Cold - Rather!



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

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

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

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

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.



The front gate post at 7am this morning



A ton of pork

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.