Our changing landscape

The recent summer rains have left parts of the farm in disrepair. We have issues with fencing being destroyed, new erosion gullies forming and the possibility of losing our large dam in the gully up the back (now christened Carabineers Creek).

As we don’t have stock in that part of the property the loss of the dam won’t really affect us, but it will affect the wildlife that live in it and on its banks. Every year families of water birds use the dam and backed up gully for breeding, this year we had our first waders, as well as the Grebes, Coots, shags and ibis. What we would really love to do is to turn the dam and the area between the dam and the river back into a wetland habitat. Something that was common on the Monaro 200 years ago but sadly missing today – so if anybody knows of any grants going that we would be able to apply for let me know.

So, with all this hydrological damage about I spent a few days out at Milkwood near Mudgee doing a Watershed Rehabilitation Workshop. This was run by a guy called Craig Sponholtz from the US and was based on solutions outlined in the book “Let the Water do the Work” by Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier. You can find a review of the book here -
http://permaculture.org.au/2011/07/14/let-the-water-do-the-work-induced-meandering-an-evolving-method-for-restoring-incised-channels/

The course was three days of mostly theory and a day of practical. Most importantly to my mind was the course covered in detail the effects that putting any structure into a stream will have, and the importance of putting the right structure in the right place. We covered stream and gully profiles, types and anatomy as well as formation and development.

The last day involved repairing an eroded gully using the techniques we had learnt. Which is another way of saying ‘hauling rocks’.

Overall I would recommend anybody who has a stream, gully, creek or run on their property to do this course. It's a pity the NSF doesn't have a course like this.

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?????

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.

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.

 

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!

Work to do

Harry Cooking Breakfast

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

The Rooster

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

Our lawn whilst being mowed

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

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

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

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

The farm dam

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



Helpers at the leaky weir



Going Slowly

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

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.

Wet, wet, wet.

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.

Drought is over - for now.

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.

Sshhhh - they're all sleeping

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...........

Catching up.

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

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.

The Cooks day off

Poor old Cook. She had a day off yesterday – sort of. She started out having to complete all the chores because the boys had gone off to a friend’s for a sleep over. By the time she had finished those she noticed that the horses were down in the river again so she went off to fetch them back, on the way she lost the sheep. Poor old George doesn’t like getting his feet wet so he wouldn't cross the river.

It turned out, once she got down there, that one of the horses had hurt itself. So she needed to look after that first and later went back for the others. Then she went looking for the sheep – which of course had already returned to the house paddock – but it took her an hour of searching to find that out. Once everything was settled at home, she had to take a trip into Cooma and get our car in for repair and do a little shopping.

She finally arrived home – much later then intended, just in time to feed the animals. By the time I arrived home she was in the kitchen cooking dinner for the two of us – what a women, what would I do with out her?

Anyway, she had left the preparation for the next mornings feeds up to me – and rightly so. So I spent a while doing before dinner. Then we both sat down and watched Australian Story and Peter Andrews whilst enjoying a delicious curry.

I had arrived late home. I’d had to drop something off on my way and thought I’d take a long cut. I’d never been down the ‘Angle Road’ before and it was definitely something I shouldn’t have done at night. I had the car and trailer going side ways around corners and missed turnoffs – nearly ended up in a paddock once! I haven’t been on a road with corrugations that bad for years.

Then on the way down the highway I had to wait a while because of an accident. A four wheel drive had rolled off the road avoiding a kangaroo whilst travelling to the snow.

This morning on my way to pick up bread I was passed by a fellow in a ute just before Williamsdale, he passed me on a pretty dangerous spot and wasn’t going slow. I caught up to him a bout three kilometres later pulling a kangaroo out of his radiator – he wasn’t going to get to work today. I am amazed at the speeds people travel at on the highway this time of year. The sides of the road are littered with car debris and dead kangaroos – you’d think it would be obvious.

