drove on.

Luckily we made it to the farm and unloaded the pigs, took five minutes to gather our thoughts and sat down to enjoy some lovely Pumpkin Soup – thanks Liz. I called the NRMA and settled in for the next hour and half to await the tow truck. Thankfully he was half an hour early and I abandoned the Cook and Harry and set off for Pambula – 60km down the track. We arrived at the NRMA depot in the dark, luckily they had a car for me and I set off back pick up the Cook – I wasn’t making dinner, not after everything that had happened so far.

I did get a little geographically embarrassed on my way back in the dark – but I eventually got there. I picked up the Cook and Harry and we headed home – they slept and I drove.

On Sunday I was picking up feed, I’d ordered a double load because of the cold and so we had some spare if the feed man couldn’t deliver again in the near future. Without the Jeep it took numerous trips in the small car towing the little trailer, that was Sunday shot as well – and the Cook had sent Harry into town to see a mate so I was left to unload everything on my own. My shoulders are still sore.

What else have we been doing?? I would tell you about me having to lance an abscess on the angry Barrows arse – but it still makes me gag just thinking about it. Archer spent the day at the pub on Monday – neither the Cook or I remembered to tie him up before we went to bed, and as usual there was a message on the answering machine when we got home.

We had over 50mm of rain as well. All in the one weekend, flooded out everything form the pigs to the feed shed and the chooks. We never get good steady rain, it always just happens in one great big event and then everything dries off beyond any use. I did manage to move the pump at 4:30am one morning before the river rose, I hjaven’t been down to see what he water hole is like yet after the flood either.

So, anyway, good things do happen as well. Youngest Ben received three awards at School last week. He got the Kool Kid award for being the coolest kid in Stage 3, we received a note from his teacher in the mail about his good work on the School Radio Program and he won third place in the RSL Essay writing competition from the Cooma RSL Sub Branch (we had to ring somebody up to find out what his one was for) – maybe he can write the Blog. He also did very well in his sports carnival.

I have finally replaced the gate on the chook pen – for which the Cook is very grateful. It’s steel mesh with a steel frame – hopefully pig proof. It even has a great latch on it that the Cook herself picked out. The latch is strategically placed so you can’t open it from the inside, you know - so the chooks can’t get out. Unfortunately I didn’t realise Ben couldn’t get out either, until he failed to turn up for dinner one night.

Back so soon??

2010-05-24T11:08:00.000+10:00

Another eventful weekend at Valley View. But before that – Thursday evening the Cook made her first Lasagne with homemade pasta sheets – how good was that?? I am a lasagne lover from way back and I’ve got to say it was the best I’ve had for years. Funnily, we were sitting wondering how long we needed to let it cook for when Italian Food Safari came on – and they were making homemade pasta for Lasagne – problem solved, thanks Maeve.

Friday afternoon I was in the feed store picking up some feed after visiting the local rural store. A bloke rocks up with a box under his arm and asks the guy behind the counter if he could task a rooster to sell. “Not a lot of demand for roosters in suburbia” say’s Jim, “you could advertise them in the paper maybe”

The guy looked a little worried; I asked him if it was a good looking rooster? So he gave me a look – he was a very nice looking young roosters. I said I’d take him, and the guy said “hang on and I’ll get the other two out of the car.”

So off I headed to Mrs D’s house trailer load of feed, fencing wire and three roosters. I picked up the new Khaki Campbell Drake and headed home. The drive gives a good amount of time to think up and rehearse what I’m going to tell the Cook. A number of reasons for increasing the number of roosters on the farm came to me along the way – all of them very lame. Finally I settled on the reasoning that if I keep collecting roosters soon there has got to be a shortage – and I will be able to corner the market, and yeah I know, she didn’t think it was a good excuse either.

So the kids settled in the roosters and drake – he took possession of the KC Ducks strait away, and I tried to make myself as small as possible whilst the Cook muttered something to herself. Funny thing was, she was cooking omelettes for dinner, which didn’t make it easy to change the subject – I even got heckled by the children.

Saturday I headed off early to the Love Grass workshop. It was an interesting meeting, managed to discover a new strategy for dealing with invasions but overall it was the same old same old and by the end I was wondering why I bothered.

On the way home I got to pull in at the local hardware shop and spend a little quality time window shopping for tools. I picked up a couple of odds and ends and headed out. I then pulled in to the supermarket to pickup date roll and milk. When I pulled into the car park I noticed two chickens scratching around in the bushes between the cars. I thought it was a bit strange, there aren’t many houses close by and the chickens looked well enough. When I came out they were still there and scratching around in the bush close to the car. So I walked over and picked up the bigger of the two – an Isa Brown. The other one was a Bantam – probably a Buff Orpington or something similar. I chased it into the bush and caught it also, so there I was standing in the bush with two chickens, one under each arm. What’s that saying – a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush – somehow I think it doesn’t apply here??

So I sat the two chickens on the back seat – on my jacket all the way home. I didn’t need to think up any wild to tell the Cook this time, which is lucky because I was all out of creative ideas after Friday. So this time when I rocked into the kitchen with two chickens under my arm I was greeted a lot more civilly.

Sunday was freezing – minus 8 Degrees C in the morning. I don’t go outside until it’s at least 5 Degrees C. Old Nev called us with some disturbing news - Matthew (my Brother) was off getting his Pony Club Instructors License this weekend. You'd need to know the family history for this but they must have got him drunk or promised him something to make him do that - I can't wait to see a picture of him wearing jodphers on his blog. If he doesn't have any I think the family should all chip in - can't have him doing pony club improperly attired, what would old Di say??.

It took a while to warm up – but by the time Land Line was over I was outside fencing. The ground remains cold, especially on cloudy days with out the sun, and by 6pm I was well and truly cold and ready to get by the fire. Luckily for me the Cook sent the kids out with a cup of tea and orders to give me a hand at about 4pm which helped me get the job done.

Of course, for me the weekend ends when I get the kids on the bus on Monday morning. So after chores I stuck the kids in the Jeep and headed for the bus stop. We stopped to feed the sow near the gate and as is normal I turned off the car to give Harry the keys to lock the gate. Unfortunately when I tried to restart the Jeep it cracked a sad and refused to start. “Quick - start walking to the Bus” I said to the kids and raced back up to the shed to grab the spare battery and jumper leads. In ten minutes I had the Jeep going and managed to reach the kids just as they made it to the gate, I got a couple of dirty looks, but at least they made the bus.

Yep - it's cold.

2010-05-20T12:09:00.004+10:00

The cold weather is upon us – as usual for these parts it started with ANZAC Day. Unfortunately it also causes me problems with the pigs fencing – every year it’s the same, we get failed wires and shattering insulators. What’s made it worse this year is that the fence went down between the Boar and the Sows and now I’m looking forward to the first week of September as being a very “labour” intensive.

So we’ve had our first Minus 4’s, Monster Frosts and thick all morning fogs. Everything is damp or frozen and scraping ice off the windscreen at 5am is becoming a chore. But the days have been warm – after the fog clears at least.

We’ve only had about 12mm of rain since our big falls earlier and everything ha died right back. We still have some feed and the dams are almost full – but it won’t last the winter.

So what has been going on at the farm? We’ve had a Birthday, a 21st Wedding Anniversary, Mothers Day and our 3rd anniversary on the farm. Also the return of Doctor Who and Robin Hood on ABC always something to look forward to over the winter months.

The Cook scored really well on Mothers Day – a brand new Schnitzer Grain Mill. She’s been milling wheat for various meals ever since. A friend loaned her a pasta making machine and we had a great time making our own pasta, a little more practice is required – no wonder Italians had such large families.

She also got a hand cranked (Amish) corn schucker and her own scythe – she’s a little concerned about hidden messages.

We’ve also been selling a few pigs, some went to the Farmers Markets, some went to be fattened for Christmas and some are going to be breed. We have been pretty happy with the current condition of all our pigs going into winter and looks like it’ll be our best spring yet as far as the pigs go.

Unfortunately the fencing has taken a back seat the last few weeks – but that is about to change. Also, our weed program has been given a boost with the arrival of some new equipment to make our spraying program a lot more efficient and effective.

Ben has started Soccer – he’s the star Goal Keeper for the Cooma Cosmos. So far this season they are 2 wins and 2 loses.

Unfortunately we had a fox in the Chook Dome they other day and he killed a few of our chickens and four ducks – one was the drake we were given by Mrs D. Luckily she has a spare and I am picking it up on Friday evening. He was a lovely drake, full of character. We think he was taken protecting his girls from the fox as they were all fine. I hate foxes. It came back a couple of nights later, not long after I had gone to bed. It got a real shock when a large naked man sprung at it, with a stick cleaned in his hands, from the shadows as it tried to corner another helpless duck. Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to get a good swing at it – must have been the cold, and it got away. But I’ll be waiting – in the shadows, when it returns.

I’ve been told that the family is running a book on what the change is I was talking about – good luck guy’s – there’s no hints. Sometimes things just don’t happen how you expect they will. It’s been three years since we moved onto the farm – one of our goals was to be full time farmers by the end of five years, others included - pay off the mortgage in ten and be as self sufficient as we could before we retire – of course the Cook would put in - renovate the house as well (she's a little over the Kitchen and Bathroom). We are on our way to achieving some of those goals, others might have to wait. I think I might add getting rid of the rats in the cieling as well.

One of our biggest problems has been the transport of pigs back from the abattoirs. I think I approached this problem with a number of incorrect assumptions which tied me into a narrow mind set. Of course the principle key to success of any business venture is innovative thinking – and I fell into the trapped of trying to do it the same as everybody else. Having slipped the chains of imitation I can see my errors and am working on a new logistics chain for our product which should prove to be far more robust then the current method and a lot more efficient.

I have been participating in a pilot pig farming course run by the NSW DI&I (DPI in QLD). It’s been really interesting and this last subject was marketing. It’s funny how you sometimes don’t join the dots until you are explaining yourself to another person. That’s when I had my epiphany about our logistics train.

Douuuh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-04-20T21:05:00.002+10:00

Hey Mrs D

Somebody is advertisng a Khaki Campbell Drake for sale - it's only $10 and it's really close to you - hey, look, the lady has the same name as well - and phone number - that's strange?????

Did I tell you all about the time the Cook locked her keys in the car?? I was close by, in uniform, so She aked me if I could help - with out a second thought I immediately ripped off my pants and rubbed them against the door - it opened like magic. She asked me how I did it? I just said "they are my khaki's"........... The rest is history... Haha....

I shouldn't blog when I'm really tired.

Birds and Bees

2010-04-19T13:28:00.002+10:00

Autumn is ‘the’ time of year here – lovely misty mornings, warm sunny days and cool quite nights. It would be nice if the whole year was like this.

