Bredbo Valley View farm - providing quality education in Permaculture and sustainable living practices.

Monday, February 15, 2010

It's over for now



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


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

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.



Thursday, February 11, 2010

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


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


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.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Looking Good


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

Friends forever


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?