There's a long way to go

With the Cook back everybody is happy again at home, especially me. We managed to get a couple of things done over the weekend– fixing the pigs electric fence was one and hanging a gate on the pig yards was another. All together things are ticking along.

I had to drop some paper work off at the DECC offices in Queanbeyan this afternoon and I was listening to the ABC. They ran a story about the Animal Liberation Group and a planned advertising campaign about intensive/factory chicken farming. I’m no fan of any intensive farming, and any attempt to make people more aware of hoe their food is grown has to be a good thing. Anyway the poster they had produced to hang in places like railway station and bus stops showed a family sitting at a table having a roast dinner. The caption posed a question asking how cruel the dinner was and then described the farming practices and methods used to supply the chicken in the dinner.

But apparently this dialogue was seen as being offensive to children; it may scare them or frighten them. What a load of bull. Surely a child would have to be over eight or nine to understand the language and much older to understand the concepts. People need to be aware that animals need not suffer to provide us food and they need not be farmed so horribly to provide us cheap food. No body argues with Telstra when they charge you 25c to make a phone call – then charge you line rent, then charge you installation for your modem and so on, it’s just a cost people pay. And food should be no different, if it costs a little more to produce best quality and ethically farmed produce then people should have to pay the farmer.

This opens up another array of issues, about how profits should be shared and who should be payed what. Dairy farmers, for instance, are paying higher water, feed and energy costs then ever before but are having their returns cut by milk processors. We haven’t seen any reduction in price of milk at the supermarket, there is no shortage of milk and we aren’t exporting more. So where is the money that we pay for milk going? I don’t know – I’ve searched the internet looking for a reason, but I’ve come up blank. The only thing that has gone up are the share prices of the multi nationals that extort our farmers.

One day we are all going to wake up and find out there aren’t any farmers anymore. There won’t be any fresh fruit, meat or milk. We’ll have to pay above market prices for below quality food, food that we don’t really know how it’s been produce or what has been sprayed onto it.

I was also disturbed by another issue that I discovered last night whilst watching Australian Story. I’ve never been a fan of the CSIRO either, they’ve been the lynch pin in a number of disasters over the years, remember the cane toad and more recently gene technology – I won’t blame them for DDT but they did encourage its use.

The story was about Maarten Stapper a former CSIRO Scientist who now specialises in soil biology and fertility. Biological farming has been around for years, but because it uses natural methods that are easily produced on the farm the requirement for the Agro industrial’s to supply millions of litres of chemicals is significantly reduced. So there are no grants of funds form the Agro giants or the Government for research or testing. Dr Joan Daly Head of CSIRO Agribusiness basically spelt it out; if you can’t commercialise something then it’s not the type of science that CSIRO is interested in. As a tax payer who pays her wage and foots the bill for her organisation I am dumb struck at her attitude – is she really a Scientist or just a grant chaser not really interested in the real out comes that will benefit peoples health and the environment – I question her ethics.

We regret this break in transmission

I’m back! Kind of busy over the past few days, Harry’s birthday sleep-over and a major computer disruption have left me a little behind. It would appear that we are in the market for a new computer, the one I usually use has thrown a motherboard and resuscitation is out of the question this time. I hope there was nothing on it I hadn’t backed up!!!!

Harry’s sleep over was a real success. All his mates had fun and everybody went home happy and very tired. They stayed up until 2am playing games and chatting about secret boys stuff. They had a bonfire as well which was nice on a chilly evening and has left us with a clean space in the middle of the back lawn. The Cook was kept very busy and lost count of the number of homemade pizza’s and garlic bread she made. By Sunday lunch she was well and truly glad to see the last young lad go home.

The Cook started tired. She had been out to a girls lunch the day before; she had to take the piglet with her because she needs to be fed hourly – the piglet, that is.