I bet the bird watchers we had out on Sunday were wishing it wasn’t foggy. Bush Heritage and Greening Australia are doing a bird survey across the K2C area, they came out on Sunday to do the first autumn survey – unfortunately they came at 8am and the fog didn’t clear until past 11am. But, being true professionals they were able to identify a number of birds by call alone, it’ll be interesting to get the species list and have a look.

Fatso has been watching Hogan’s Heroes’ again – swear she could escape from Alcatraz that girl. I watched her on Sunday; she pushed the water trough against the wire, to short out the fence, then she squeezed out of a gap in the wire. She walked strait up to me and lied on her back for a belly scratch – absolutely no shame.

I headed into Cooma to start the April Acorn Hunt. My trees have a lovely crop this year, but the late rain has delayed the harvest a couple of weeks looking at the trees. I haven’t been around my other secret trees yet – give me something to do this week.

Anybody want a rooster?? We’ve got a couple of spare ones.

I went over an paid Mrs D a visit the other day and had a look at what her girls had bee’ n up too. She showed me her crazy hive frames – very interesting. I’d like to follow as natural bee keeping system as I can, and make as much as I can myself as far as hive boxes go. Mrs D has done a good job so far and I’ve offered to be an apprentice come spring so I can learn enough to confidently start our own bee hives.

I was supposed to muster the sheep on Sunday – I drove across the property and all I could find was Sheepie, Beryl and Mildred. Don’t know where the others have gone too. I walked up hill and down dale following the buggers for two hours before I lost them in a fold in the ground. They managed to sneak around behind me using dead ground – the damned things are so short in the long grass I just couldn’t see what they were up to. And I wasn’t walking up anymore hills that late in the afternoon. So, looks like I’m going back for another look next weekend.

Changing or renewal?

2010-04-16T15:54:00.003+10:00

You know, the biggest teacher in life is experience, and with enough experience a person gains wisdom. It’s the wise man who knows how to divorce emotion from necessity and make decisions based on evidence and facts, not idealism and greed. What has this got to do with the farm – a lot, nothing, everything? All will become clear in the months ahead.

Not really impressed with the bacon we did recently. Way too much fat – I’ve never seen so much fat on our pigs before, I’m wondering if it has something to do with being summer pigs – most the others we’ve butchered have been winter pigs.

It’s possible I’ve got the carbo/protein balance all wrong in the pig ration - so it’s back to the drawing board. I think I’ll up the protein until the days are getting colder and see what happens. Also, I don’t think the butcher did as good a job as previously, the low nitrate brine may be an issue as well.

We’ve had our first frosts for the year. Two mornings so far – and one morning was below 0 degrees. The Cook is already complaining and a load of fire wood isn’t far off. Of course the first frost killed off the tomatoes, pumpkin and watermelon vines and all the other things in the garden that aren’t frost tolerant (like the Cook).

The Poplars have just started to turn yellow and soon I’ll be off collecting acorns again. I’ll have to go check out my favourite spots this weekend.

We had a very windy day on Sunday and spent a lot of the day in shelter. At one pint the chook dome (or humpy) was blown over and the chooks escaped into the garden – it took three of us to catch one rooster whom refused to go back in.

I suffered a another three in a row with flat tyres. This morning I had to change a tyre on the Jeep – like every year when the temp drops I have a series of fence issues with wires breaking and such as well – this morning was no different. So there I was trying to change a tyre, with a dozen pigs trying to help. Of course Fatso was the leader, she supervised everything I did and conducted a quality control test at the end – just to make sure. I ended up having to get the kids up to feed the buggers and fix the fence so I could finish changing the tyre.

We had the traditional School holiday sleep over with a bunch of young lads camping in the shearing shed. Glad it wasn’t me – much too cold to be sleeping outside. They had a ball, cooking dinner in a camp oven, roasting potatoes on an open fire and making damper. The Cook spent the time cooking cakes and biscuits and making hot milos.

Reaping what we have sown

2010-04-03T23:04:00.003+11:00

Where the hell are you??? Well I’m back again, this time I’ve actually been away. I spent a few days up at Mudgee learning a few things and participating in a bit of a farm workshop. I travelled up to Mudgee with a guy from Bega who has just finished building his own straw bale house. It took us a day to get there and small place called Toene Valley to the East of Mudgee. It was a great place a lovely valley surrounded by limestone cliffs and eucalypt forests.

The farm I visited was only about 125 acres; they farmed Boer Goats Wiltshire Sheep and Galloway/Murray Grey Cattle. They used the Poly Farm model of stock rotation and cell grazing to manage their stock. It was very interesting to see the set up in action and I learnt a lot over the days I was there. They also ran everything on the farm off solar energy and had just installed a composting toilet the day we arrived. I like checking this stuff out – there’s nothing around here so there is nowhere to get ideas from or see how stuff works.

The other reason I was there was to learn how to use and maintain an Austrian Scythe. I’ve always been interested in learning all the old skills and teaching the kids as well. I didn’t expect it to be so hard, but like I say – if it isn’t hard it isn’t worth doing. And those words have bitten me on the backside a couple of times as you could imagine. Anyways, we did a couple of days of scything, cooked in camp ovens and drank billy tea. Food was good – they had an amazing ham ;) and killed a kid and lamb on the first day which we ate later. I haven’t camped like that for a very long time and it was nice reminisces of a long forgotten past.
We visited a hay bale sound recording studio close by, it was a beautiful building. The inside had been left with the bales exposed to assist with the acoustics; it would be interesting to see the structure in ten years time to see how well the bare bales have dealt with aging.

Did I manage to master the Austrian Scythe?? I don’t think so, but I’m practicing every day. It’s a very relaxing tool to use and I’ve managed to clear a fair amount of grass so far but my technique needs improving.

Our tomato harvest has started in earnest, the Cook was busy today making chutney’s, sauces and bolognaise. She was busy all afternoon. This afternoon I’d also brought home a load of hams and bacon from the butcher – when I walked in after feeding tonight the whole house smelt like real farm house.

On my way up the drive on the way back from town I spotted a long neck turtle wandering (how many times have spelt that wrong??) up the farm track, I pulled over and had a quick look at him to make sure he was okay – he seemed fine so I let him get on his way. The Grebe in the Grebe in the dam has hatched another two chicks and she is now swimming around the dam with three kids on her back.

The fellow I went to Mudgee with left a grain mill for the Cook to try out. She’s always wanted one and was keen to have a go. Between her and the kids they milled enough flour to make a couple of loaves of bread and a couple of morning’s worth of pancakes – looks like I can add one of these to the gift register.

Well it’s off to await the Easter Bunny, I wonder if he’ll end up beating the turtle up the drive??

Green acres and acres

2010-03-21T22:22:00.004+11:00

March 14th
It seems that the frosts are almost here, chilly mornings and heavy frosts are a good indicator. Our tomatos are taking for ever to ripen and the Cook is afraid we’ll lose the best of them to the frost. The potatoes and the zucchinis are still prolific – we have foot long radishes and eight foot high corn.

We get our straw and hay from a couple down the road on the other side of Prospector’s Gap, years ago they also had pigs and have been keen to have a look at ours. They offered us their old water tank pig shelters; they had been sitting in the paddock for a while but where still in good condition. Harry and I went down in the morning to give them a hand to get the shelters on the truck and shift them over here. We discovered that once the pigs had moved out of the shelters the Red Backs moved in – unfortunately I only had one pair of gloves which I gave to Harry and hoped like hell I didn’t put a finger on top of one of the deadly little buggers.

Everything went well and loading them onto the truck was no problems – no bites either. We got the shelters home, Harry rode in the truck with Lance which was a bit of a highlight for both of them I think. We unloaded the shelters in the pig paddocks ably helped by Fatso – she oversaw the whole operation and inspected the shelters once in place. Its good timing as I had hoped to have more shelters up before winter came. It also lets me divide the large paddock in two.

I’m limping around at the moment and slightly tender – I’ve pulled a hammy, bloody hurts too. So I’m hobbling around the place – it’s not as sore as Friday and I should be right by Wednesday.

We took a drive out to south of Cooma this afternoon in hunt of apples to crush in our new apple press. We found a couple of good trees and returned home with bags full of good looking apples. After doing the feeds and getting things ready for an early morning trip to Sydney we sat down and copped up apples. We filled the crusher top the top and set about crushing. Unfortunately we didn’t have any food grade grease to grease the spindle of the crusher and we failed dismally. I think we also needed to mash the apples a little bit better – we live and learn
The Cook has been letting her Ducks out into the garden during the day to eat the snails and slugs – and the ducks just love it. They get into the corn and waddle about quacking and scoffing down snails. She does have problems getting them back in – but the kids give her a hand.

I’d like to go to the Sydney Show, but I don’t think that is going to happen this year. I’d really like to have a look at the Pigs and see what other peoples Berkshires look like. They’re showing on the Saturday which would have been a good day to go. I am going to a Scything workshop up near Mudgee on the weekend before – which is why I’m going to the show. The workshop sounds like fun, alot of people going are interested in heritage farming. I’m catching a lift with a fellow from Bega, he’s bringing a grain mill to make fresh flour for pancakes and I’m supplying the bacon for breakfast when he picks me up – I think the Cook is planning on starting late that day. With a start like that it’s got to be a good weekend.

I don’t get enough time to reply to all the comments at the moment, which is unfortunate; I’d love to talk to everybody. I do check out your blogs and I’ve got them all book marked. One day I’ll get to you all – I thought with a bung foot I’d get time to do it this weekend, but the Cook just finds jobs for me I can do standing still.

I didn’t see the Duck lady at the Bee meeting – I guess she forgot again.

March 20th

Well, looks like the poor old Duck Lady didn’t forget - she was sick; we all hope you’re feeling better by now – the weather has been way to good to miss.
I took time to head up the back today and have a look at things. There is grass everywhere and water in all the dams. The wild flowers and native grass has seeded for a second time this year and I’m really happy with that.

In the main dam I found an Australian Grebe – a small Australian native duck, had built a nest. A closer inspection showed a duckling sitting in the nest with an unhatched egg. I came back later to photograph the chick, but it was riding around the dam on its mothers back, how sweet..

Not much else happening, we had a feed pick this weekend, dump run and general stuff. Ben got bitten on the finger by a piglet, swelled up really well, quite impressive. We got to see Jamies Pig show which was really good - hopefully it will show people how poorly pigs are treated in industrialised production farms. Really interested to hear that New Zealand have banned Sow Stalls, surely it can't be too long before it happens here.

Oh' yeah, and Old Nev was 70 years old the other day - Happy Birhtday!

Good one Jamie

2010-03-18T16:20:00.001+11:00

This was on last night - I hope people get it, but I wont hold my breath. Lots happening I'll update soon - MTFO.

I love this rain

2010-03-09T15:21:00.003+11:00

Another case of starting to write then getting side tracked, taking a detour, heading the wrong way down a one way street and finally finding I’m in the wrong postcode. As everybody knows; sometimes we take things in life for granted – things like, you never get to good drops of rain in a row, the river doesn’t flood twice in a year or washing machines. Follow so far?

Now I’ve already written one blog entry, last night, tried to upload it but the connection was playing up. So I ended thinking I’d wait until today to up load it. I should have saved it first I guess, I thought I did – and well in a way I did, but I saved it to the Cooks USB stick which she has taken of to work with her today, it’s no good to me there.

So what’s been happening down on the farm? We’ve had a little bit of rain, almost 40mm on Sunday, very pleasant. The river flooded again, which was good for the soul after all the dry we’ve suffered lately. It’s really nice to look out over the river from the house and see water flowing and to hear it at night as you nod off to sleep.

The Cook asked me on Sunday afternoon if we should move the pump, I had a look at the rain gauge and it only had about six mils of rain in it, so I said I didn’t see the need. About 11:30pm I had another look and there was 26mm in the gauge and the water was flowing rather well down the drive and in the gully behind the house, so I thought I should check the pump. When I got down to the river the water was turning brown and the flow had increased, so I decided I should move the pump – the fact the pump was in ankle deep water also had a little bearing on my decision. Unfortunately for me the Cook had stuck the foot valve in a bucket (which is the right thing to do) and the bucket and foot valve had snagged on a root in the river. This caused a little bit of swearing and some disingenuous statements being made about the pump – did I mention the Cook was sound asleep in bed whilst all this was going on. The water was awfully cold, and I managed to easily disengage the foot valve from the bucket – unfortunately the bucket was left behind. And of course the first the thing the cook asked was – “did you get my bucket?” oh dear……………

So by Monday morning the river was flowing rather well, we’d had over 38mm by then. The Cook was up early and decided that seeing I didn’t let Archer of the chain for a run the night before she would let him off for a run – the river was flooded so he couldn’t go far, town is on the other side, he won’t swim that – yeah right!!!! So the Cook is foraging around the garden, playing with her ducks, I think she was collecting snails for them. She gets so carried away she forgets about Archer. I was sitting inside having a cuppa and some home made plum jam on toast, I could hear her calling him and thought he must have gone up the back some where chasing Kangaroos.

After about half an hour I decided I should take a drive and check out what he was up to. I figured he may have tried to walk into town and make his way to the pub – so I went off in search. There was no sign of him along the river so I thought I should have a quick look in town in case he had gone across the river. It had risen about 2metres and was flowing rather well. You would think an old dog like him would not even try such a thing, but there he was soaking wet trotting towards the pub – with out his collar. He was rather perturbed to see me and resentfully jumped in the car for the ride home.

We spent Monday removing the growing hedgerows of Horehound from along the electric fence. It was so thick that it was shorting out the fence constantly. After a couple of hours work we had everything back in order. Tiberius, our 400kg boar acts like a little puppy when we do anything in his paddock and as usual he was all over us like a rash. I still get a little nervous when he’s so playful – at one point he almost pushed the Cook head first onto the fence with a great hip bump (this of course was serious and I couldn’t laugh on threat of an eventful and totally painful death), I swear I could see him smile as well.

I also managed to get the score of the year! A brand new, second hand fruit and wine press – for $100! I saw it on all classifieds and thought why not? I was going to get a new one earlier in the year but they were over $700, and that was for one half as big and no where near the quality. I’m very happy with it and plan on collecting some apples this afternoon to try it out – was going to be Monday, but I took another nap.

It's over for now

2010-02-15T22:43:00.003+11:00

The rain has stopped. I think the pigs will be pleased. We had breif spot of sunshine on Sunday, however today we had another 36mm of rain. The river is flooding at it's highest level since we've been here. All the dams are full and the country side has never looked greener - looks like a bit of work coming up when it drys out....

More wet shoes

2010-02-15T15:42:00.002+11:00

Still raining, looks like the kids will have wet shoes again this afternoon. A lot of that rain is over the catchment which means the river will be really high this afternoon, might head down and move the pump to even higher ground.

It just keeps coming

2010-02-15T14:03:00.004+11:00

Monday Afternoon

Monday Morning

An old man in Cooma told me before Chritmas that the drought would break before ANZAC Day - and he's probably not going to be far from wrong. We've had 120mm plus a littel and Cooma has had anither 25mm today, not sure what we've had yet. It's the first weekend we've been rained in for ages which was really nice.

It was the Cooks birthday as well, another wrinkle added to the collection - Happy Birthday sweetheart xox....

If it gets any wetter the pigs will need life jackets, the horses boyancy vests and George floaties. It hasn't been this green for months, the Cooks garden and the lawn are both jungles and I'm guessing the back dam is now full - but I'll check that this afternoon. The river is running bank to bank and is at it's highest for two years, luckily all the rises have been gradual and our fence around our water hole is still there - as far as I can tell.

Mrs Duck has our new Drake so I need to organise a time to pick it up. EM picking up yours shouldn't be a problem - just got to get organised, I'll talk to you soon.

Damn'd, I forgot to tell the kids to take a rain coat

2010-02-11T16:17:00.002+11:00

Another good storm over the farm. Kids got caught coming across the paddocks from the bus - they are absolutely drenched. Never mind, it's just rain, a little discomfort will help make men out of them.

Barking at Shadow

2010-02-11T08:32:00.002+11:00

Alright, there was some things I didn’t include the last couple of times – firstly, the Cook was in the local paper the other day – who’s a tart now? She gave an interview about the importance of balancing conservation and farming in the K2C region. My photo didn’t win the competition, but it did get into the Summer Hot Shots pull out and was in the top 40 of 1700 pictures entered – really happy about that.

We ended up with almost 75mm of rain from the storms over the past week, which was a real relief. The dam now has water –almost half full, and the gully is running. The river also rose about four feet on the weekend – luckily this time I moved the pump before the river came up.

We’ve missed a couple of major storms that swung around to the east of us. Yesterdays was a rather large one and swung around from the southwest to the north east. It was black as pitch and must have drop a huge amount of rain. About 3 am this morning Shadow, whom has taken up residence on the front veranda started barking and wouldn’t stop. Of course being the brave soul she is and full of heart she wouldn’t leave the veranda to go investigate, no, she just sat infront of the open door and barked. The cook gave up in the end and went out side and very impolitely told her to have some manners and consider other before she made so much noise – but with fewer syllables and only four letters per word…… Once dawn broke we could see why she was barking, the river had risen over six feet and was flowing from bank to bank.

The Jeep is still in Cooma waiting for a part – hopefully today. Tonight is the first bee meeting which I really want to go too. We’ll see what happens.

Looking Good

2010-02-05T14:36:00.002+11:00

This afternoons radar, it's a bloke thing - I know.

Friends forever

2010-02-05T10:17:00.003+11:00

We’ve had a little tiny bit of rain today, only enough to put a smear of mud on one’s boots and nowhere near enough to put water in the dams. It started to rain early this morning but we’ve still got no more then 3mm and it’s after lunch already. Well that was yesterday, now it’s today we’ve had 38mm. It all fell in about an hour, flooded out the pigs shed and softened up the house track, and made everything really humid.

I wrote stuff for the blog the other day, but the kids had used all my internet time so I just saved it, now I’m not sure where I was up to…… Any way, the alternator in the Jeep finally packed it in on the way home last night, so the Jeep gets towed to Cooma this morning. I was coming home from Canberra – on the busiest road in town at peak hour when it gave in. I had been carrying a spare battery with me to get me out of trouble and it came in very handy.

I’d pulled up at a traffic light at a major intersection – front car, just missed the green arrow previously. As I pulled up the car just stopped, “bugger”, I popped the bonnet, jumped out with my handy ratchet in hand and whipped off the battery leads. Dragged out the battery and dumped in the back of the car. Grabbed the spare battery – it was from the electric fence, and tossed it in, connected the terminals and quick finger tighten, shut the bonnet and back in before the lights changed. I don’t know what the people around me were thinking, but I’d bet it was the fastest battery change they’d ever seen.

So….., what else? I’ll get in trouble for this – but, oh well. The Cook found an egg in the chicken coup the other day, on the ground. This made her very happy because it meant she could make a cake. So off the kitchen she trundled, a little smile on her face, egg in her pocket. Of course as soon as Harry hears the words cake and make he’s into the kitchen – “Mum can I have the bowl?” The Cook has everything ready and breaks the egg into the batter – a shriek emanates from the kitchen and we pile in. Looking into the bowl all we can see is a tiny set of duck feet sticking out of the flour. It would appear that the egg had come from under one of the sitting ducks and the Cook hadn’t notice it was heavier then normal – Harry didn’t want to lick the bowl – who would have thought?

Snakes in the grass

2010-01-19T08:35:00.005+11:00

(BREAKING NEWS) Poor little Penny; The Cook just rang me in the middle of writing this to say that her puppy has been bitten by a snake, poor little thing.

I need more time to take photo’s… That’s why I haven’t updated the Blog. I keep leaving the house with out the camera which certainly doesn’t help.

A lot happened last year, after thinking back the Cook and I are both pretty satisfied with what we’ve achieved. Our first pigs were sent away and processed, we made head way on our conservation projects, the garden is producing well and the fruit trees all had fruit, we received our first wool cheque, sold a solid number of pigs, nobody was bitten by a snake (until today) and the kids did well at school. Unfortunately the Cook didn’t get a renovated kitchen or a tiled bathroom, nor did the floors get re-laid. Oh well, add them to the list for this year.

The snakes are still causing some concern with the family being trapped in the house on Sunday by a decent sized brown. I was out fencing away from the house when the women folk and children rang to tell me about the snake trying to come into the laundry, luckily the dogs alerted them and the Cook gave it a stern talking too. Harry had one slide over his foot in the chook pen days earlier and we’d seen them wriggling around the farm in the preceding days.

Thanks to the Cooks Sister, Iris, for this pic of the Brown Snake - she was standing in teh laundary when she took it.

But, on the upside we don’t have any mice. We’ve got big rats though. The Cooks sister is visiting and the biggest rat I’ve seen for months poked up out of the floor and scurried across the kitchen to squeeze out a hole behind the old tank water tap. As soon as I saw it I almost yelled out “see the size of that flippin rat” but, due to the Cooks sister not being quite as “understanding” as the rest of us I decided to just shut up and say nothing. It was a really big rat, the type you could really admire if it wasn’t living in YOUR floor and I’m sure it flashed me a gold toothed grin.

The Cook took everybody down to the river – where most the snakes are, to pick wild black berries on Sunday. They came back with a couple of buckets full which made lovely black berry streusels. The cook can bake a cake that would make a master chief cry, but her berry cakes, jams and pies are just to die for, unfortunately I don’t get to share in the bounty as much as I would like with two teenage boys in the house. I expect it’ll all be gone by the time I get home.

Of course whilst everybody was down the river I rocked up home with the trailer full of feed and rain about five minutes away. I had unloaded most of it by the time the boys turned up to help. Last time we unloaded feed I was worried about a fire, what a difference a couple of showers of rain makes.

This is Fatso - she say's hi to everybody. We caught her suckling off one of the mums yesterday - no wonder she is so fat. The picture doesn't do her justice.

BTW - Old Nev, we got nearly 10mm of rain an hour after you rang.

I spent a fair bit of Sunday fencing. Have I ever told you how much I love pounding steel pickets into rock? The rotten things a $5 each now, and that’s for the poor quality Chinese ones. I’ve bent a couple into S shapes after hitting rocks. I think my hair is falling out – I keep finding bits on the keyboard, oh well, nothing lasts forever. Anyway, I have almost completed the majority of the picket lines and just need to set some strainers before I can run out the wire. I think the most sworn at piece of farm equipment I have is my wire spinner. I bought a good Waratah one in the beginning thinking I was doing the right thing but the bloody thing is useless some times.

Because I’m out on my own most the time I need it to work properly. But, I spend more time walking back and forward trying to fix problems with it then I do pulling wires. Sunday was no different and I think I turned the sky purple swearing at it and walked a couple more kilometres then necessary. Time to start experimenting with the hack saw and grinder me thinks.

The Cook built a fence of her own with the help of Harry last week. She’s planting a line of trees as shelter for her garden expansion plans – she thought I had no idea about her plans for farm domination, but I can see right through you darling! The upside is there is less lawn to mow in summer. The garden is going well with the corn and zucchinis towering above everything else. Luckily I really like zucchini as long as I don’t have to eat it.

It’s the next day and I’m happy to say that Penny survived the day and has managed to recover from her ordeal. Apparently it was touch and go for a while, the Cook wasn’t very confident at about 2pm that she would get well, but by 7pm she was up and about and by bed time she was going crazy on the cat again – a big thankyou to whom ever looks over little puppies in need.

Looking for boots - again

2010-01-09T23:33:00.004+11:00

Rather warm today – for us Southerners. Reached the forecast 35Deg C, and stayed there for hours. The Cook has even declared that the fan may be taken into the bedroom tonight – lucky me. I took the kids over to the pool at Cooma to cool off for a while at midday, I needed to get something from the Rural Store – but I missed that, by two minutes. That’s country towns for you, I love the fact that there’s nothing open on Sunday here.

Everything is still green at the moment, but the warm westerly’s have started so it’s only a matter of time before we are dried off and brown again.

I had a rather pleasant surprise this morning, after going to the dump I picked up the Canberra Times from the store. When I opened up the paper (page 8, Mrs D) they published a photo I had entered in the papers Summer Photo Comp – how exciting. I've put it up again just because I can.

Ben came across another snake in the feed shed – I’m sure they are following him around. I couldn’t find a shovel in time so it got away to live for another day.

I love our kids – they really have a great (their fathers) sense of humour. Last night we were all sitting at the table and Harry says

“I saw something really disgusting today Dad”, Ben chimes in

“Britney Spears?”

Both the Cook and I nearly choked on our dinner and once again the Cook was caught snorting. It was rather funny – and no, I’m not going to tell you what Harry saw.

IO'm searching for new boots again. Not happy with steel caps, no good for walking down hills in, wish I could find some of my old Army GP's, I loved those boots. They always fitted well and I could walk for days, and did, in them. You wuoldn't think it would be so hard - it's only boots.

Flat on her A@$&*

2010-01-05T21:00:00.006+11:00

Well, I spent all of Sunday improving the pig fences in prepartion for the next flood of piglets. I doubled the number of steel posts, strained all the wires and tied down everything. Unfortunately for the Cook some of the fences are a little further off the ground then before - add the fact that the fence is running off of mains power now also and it has a pretty good zap factor - as the Cook found out. She tried to climb over one today and made contact withthe inside of her leg. She ended up seeing stars and clouds, flat on her back it put her. Of course I didn't do anything to help laughing until I cried, snorted, had stuff running out of my nose and nearly choking - and that was all before she got her hands around my throat.

She's not the only one, poor Penny has had a couple of zaps with her tail as well. Shadow walks around with her tail down always now.

And keeping with tradition of Christmas litters, we have a bundle of new piglets arrived today - I think we are up to 18, bacon supply is safe for next Christmas.....

First week of the new year - gone already.

2010-01-04T11:09:00.005+11:00

It’s time to get back to work and stop all this laying about. I’m talking to the Cook! We’ve had a pretty hectic Christmas with heaps of visitors, lots of rain and more piglets.

Santa certainly did bring the rain and we’ve had over 80mm since Christmas eve. Everything is lovely and green and we won’t have to worry about fires for a week or two. The river is flowing, but no flooding yet so the pump is safe. The kids discovered we have fish living in our water tank. Looks like carp, I did want to try Aquaculture – but not in our drinking water would have been the preferred way.

Ben had a snake chase him around the chook pen the other day, Saturday I think. Each time he called me the snake had disappeared before I got there. We also spotted a rather large Red Bellied Black in the back paddock on Sunday. He was lying in the sun, the Cook wanted to know if I wanted to get out and have a look – after you sweetheart!

The Chook Dome has been completed and Harald did a wonderful job. It now houses half a dozen chooks a nice rooster and the three Khaki Campbell Ducks. The ducks quack every time we leave the house, but they really enjoy the showers the get from the garden sprinkler. And the chooks seem happy; some one is laying an egg a day so we can’t complain. If my calculations are correct we only need another three hundred and six eggs and the Chook Dome will have paid for itself.

I managed to find time to fix a few of the home fences, managed to strain the back fence and pull over the gate post - the Cook wasn’t very happy with me about that. Anyway, still can’t keep the goats out, which is a bit if a shame. I have fortified the pig enclosures and they are happily producing in the manner that will provide us with much pork this year. There are two whom are marked for bacon which are looking rather good.

We had a rather dramatic end to the week with a car catching fire on the highway in the front of the farm yesterday afternoon. I saw it from the pig yards and thought it was an accident at first, I raced up the drive and was just in time to see the car engulfed in flames, and luckily the two occupants had managed to get out before it was too late. I was amazed as they both lit up a cigarette and stood back to watch. It took the Fire Brigade nearly fifteen minutes to arrive, but the car was burnt out by then, I was grateful that he driver had managed to stop on the gravel and not the grass – even with all the rain the wind would have pushed a fire into the paddocks and who knows what could have happened.

Great weather for the Ducks

2009-12-27T22:01:00.004+11:00

I can’t believe it but we’ve had more rain today, last time I looked it was 16mm – and there has been more since then. Looks like we are going to get our whole month’s average rainfall in a week. Pity it didn’t come before the fires in Michelago started and destroyed people’s homes. The Duchks spent the day in the garden eating snails - yum yum.

We had visitors today from Melbourne – great to see them again. They stayed for a BBQ dinner which we ended up having to cook inside because the rain was so heavy. Also fatso was being a pest carrying off the BBQ on her back – I really need to get her fence fixed so she can’t get out when it rains. The pigs are having a ball with all the mud, they slide and wallow and lay around. It was quite hot before it rained; it reached 34 Deg C by midday, but dropped once the rain started.

The Cooks brother has been helping her build a Chook Dome – it’s a real work of art, abstract I would say. It will be interesting to see it finished; The Cook is hoping to keep her new Ducks in it for a while down in the garden. I’ll post pics tomorrow.

The puppy is having fun, she’s played with fatso this morning and tried to play with the cat today – but he’s not really interested in playing with the puppy.
The Cook created one of her world famous Christmas Cakes today – spectacular, she’s a real gem in the kitchen – so lucky I married her and didn’t wait around for Trisha Yearwood.

In other News - Looks like we are getting our own smoker built – won’t be half as good as the Rock Wallaby one. Obie, our visitor from Melbourne, has a brother in Canberra who is a gun welder – apparently this will be right up his alley, the Cook wants him to flash up a Rotisserie as well – I think She thinks I’m made of pigs. Shame I haven't got a welder or I'd give it a go myself (yeah ok, I can hear the Cook laughing from here too).

Nice rain. Penny say's hi!

2009-12-26T22:48:00.003+11:00

How about that rain? Not quite biblical - but I’m not complaining, far from it. The rain started at about 0100hrs on Christmas morning and this morning it is still raining. The Cook measured 19.5mm by dinner time yesterday and we’d only put the new rain gauge out at 1100hrs. By this morning we’d had a total of 26mm (due to no rain gauge we missed the first fourteen hours).

We had a lovely Christmas Day – all started a little later the normal Christmas Day, our recalcitrant visitor refuse to get up early, that didn’t go down well with the kids and all sorts of punitive actions were being discussed when he wasn’t up by 0800hrs. Luckily they don’t have my creative slant when it comes to this sort of thing and the visitor was allowed to slumber – threats from the Cook to the three of us also went some way towards our better then should be expected behaviour.

For breakfast Christmas Day we had our own bacon and eggs. Dinner was the traditional turkey, prawns and ham. The highlight was the home grown ham. It was just superb, the Cook likes the Shoulder ham better but the rest of us will take anything you dish up as long as it’s from our paddock.

Today was a little slow whilst we get over yesterday. The cook took the time to plant a couple of Pecan nut trees she brought at the Murrumbateman Filed Days - that have been sitting in our bath tub ever since. She has also attempted to pig proof the trees, but time will tell how well that will work. Hopefully the pigs will ignore them, yeah right........

I took the dogs for a walk out to the dam to see if we had managed to catch any of the rain – appears not, none of the dams have any water in them, maybe over the next few days we’ll get some inflow. Penny the new puppy was a terror, she barked at every cow, sheep and kangaroo. She’ll sleep well tonight for sure.

I don’t know if anybody else saw it, but ABC2 showed the Australian film ‘A Bush Christmas’ it Nicolle Kidman’s first movie. It was filmed around Rathdowney, near Beaudesert in Queensland. I grew up not far from there and recognised a lot of the extras in the movie as well as the land marks. I also manned a polling booth in the hall they showed the dance in and rode at many camp drafts and Pony Club days at the show grounds. It was filmed in 1983 – now I feel really old.

Mrs Duck Herder, Afternoon Tea sounds very nice and now the Cook has a brand new second hand antique oven she can cook a cake and biscuits. We are home all week, if you talk to Em organise a time that is good for you both and give me a call.

Oh, nearly forgot. This was funny; the Cook discovered that the Kitten we thought was female for the last six months is indeed male. I just shake my head.......

I hear footsteps on the roof

2009-12-25T00:13:00.003+11:00

As I sit at the table to write this the Cook is busy wrapping the last of the presents, CMC is playing every film clip in their catalogue and the new puppy is whining at the back door. Yep, I went and got the Cook a short haired Border Collie puppy for Christmas. She’s rather cute, her name is Penny and she’s made herself right at home. And the Cook loves her – he scores...a direct hit on the perfect Christmas present yet again.

The tree is lit and everything is ready for Santa’s arrival, in fact, the dog are starting to bark at something now. Must nearly be time for bed.

It’s been a rather busy year, a few ups and downs, but mostly positive if you don’t count the dry, weeds, LHPA, horses, the Jeep, foxes and my useless electric fence building skills. But hopefully Santa is towing that huge thunder storm I asked for, we’ll have to wait and see what morning brings.

Well guy’s, I hope Santa is kind to you all. Hopefully we get rain from Rock Wallaby to Valley View and all those places in between. Thanks to everybody who reads our blog for the kind comments and remarks – especially Mrs Duck and Em. We’ll have to all catch up in the New Year. JAAAM in West OZ, promise I’ll ring and The folks in Maryburg – I know it’s my turn to ring you too – I’ll do it at 5am when the kids get me up. And not forgetting the Rock Wallaby guys – nice looking ham, great looking pigs, nice to hear you got rain at last. And no, I didn’t forget the Adelaide connection, I hope your all well and safe also.

Goodnight to all and Merry Christmas, from all of us here at BVVF.

Too close for my liking.

2009-12-21T14:58:00.002+11:00

Sorry for another break – things are hot and dry, very dry. Yesterday we had our first fire scare; a blaze broke out on the western side of Cosgrove Hill, just behind us (800m South). I’d just returned from picking up feed when we saw the smoke. The Cook got the pump running whilst the kids and I unloaded the feed and filled the fire tank. Luckily this time the wind was in our favour and the fire was to far south be any direct threat on the house. In the time it took us to start getting organised the aircraft from the Michelago arrived and spent about an hour bombing the fire. The aircraft had been over flying the farm all day between Michelago and Bunyan Airfield and they probably spotted the fire even before we did.

I had a talk to one of the firies this morning, I was told they had trouble getting a crew together due to the effort on the other fires.

The last two months we’ve had less then 10mm of rain, our average for this period is over 140mm and the rain we were expecting over the Christmas week has disappeared. So with little outlook for a break in the weather we will be constantly watching for smoke over the next few weeks – or until it does rain.

This also means that a lot of the jobs I wanted to do in the back paddocks are off as well. We can’t afford to have the vehicle start a fire and as I have to drive through thick beds of tinder dry grass to get anywhere - it’s just not safe.

One of neighbours was badly injured in the Michelago fires; he made front page news of the Canberra Times on Saturday. Hopefully, he makes a swift and full recovery.

In the middle of all this however, the Cook has managed to keep her garden going and we are currently enjoying a bountiful harvest of Zucchini. The three new ducks are growing and now have full feathers – they are just beautiful, and we think they are all girls too.

I saw on the Sister-in-Laws Blog that she took a fall off a quad bike (I hope your okay) – Don’t worry F, doesn’t matter what you do to your face you’ll always be prettier then Maverick…. And I haven’t started my Christmas Shopping yet either, I figure I’ve got until Thursday. Is it too late for Amazon????

I’ll post more soon, lot’s of stories stored up, like being bitten by a snake, selling lots of pigs and George’s latest indiscretions.

White with two please.

2009-12-07T22:26:00.004+11:00

Yeah I’m still alive, survived a sense of humour transplant. Things in general have worn me down a bit lately so I think it’s really time for a little holiday – if I’m lucky Santa might let me have one for Christmas. I was talking to somebody today and they asked when was the last time I had a holiday? and I couldn’t remember.

I read an article today about a judge who believes the internet doesn’t allow us to forget. His opinion is that in the past, pre digital days, people would forget bad things people had said or done and over time forgive them for their indiscretions. However, in today’s digital world everything lasts forever and nothing disappears over time. A bit like the Blog – here forever, don’t tell the Cook.
The farm is still here, pretty to very dry, no water in the dams and very little summer feed – lucky sheep eat rocks.

Speaking of sheep, you may recall we had a successful lambing this year, lots of little spring fella’s bounding across the dry, dusty dirt chasing down mum. I was lout fencing on the weekend, I’d missed going out there last week due to an injury, so I was keen to see the sheep and see how they were doing. I tracked them down the flats and into a small gully, I could hear Mildred’s bell tinkling away and smell the heavy sent of lanoline on the air. I creped over the rise, they usually bolt if they see me so I stayed out of sight. I did a quick count, and made a mental note that there must be more somewhere. I watched them for a spell then moved back down the gully. I looked around for more tracks and sign of the remaining animals but couldn’t find anything. Whilst I was snooping around the sheep began to move towards the river into the shade for the afternoon. I decided to take up a position overlooking the trail and count them into the paddock. We only have 24 so if I take off my boots I can keep track – thanks to those extra toes!!

So we lost some sheep. We had a couple of good litters of pigs as well – which is another story. One poor mum had ten piglets and was doing really well. One night we noticed she was down to eight – nothing unusual we lose a couple every once and a while. Anyway by the end of the week she was down to a single piglet and I couldn’t believe it. I searched around and couldn’t find any sign of what was happening until a couple of days later when I found a well worn path being travelled by an adult fox and three or four cubs. It must have been hunting lessons for the young ones. Anyway I have a solution in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again – looks like the old Yowie suite is going to get a run after a few years in the trunk.

Mrs Duckherder, your ducks are going fine and I’ll take a picture of them soon. Only three hatched but they are doing really well. The other chicks that we hatched are doing well also, we’ve been really lucky with them and there are some really nice looking birds amongst them. The Goose had a nest going for a while – but she dropped dead walking back from feeding one day – oh yeah, it’s never slow around here. It was a real shame, and it happened right in front of the kids. We tried to incubate here eggs but that didn’t work and we took them off life support the other night. Which reminds me, those eggs are still in the incubator.

The Cooks garden is going well, she has been away a bit lately and even with the blokes looking after it there appears to be life. Ben has been enjoying the strawberries and we’ve had a good supply of lettuce, radishes and assorted greens.
Got my ugly mug in the paper – must have been a slow news day. Mrs D spotted it otherwise it would have gone totally unnoticed.

The fence is taking shape and I’ve got over the blisters – now I just have calluses. I’ve spent alot of time and effort hammer posts into rock to make it work. I think next time I have such a bright idea – I won’t.

Snakes are out and about and we’ve seen a few to date. The Cook had a close call the other day and the kids have seen a couple too.

A minute to myself to catch up

2009-11-03T21:47:00.002+11:00

I’m having a little difficulty typing after a couple of weeks fencing and such. We’ve crammed a lot in over the past few weeks and I’m ready for a little lay down. The temperature took a sudden climb and the days included morning mist and afternoon storms. We had 28mm in one afternoon at the beginning of last week alone. Nothing like the 8inches they had 20km’s down the road which closed the highway, killed stock and destroyed a plant nursery. Of course today it was windy all day – at one point we had rain and dust storm within seconds.

The fencing is far from finished but we’ve been able to complete a lot more then I could have alone. With about a quarter of the steel posts now in on the wildlife refuge and just a little wait until we can get the rock out of the last four holes in the CMA area it’s all going forward. The guy’s came out and helped again – on an incredibly hot and humid day.

The rain we had forced the river to rise and I had to do the dash and rescue the pump – at least this time I had pants on.

I had to drive out to Murrumbateman and pick up some mulch for the Cook. We found some advertised for $30 a bale and the Cook sent me out for two. It never occurred to me to ask if they had any way to load it – I just thought that a horse stud, with 8x4x4 straw bales would have a tractor. Any hoo, a couple of hours later and a tonne of mulch was on the trailer and I was stuffed, it was hot and humid and the straw was wet all the way through and I’d only loaded one. By the time I got back to Bredbo it was afternoon and I needed the trailer to pick up the weeks feed. Of course it was coming a day early, that afternoon.

Mrs Duck herder dropped in on us that afternoon and we had a pleasant couple of hours showing her around and chatting about compost. Unfortunately I left at one stage and the Cook and Mrs Duck conspired to make me go back to Murrumbateman and retrieve the other straw bail for the Cook this week end – I’m really looking forward to that. There was also nice little impromptu lesson in Potato identification and ‘farting’. Poor old Ben was left to unload the straw on his own when we went for a cuppa – looks like its Harry’s job next time.

The Cook and I had been invited to a dinner at Old Parliament House to celebrate the 100 Anniversary of the survey of the ACT and the food producers from within 100 miles that night as well. It was a great night, the food was wonderful of course and the pig farming and slow food conversation was entertaining. The tables were arranged so that there was producers and consumers together and people could ask questions and discuss what it actually takes to grow a pig, chestnut or waratah.

We only just made it to the dinner on time – I had to load a tonne of fed onto the trailer and then park the car at the underground car park at the hospital, we left it there because it might rain and we didn’t want the wheat getting wet. I also needed to get change – unfortunately the Cook only pointed out the security cameras after the event.

On the way home dropped by Mrs Duck and dropped her off some high quality Bacon – she goes to bed way too early.

I had a chance to take a short walk down the river Friday before it came up and chanced upon a couple of swans paddling in the shallows and a juvenile Eastern Water Dragon sunning himself on a log. We’ve had an increase in the wildlife around the farm in the last year or so, things that we’ve never seen before and that aren’t included in the Cooma/Monaro State of the Environment.

And of course Sunday was my birthday, so I went fencing. Paul, Greg and Tanya came out again. Paul was out early and had a farm fresh breakfast of bacon and eggs, Greg and Tanya stayed for dinner after a hard day’s work. We got to sample the Cooks pickled gherkins’ from last year’s crop – now they’re not too everybody’s taste but I loved them – she can make them for me any day, and there are jars of them left – lucky me.

Yesterday on my way home from Canberra the jeep over heated slightly so I pulled over and had a quick look. Transmission fluid was going everywhere so I pulled into the servo for an emergency top up and hopefully a quick trip home before the transmission blew. Luckily I made it, but this morning I had to take it into Cooma for a new transmission cooling hose – five hours in Cooma is not fun. Another few hundred dollars gone, but at least the car still goes and I can pick up bread tomorrow.

Whilst the car was in being looked at someone from the Jeep Club in Canberra came through town, he noticed our jeep out front of the servo and stopped (I haven’t talked to him yet so I don’t know why). He quizzed the mechanic and left a card for me to contact him – apparently he’d never seen a jeep with nearly 500 000 KM’s on it before and was quite impressed.

So I’ve still got a list of things to do a mile long, things like; the sheep need to be mustered, I need to put a water pipe in for the pigs, I need to finish mowing the lawn, there’s some work needs doing on the chook pen and it keeps going ( I’ve ignored all the fencing I need to do other then what is currently being done).

wasn't there pigs here yesterday?

2009-10-28T21:02:00.002+11:00

I’m sitting at the dinner table watching Ben run in circles around the lounge with the kitten trying to catch him, every so often the kitten takes a short cut and launches herself from the top of the lounge at Ben – luckily there hasn’t been any contact yet, but it’ll come, and I’ll wet myself laughing when it does.

We had a good storm this afternoon; at a guess I would say more than half an inch – I was in Cooma with Ben when it rained, there is mud everywhere and the back room of the house has had water in it as well. So, after the kids left for school I spent the morning crushing grain for the pigs and making up feeds, I topped up their waters and made sure the chickens had plenty of water as well – it was going to be a warm day.

I spent most of out the back putting in the last couple of strainers, that’s 20 with another five in the trailer waiting for the holes to be ‘improved’. Tomorrow it’ll be time to start putting in the steel posts – I can feel the aching shoulder muscles already, I suppose it’s character building if nothing else, plus now I have blisters on my blistered blisters.

You know how sometimes you do something – then in hind sight you realise you’ve made a huge mistake. We had a couple of piglets in a box in the house some months ago. They needed some warmth and looking after because they were too small and the litter was too large. Any way these are the pigs we’ve been using in the garden paddock to plough things up. Harry went out to feed them this morning and they were gone (at first I had a dread that they had been stolen, I’d been woken by what I thought was someone driving up the drive at 3:45am – couldn’t find any sign and I checked the camera this morning but it showed nothing). I went to investigate what was going on and found the little buggers had dug a tunnel under the fence and escaped – so it was more a ‘great escape’ then ‘a wooden horse’ – we found them a short time later back in the big pig yard. We probably shouldn’t have watched Hogan’s Heroes when they were in the house.

oh well no tears and they've gone to bed - quite time at last.

Now it rains

2009-10-26T19:54:00.008+11:00

It was a little wet and windy today – just what we needed. The day started off slow but soon with kids galloping off to school and pigs to feed everything regained its momentum. The Cook had a well deserved lay in and I looked after the animals. We’ve recently reduced our numbers by about a dozen pigs and it’s made a big difference. Most of the ones that went were bigger pigs as well, so the feed is going a lot farther.

I spent the remainder of the morning after feeding dodging the Cook and her jobs – she was on the look out to put me to ‘gainful’ employment. As there is nothing to eat in the house until we can get to the shops again I headed up to the back 500 acres to have a look for weeds. Of course I found more than enough to be depressing. I haven’t been right up in the back corner adjacent to the railway line much, there’s a lot of tussock coming across the tracks onto our place, luckily it shouldn’t be too hard to get under control (famous last words). I was also trying to find any trace of our second Jersey Bull – no luck there, I’ll have to go see the neighbour and see if he’s seen him.

On the way back I came via the back of the hill behind the house, I ran into the Wedge Tail Eagles who were hunting rabbits in the grass ,I managed to get a couple of quick pics before they disappeared over the ridge. I also spotted a couple of new native flowers, I still can’t identify them – they weren’t flowering properly so I may go back on the weekend to have another look.

I don't know if there was something in the water here but some of the animals are a little odd today. The kitten thinks it's a lion and has been pouncing on anything that moves in the house from behind cover - and after seeing snakes it's not a pleasant feeling to have a kitten sink it's claws into your ankle. The fat dog has been doing that crazy dog thing running around with her tail between her legs all over the lawn. Fatso has been following me around all day - getting in my way when ever it is convenient for her and lastly George - he's joning in where ever he can and being a real dag.

When the boys arrived home they were put strait to work cleaning up the shearing shed, earlier in the day I’d found a blue birds egg on the grass up there and left it on a table. Anyway Ben found another couple and bought them back to the house. He’s quite the survivalist and pestered the cook to be able to break one of the eggs open and see what it look like inside. I was thinking it’d be a half grown chic or that it would be rotten. But low and behold it was just a normal egg, Ben asked if you could eat it, to which I responded that you could if it was a survival situation – so he wanted to try it. Out came the frying pan and Ben went to work cooking his egg, once finished he and Harry divided it and put it to the test – they both ate their share and decided it tasted just like ........chicken!

Sshhhh - they're all sleeping

2009-10-25T22:23:00.003+11:00

Finally, it’s all quite....... not a sound - except the soft patter of rain on the iron roof and the faint muffled snoring of a fat black Labrador in the mud room. Quite a contrast from the last 48hrs.

We had 18 young lads here over the weekend for Ben’s birthday sleep over and that’s a lot of growing boys to feed.
Hat off to the Cook, she has spent the past two days attached to the stove cooking pizzas, biscuits, cakes and bread. I think, with the exception of pork we’ve run out of everything edible in the house. It was quite a logistical challenge to get everything cooked on the wood burning stove – specially the pizza’s, I think the kids were still eating until 9pm then there was milo’s at 10:30pm. They all spent the night in the shearing shed, I wandered up about 11:30pm and they were all still up watching DVD’s – except our two who had both passed out on their swags, exhaustion had taken its toll I expect.

I can’t even remember Saturday, I think it started early with a dash to Cooma to get everything that the Cook hadn’t the day before in Canberra. We had the Land Care AGM, it was uneventful. The guest speaker was from DECC and spoke about the Atherton to the Alps project, this is a conservation project about linking all the diverse landscapes along the Great Dividing Range. K2C is part of this and we received funding from this for some of our conservation work. Saturday afternoon was spent spraying weeds – for which I have formally given up and decided to get in a contractor with a tractor and boom to finish – there’s just too much. Did I ever tell that we have had our status wildlife reserve Gazetted?? It happened a couple of weeks back and the property is now officially named ’Valley View Wildlife Refuge’.

Today I have to really thank the three people who turned up to help with the fence, Paul, Greg and Tanya. All of them are part of the NSF and have their own conservation work to deal with as well. The help was gratefully appreciated and I could never have finished so much without them – and Paul is coming out next weekend as well. Unfortunately I have bent my crow bar into an ‘S’ shape – I need to find a heavier one I guess.
We headed back to the house about 1pm and arrived just in time for parents to start arriving to pick up the. Then I hit the road, off to Canberra to drop kids back and a long trip home. By the time we fed the pigs and did the waters is was dark and raining heavily. The Cook had conjured up a chicken from somewhere and we all sat down wearily to decimate the poor soul.

Now ever body else is in bed and I’ve got five minutes to myself, I might have a cuppa, catch up with some blogs, feed the dogs and hit the sack...........

No Rain, lots of Wind and plenty of blisters

2009-10-23T21:11:00.004+11:00

Swainson Pea

One day I’m going to actually have holiday, the last time I took time off was when we moved into the farm. It never slows down, and even this weekend is full, Ben has his Birthday Sleep Over, there is the AGM for Land Care and a trip into Canberra on Sunday.

The last two weeks have been fairly productive, I’ve been able to get a lot of the posts into the ground out the back in the conservation area, the last few have been soul destroying with solid rock down about 18 inches. My arms ache, I’m sunburnt and in desperate need of a shave - I’ll be glad to head back to work, the kids reckon I’m a real red neck now. It hasn’t been all my work, one of the guy’s from the NSF has come out and helped and some others have also offered which is really great – and I will take them up on it.

We had a Grass Lands expert Rainer Rehwinkle come out yesterday to do a survey of some of Grasslands. It was a little windy, but otherwise a very pleasant afternoon. Rainer found over 60 species of native plants including orchids. He was very impressed with the quality and the quantity. I thought this was amazing because he only saw a small portion of the grassland we have. He’s asked if we would donate some of our Swainson-Pea seeds to the millennium seed project. Some of the seeds will end up in the National Botanic Gardens and the rest will be sent to the deep freezer in Norway where they are storing a collection of seed samples from every plant in the world – sort of a huge bio bank. I forgot to take my camera with me so went back today, but the wind was up again and the little flowers are hard to photograph in the wind. Whilst I was out there I stumbled upon two Shingle Back lizards and an Earless Dragon – which was slightly funny as Lauren, the facilitator from K2C was with us the day before and she spent hours looking under rocks for the little blighters.

I’ve also spent a bit of time spraying the Tussock Grass in the paddock next to the highway. It’s a wonderful job; the long Love Grass makes it difficult to walk and hides wombat holes really well. The paddock is a nice shade of pink however. I’m starting to think there is more to be done here then I can manage alone – between the farm and the conservation work there is barely a free or slow moment. I am going to need to get the local contractor in to boom spray some of the larger infestations of Tussock otherwise they’ll just get away and the problem will only get worse.

The Cook was in fine form this morning, I was in the Chicken Coup turning on the water and she was bringing up some scraps to the chickens. I wasn’t watching but she suddenly screamed and I looked up – just in time to see two very large brown snakes slithering across the yard. She had nearly stepped on them (maybe interrupted them is more precise), luckily the dogs weren’t around and the kids had gone to school. I think she’s looking a bit greyer this evening.

The Cook has been preparing the garden for the Bio Dynamic Course. It’s looking really good and a lot of effort has gone into it. It should look really good by November – and many thanks goes out to Mrs Duck for her donation of seedlings, they are doing you proud Mrs Duck and the Cook is very happy with them all.

Who's the good looking rooster??

2009-10-14T22:41:00.002+11:00

Another day out in the open air and wind, I’ve got blisters on my blisters and a few aching muscles. I spent hours digging rocks out of post holes, I’ve ruined a pair of gloves in two days and I’ve already started to wear the second pair at the base of the thumb. And I’ve bent my crow bar – that’s a real bugger.....

It’s amazing what you see out there, I saw two foxes, one saw me, but the other didn’t.

I’ve managed to get seven posts in to date and this should speed up in the next few days as the fence goes out across the flats. I still need to go back and cement one in because I couldn’t get the whole deep enough in the rock.

There are dozens of different birds, hawks and falcons can be seen floating around on the updrafts and the stubble quails keep scaring the life out of me in the long grass between fence posts. I spotted a white necked heron gorging itself on threatened species down at the river this morning – I tried to get a picture of it but it had gone by the time I got back with the camera.

Our sheep are looking well and all the lambs have survived the bad weather. I see them each day on my way out to the fence, they are fat and happy – we’ve got one that must have been missed at shearing time it has a double fleece which will make it a fly target when the weather warms up so we’ll have to get the shearer out early this year.

Big day tomorrow – somebody is having a birthday, not that you would know. He’s been reminding us for days. So we are planning a special dinner for him tomorrow night, the cake is cooked and his pressies are sitting here on the table ready for when he wakes up.

Here it comes again

2009-10-13T22:57:00.001+11:00

Working hard

2009-10-13T22:46:00.002+11:00

A few days ago we rounded up a dozen of the smaller pigs and put them into an enclosure (we call it a pigitentiary) on the garden area. They only stay out on one spot for a night and they plough it up enough to move them onto the next area, at this rate we’ll have the paddock ploughed before the end of the month. Everything is starting to look green again now, but we’ll have to wait and see how long it lasts, maybe we’ll get the wet spring we’ve been hoping for.

We’ve finally been able to get our electric fence problems sorted out as well. Our mains power energizer arrived back from repairs the other day and is now working a treat – no more loose pigs. The Cook is really happy about that.
The River is running well and the water is crystal clean. I was quite surprised when I saw it, I thought it would have been a little more turbid after all the rain.

I spent most the day on the hill side putting in fence posts, apart from the blisters, wind and rain showers it was a rather nice day to be out there – lucky, because there is more of that tomorrow. There’s nothing better than the solitude of a vast open space.

The other thing I really like is music – both types. Right now I ‘m sitting at the table typing whilst listening and watching the new Sugarland DVD – if you’ve never heard of them then do yourself a favour and get any one of their CD’s, they’re just great. Jennifer Nettles, the lead singer, has the most amazing voice and she has the greats Georgia accent – I love the Southern ladies when they talk like that... I’ve been really lucky to catch them in concert as well and they are as good live as on CD. I’m thinking of heading off to CMC Rocks the Snowy’s again this year, I’m just waiting to see who all the acts are. I know that Taylor Swift will be in town around then as well and if she brings her support acts with her I’ll go see them instead. Glorianna are touring with her at the moment and I’d really like to see them in concert – and Kellie Pickler is another favourite as well.

Back again

2009-10-12T23:17:00.003+11:00

It’s been a while – I’ve got no excuses life has just kept us rather busy. We’ve had a lot happening – it has rained quite bit nearly every day without the drying winds’.

I won’t try and catch up right now, I’ll leave that for later. The important things first; a big thank you to Mrs Duck Herder for an incubator full of lovely duck eggs, they’re in and rotating and hopefully in a couple of weeks we’ll clutch of very special ducklings. She also gave us a load of Onion and Leek seedlings which have been planted. And sorry for busting in so late Mrs DH – I’ll try harder next time to arrive at a decent hour...

We’ve also picked up our first batch of natives for planting in the upper reach of our gully. The fencing has started in earnest and hopefully in the next three weeks the planting areas should be stock proof. If anybody has a spare couple of days of sunlight they could spare let me know.

We’ve had more snow as well, last week on Wednesday it snowed all the way down highway to Michelago. I was taking the kids to a first aide course in Canberra – I nearly turned around and had a snow day it was so heavy.
The River is high but the water is crystal clear, the rain has been enough to cause runoff but not a lot of silt. Up early in the morning to collect another load of bread, then back home for a little more fencing, some tree planting and if it’s fine a little weed spraying.

Still more to come - Bee and NSF meetings, weeds, piglets and all sorts of things. I need to sort out my pictures - they're all to large to upload, I need to get photoshop.....

It never snows in September!

2009-09-28T15:48:00.004+10:00

Snow over Bredbo

A lot needed to be done this weekend – not much happened. Due to the weather we had a pretty quite weekend. Saturday the wind drove us all inside and at times it was either raining ice or snow. I don’t think the temperature rose above 7 Degree’s making it the coldest September day for years. The winds suddenly abated at 6pm Saturday night, which was nice, but by Early Sunday morning we had our second dust storm in a week and woke to a rather windy morning. The kids had a sleepover and spent the night n the wool shed – luckily their swags are well decked out and they didn’t freeze.

???????

Cooks day off

I was supposed to go over to Braidwood for an NSF meeting Saturday night – but I decided to stay home because of the weather and the 3 hour drive – one way.

We fed a lot of bread to the pigs on the weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve lost interest in it. But they were still eating it this morning so hopefully, by tonight, it’ll all be gone. Of course having a couple of extra hands made feeding it out a lot easier. George is always there to give a hand as well and his eagerness to get into the trailer is going to be legendary one day.

Sunday was another horrible day – but things needed to be done. I dropped into the Bredbo Markets and picked The Cook up some honey. Went into town and picked up the feed, visited the dump (hilite) and spent the afternoon unloading the feed.

This morning we had a sort rain shower and then everything fined up – you wouldn’t have known we’d had such a bad weekend by 9am.

Lots of bread

2009-09-25T13:16:00.001+10:00

Well it’s back to farm stuff. Had a little more rain over the past couple of days and we are starting to see a little bit of green come through into the paddocks. We had a pleasant surprise yesterday morning when the cattle arrived in the back yard after a couple of months grazing the ridges. I don’t know if it was the rain that bought them back, but it was good to see they are doing fine.

The kids wandered out of bed bleary eyed early this morning – followed by that ball of energy known as Ashes. Ben was complaining that the kitten had woken them up wanting to play not long after the sun rose – neither of them was impressed and I had little sympathy for them.

I received a call from the bakery this morning – one of the ovens had chucked a wobbly and they had a tonne of bread they needed to get rid of before the weekend. The big trailer is packed to the brim and the Jeep had a job dragging the trailer up the range this morning. They just kept on bringing the stuff out by the forklift load. I think the pigs will be really happy tonight when the boys get home and we can start unloading it. The big trailer is packed to the brim and the Jeep had a job dragging the trailer up the range this morning.

The bruise on the Cook face is going down at last – she had parent teacher interviews last night, goodness only knows what they thought.

There’s a big weekend ahead of us but the weather isn’t looking that good. I’ve got to make it to the dump on Saturday before anything else – it wasn’t Em’s fault I missed the dump last time either – it was all mine.

And lastly – hi to Liz and Obie down in Melbourne – thanks for the email, which I haven’t replied to yet.

//MTF./

Tuesday - already

2009-09-22T13:54:00.002+10:00

I didn’t get time to post last week, I’d written something – but it never went any further, so I back posted it today. Another week has flown by and we are getting closer to school holidays again. We’ve had a little bit of rain – enough to get things started, but not enough to put anything in the dams.

Last week was our first trial run at delivering fresh pork to the door step. This worked well and I think everybody was happy. We’ve had our first family feast of Berkshire and everybody was very impressed – even the Cook.

Luckily for me the Duck Lady and her husband were on the delivery list for pork. I left my stop there until last as she had offered me a cuppa. They have a lovely place and we had a nice chat and a cup of tea under a lovely shady tree watching the ducks, chickens and cockatoos doing their thing in the garden.

The kitten is growing and taking up a lot of everybody’s time – she sleeps with the boys and has been giving them a bit of curry during the night. I think Harry will be glad once it’s a little bit older.

We’ve had more chicks hatch in the chook pen and there are chicks everywhere. Hopefully we’ll have a better ratio of hens this time and start getting eggs again before winter. Until then we have a one egg a day ration.

I managed to visit Em in Cooma on Saturday when I picked up Ben form a sleep over. I thought I should introduce myself and took them around some pork as a welcoming gift. Unfortunately I missed the dump – that’ll be a blow later in the week.

After the rain last night there were no pigs out of their paddocks – giving more weight to the idea that he ground isn’t wet enough for the fence to not work properly over the past couple of weeks.

On the lighter side - the Cook bashed herself chopping fire wood on Sunday evening. It left her with a great shiner on her cheek. She spent all Sunday night wandering around the kitchen holding frozen peas to her face. Unfortunately she had to work Monday – which included lecturing at the University. And working in a female dominated work place you know who will be getting the blame for that one…….

The Brown snake is alive and well in the feed shed. He and I had words on Sunday afternoon – but I don’t think snakes have ears, so basically I’ll stay out of his way.

We had a light Aircraft doing low passes along the river all day yesterday – may have been the aerial photography mob that do property photo’s and letter drops every so often. It looked a little ruff for that type of flying though. I went out and watched it go by a few times – just in case they were spraying weeds. The aircraft was a blue and white Cessna Skyline 182 – been in a few of those in a past life, glad I don’t have to do that anymore.

I bolted out of bed this morning and headed off to Canberra to pick up bread. At first I thought it was raining, it had earlier in the night (going by the Old Di rain in the feed bucket method of determining rain – I think we got 3mm), but it turned out to be a massive dust storm mixing with the clouds and a little fog – a very surreal look to the whole valley and surrounds.

Last weeks post

2009-09-22T09:26:00.002+10:00

We’ve all been really busy lately, spring is here and the temperatures are slowly rising. The first blossoms are almost done and we’ll be searching the apricot trees for buds in the next few days. It was up early this morning to enjoy the pre dawn hours. The animals were out and about snuffling in the dust and dry grass, somewhere along the river a fox was calling out – it was very peaceful.

It was a busy weekend; the days were nice – apart from a mild breeze. It was Ben’s last soccer game of the year, sleepovers, a huge trailer load of green scraps for the pigs had to be fed out and a long afternoon walk along the river looking for signs of the wild boar.

Sunday was busy, helped to move some chickens across town to a new home - that took some effort. We picked up feed and more greens, and finally loaded up some pigs for travelling. I took some from down the road with a couple of ours. It was interesting to note the differences in the breeds, the ones I picked up where Saddle Back crosses and are markedly longer then our guys. The Berkshires appeared to be a lot hardier pig and the muscle tone was much better on the free’er range pigs.

Anyway, by the time we were able to load ours it was late. So here we were trying to sort out and load black pigs on to a trailer in the darkness. Poor old Ben got knocked for six and winded buy one of the bigger pigs and trying to sort out a boar from a sow proved problematic.

At the end of the day I think the cook learned a couple of new swear words – so it wasn’t all for naught.

We’ve got a cat. I’m allergic to the buggers – but we’ve got one anyway. It’s a little black kitten named Ashes – photo’s shortly. Of course a cat wasn’t really part of the overall scheme of things, but the mice problem gets worse each winter and we don’t want to poison them which is the only other way we could get them.

It’ll be another busy weekend ahead

Something completely different

2009-09-09T09:08:00.005+10:00

My next job - Weeds.....

I love Bush Poetry and Australian Folklore, I still have my collection of Henry Lawson and Bamjo Paterson somewhere - and a couple of old Wallace and Matilda cassette tapes so here's a lovely Australian poem. It has something for everyone - If you know the bush, it will appeal to you, if you work in the oil industry, there is something in it for you too, if you have a sense of humour - well, it might test it a little and if you are not an Australian, then it won't help your knowledge of Australian life one bit ...

I'm not sure of the Author, I think it's that really famous poet Annon.

Goodbye Granddad

Poor old Granddad's passed away, cut off in his prime,
He never had a day off crook - gone before his time,
We found him in the dunny, collapsed there on the seat,
A startled look upon his face, his trousers around his
feet,
The doctor said his heart was good - fit as any trout,
The Constable he had his say, 'foul play' was not ruled
out.
There were theories at the inquest of snakebite without
trace,
Of red-backs quietly creeping and death from outer space,
No-one had a clue at all - the judge was in some doubt,
When Dad was called to have his say as to how it came
about,
'I reckon I can clear it up,' said Dad with trembling
breath,
'You see it's quite a story - but it could explain his
death.'
'This here exploration mob had been looking at our soil,
And they reckoned that our farm was just the place for
oil,
So they came and put a bore down and said they'd make
some trials,
They drilled a hole as deep as hell, they said about
three miles.
Well, they never found a trace of oil and off they went,
post haste,
And I couldn't see a hole like that go to flamin' waste,
So I moved the dunny over it - real smart move I
thought,
I'd never have to dig again - I'd never be 'caught
short'.
The day I moved the dunny, it looked a proper sight,
But I didn't dream poor Granddad would pass away that
night,
Now I reckon what has happened - poor Granddad didn't
know,
The dunny was re-located when that night he had to go.
And you'll probably be wondering how poor Granddad did
his dash--
Well, he always used to hold his breath
Until he heard the splash!!

Okay - We're back and it's full steam ahead

2009-09-08T12:58:00.003+10:00

AN INTRODUCTION TO BIODYNAMICS
Grazing, cropping & horticulture

BREDBO, NSW

Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th November, 2009 9am–5pm

SUSTAINING GENERATIONAL EQUITY – GROWING SOILS FOR THE FUTURE

You will learn how the biodynamic preparations contribute to the soil food web creating fertility and balance in your soil.
Biodynamics is a cost effective method of producing high quality plants, food and fibre with regenerative ecological outcomes.
Also applicable for garden enthusiasts.
This two day workshop will introduce you to all practical aspects needed to apply biodynamics:

• The life of the soil

• Creating fertility in your soil
• Managing your natural resources
• Practical use of the biodynamic preparations
• Using the planting calendar
• Developing risk management: Weeds, Pests, Diseases
• Meeting climate change challenges: Drought, Flood, Carbon sequestration

Books will be available for sale

BOOKINGS: 02 6655 9853 office@biodynamics2024.com.au
VENUE: Bredbo Valley View, Bredbo
LOCAL CONTACT: The Bredbo Pig Man, you can smell him coming! Use the Blogsite email.

COST: $220 pp or $330 per couple GST inc.

Morning & afternoon teas provided. Please bring lunch.
Please register by Thursday, 5th November, 2009.

Presented by
Biodynamic Educators:

John Priestley

John is a third generation ecological farmer. He has been evolving his practice and knowledge of
biodynamics for over 50 years. With his wife Dorothy he grows award winning citrus and beef
cattle at Paterson in the NSW Hunter Valley. He is a wealth of practical knowledge with a
keen eye for the small observations that can make adifference to farming.

Hamish Mackay

Hamish has been working with biodynamics for 35 years and travels Australia presenting introductory
biodynamic workshops, providing growers with clear and practical methods for adopting biodynamics as a cost effective way to produce high quality food and fibre; at the same time improving our environment.

New hatchings

2009-09-07T13:21:00.003+10:00

Wombat tracks in the mud

The Cook has spent the last couple of nights on her hands and knees in the dinning room. It’s the only way she can see into the incubator and watch the chicks hatch. So far we have had nine out of twenty four hatched. They are a mix of types some are ours and some we bought locally. We have a good setup now and things are working well, they grow so much better under the heat lamps then they did under light bulbs.

So far we have two Hamburgs which are growing much quicker then the rest. The three that I picked up from Monika are growing and have feathers now; I think they are from our small white hen and maybe one of the red roosters. The Cook has had to help some out of the egg and one even managed to get a warm bath and blow dry. She just loves hatchings and spends hours watching the little ones escape their shell and play around their new home. Although most spend the first few hours sprawled in front of the heat lamp recuperating from their ordeal.

I’ve finally managed to get the grain mill fixed and now we can get back to crushing the pigs feed. Unfortunately the feed guy didn’t make it this week so we are on shop bought rations for a week, the pigs don’t mind and I’ve never seen them pass up a free feed yet. I had a talk to somebody about our electric fence and it appears there’s not enough moisture in the ground to conduct properly and therefore the pigs aren’t getting zapped. I need to go around and rewire some of the fence so that the ground is set up differently and should work better.

We’ve been getting the odd light shower over the past few days – but I don’t know exactly how much because somebody ran over my rain gauge. But we’ve not had enough to make the electric fence work unfortunately.

We’re glad we decided not to sow any crops this year as well – would have been another waste of money.

I spent the weekend installing a new surveillance system for both the pigs and the farm. We’ve had continuing problems with ‘unknown’ people entering the farm during the day. I’ve managed to make a catalogue of tyre marks as well to match with cars. I splurged a little and have purchased both daylight and infra red cameras with zoom. The range is amazing – so far I’ve been able to read number plates at 200 metres. It’s also hooked into the internet so I can monitor it from anywhere and it sends an SMS alarm if it detects certain types of movement or tampering. I might hook it up to the Blog one day when I’ve got a spare five minutes.

Catching up.

2009-09-01T13:21:00.003+10:00

looking North along the Gully

We packed in a lot over the past week. The Jeep went in for some long awaited repairs – which took a little longer then first thought. But no wit is up and running at full speed. Of course only having one car was a little bit of a bother, but we managed.

There were a number of meetings, including the Natural Sequence Farming AGM and a Weeds vs NSF show down at the Bredbo Pub. Both went well with the showdown going well with nearly 80 participants. The Council Weed Inspector was very accepting and I think his approach to the whole evening was encouraging.

Then Saturday it was off to Yass early in the morning for a Field Day with Peter Andrews. It was horrible weather and by 9:00am I was soaked. Reminded me of lovely times I spent on the training area near Rockhampton. Once the sun came out it was mild enough that I didn’t catch pneumonia.

The property we visited was very elegant and obviously had a bit of money spent on it. The lady had a variety of animals including; Alpaca’s, Dorpers, East Friesian Sheep and Jersey cows. She was supposed to have pigs – but I didn’t see any. The country was a little rough and I doubt if there was room for the serious implementation of NSF principles.

I was going to have a rest of Sunday – yeah right. Fences needed fixing feeds need making and feed needed to be moved. I had to feed out the remainder of the green feed and clean up the mess. Sunday afternoon I let all the pigs out for a graze on the new fresh grass in the potato paddock – they loved it, but by 5:00pm they were all ready to get back home and have dinner.

The Cook has named the smallest one of the three piglets Scruffy. They other two haven’t got names yet, but they are looking really good and as they are able to be registered may be good candidates for show pigs. The buggers chase me everywhere I go – day or night, squealing happily. They eat with the big pigs and then expect to be fed again when the dogs eat. Luckily we have lots bread.

George has left home – on a trial basis. He’s living with the mob of sheep in the bottom paddock, the ones with all the lambs. There is no Ram with them so he’s pretty happy. He still comes when you call and he chased the car down the track yesterday them once we had gone he returned to his girls.

Monika from work hatched some of our eggs (three) in her incubator and I took the chicks home with me last night. She was sad to see them go – but she likes ducks better. They have settled in nicely with the other five chicks we have at the moment. By next week we’ll have more from the two dozen eggs ready to hatch in the incubator at the moment. We managed to find eggs from Hamburg’s, Old English Game, Plymouth Rock and some Silkies.

The Geese are still laying and hopefully we will try incubating some of their eggs once the latest lot of chicks have hatched. That’ll test the incubator, might have to put some duck eggs in with that lot as well.

The willows have started to sprout and the highway was lined with snow white blossoms in places this morning. The wild apple trees are really showing off this year and if we get some rain it should be a great crop. The first of the new Bredbo Markets ran on Sunday and was pretty impressive by all accounts (the Cook). She said there were a lot of stalls – mostly Arts and Craft. Probably not the place to sell our pork, but there maybe something else we can do instead – keep posted. The Cook has also found a Butcher to process our Bacon and make Sausages for us as well. More on that latter also – BTW he’s German ……. So they should be good…..

Oh yeah - we've had about 8mm ofn ain as well......

Monday is the start of a whole new season

2009-08-27T14:49:00.003+10:00

The Mountains from our front gate

We emerged from our three days of horrible weather without too much damage. A couple of our sheds are a little wind damaged having borne the brunt of the wind for the past days. We’re getting used to these pockets of inconvenience but they still disrupt the daily routine somewhat.

The three little pigs are still causing strife – the Cook has ‘named’ the smallest one Scruffy – so she’s off the menu, the other two are still contenders. Inexplicably the Boars spent most of the windy nights sleeping in the open, I have no idea why. The Cook spent hours yesterday feeding out green scraps, she’s still sore and stiff from skying with Ben on Tuesday and really enjoyed spending another day out in the cold wind. We also had to do the traditional ‘after a windy day’ electric fence inspection. There’s always something blown onto it on days like these and its best to fix it before the pigs find out.

The Jeep is finally repaired and back to full running order. I had explained to the mechanics previously that I thought it needed a new head gasket, manifold gasket as well as other various adjustments – this has finally all been done and it drives like a dream again, which isn’t bad for a fifteen year old car with 450,000km on the clock.

I’m expecting the river to get a minor flushing in the next couple of days with the rain we had – with any luck.

Tonight is the Upper Murrumbidgee Natural Sequence Farming AGM, so it’s into town for that. There are field days over the weekend with Peter Andrews as well which I will hopefully find time to attend.

One extreme to another

2009-08-25T13:07:00.002+10:00

Sunday night was the hottest August night on record – Monday night it snowed…. We had another day of winds above 85kmph but we also had about 10mm of rain - which was nice, the temperature got down to about 2-3 degrees which was warmer then we expected.

The Cook put new straw out for the pigs yesterday, but for some reason the Boars where all out sleeping in the rain. I’ll never figure these guys out, but as long as they are happy I don’t care how they decide to sleep - but you’d think they would take dry straw over cold wet mud.

There was a blanket of snow across the ranges this morning; it was getting really thick up towards Cooma. There was more snow falling after the sun came up so it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like when the cloud clears. The Cook is off skying with the boys today whilst I hold down the fort – I had a quick look at the snow cams a little while ago and it looked pretty cold up there. I hope she survives.