Saturday night I was baby sitting the piglet in front of the fire, I was watching it twitch and wriggle as it dreamt on its nice warm bag of wheat. It was dreaming about something and was very active, its legs where moving and it was wiggling from side to side. Suddenly, it jumped up in the middle of a wriggle and bolted, with its eyes still closed – and still asleep, across the box it lives in and slammed into the wire on the far side. It fell over and still wriggling remained soundly asleep. I burst out laughing, it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen a piglet do. Luckily she doesn’t seem to have suffered any injuries from this episode.

Saturday was supposed to be a NSF working party as well. But by the time I had taken Ben to soccer and gone into town to collect a few bags of acorns it was all over. They were putting in a contour line down the road and doing some work at Guises Creek.

We had the Soil Conservation people out to look at our erosion problems and see if we needed any remedial work done. Luckily most of our problems appear to be healing themselves and if we leave stock off the worst areas for a little longer we should be able to see huge improvements after the next good rains.

We had about 4mm of rain over the past week, all in small part millimetre falls. It’s hardly enough to mention – but it is better then nothing.

The next door neighbour was spotlighting for ferals last night. I watched him drive all over the hills across the river. The whole time I could hear a group of foxes yapping at each other on our side - there must have been at least six. I think they all cross the river as soon as they see the spot light come out.

Oh, and the dogs laid more mines – damned things – they are obviously getting into something they’re not supposed too…..

By torch light

The tap that couldn't be found

I’m no plumber, in fact, I have problems flushing the toilet – just ask the Cook. On Tuesday I had to repair the broken pipe on the side o the house, which was made harder by arriving home in the dark.

The Trench behind the Cooks Jongles

As I’ve said before our house is more of a ruin then accommodation, and finding things like pipes and buried taps is a real hit and miss affair. So after an hours worth of digging, some tool throwing and just a little swearing I managed to find the buried pipe and tap in the dark. I must have made a bit of mess because the kids came in the next morning and told me the pigs had been rooting around in the back yard and it was totally destroyed.

Anyway, by the time I found the tap and turned it off it was really dark and I still had to get the pipe fixed. It took me a while to work out how to get the broken bit of poly pipe out of the old fitting, luckily I remembered I had a gas torch I’d bought to fix the copper pipe. I went around to the shed and grabbed the torch and called out to the kids to bring some matches.

As usual in our house, mention matches and Ben is the first one there. He was busting to have a go with the torch so I let him have a small turn. He gets right into it – can’t wait until he’s big enough to weld. I was surprised that the torch actual worked and I had the pipe fixed in no time – I’ve even been back to check and it’s still not leaking. Of course I will have broken something else somewhere – plumbing has never gone that smoothly at our place……

I was out early this morning and noticed the Wedge Tails out soaring the heavens. One of them looked a little odd and when he landed I decided to have a look and see what he was up too. When I got to the place I saw him land, down the road embankment I almost walked right in to hi. He was sitting in a depression munching on road kill. He sprung up the side of the embankment where I could get a good look at him. I don’t know if he was malting but he had not a single tail feather, which is why he looked so strange flying.

The Eagle on top of the embankment

We have moved the pig with piglets and haven’t had anymore go missing thank goodness. But because of the small number of piglets feeding off the mum they are all rollie pollie fat and full of energy. I watched them this morning playing with a piece of cloth in the straw, they where having a great time. Rosie the mum is holding her condition well too and I think we've finally hit on the best way to look after the sows.

und out yesterday, from the local paper, that a fellow I knew down the road had died suddenly. He and his wife ran a small farm with a great orchard and winery, they grew the most delicious cherries and made some splendid wines. Peter was a very generous man and had been going to teach me to make sausages Hungarian style and was also going to do some smoking for us. Their farm is up for sale now and I’m not sure what his wife is going to do after it’s sold. It’s sad to see such great characters like the both of them go – I only wish I had been around longer to hear more of his stories and learn some of his sausage making secrets.
There’s a Bee Association meeting tonight – I’m off to that. There was also a NSF meeting but I had to skip that. Hopefully I’ll have something for the Blog tomorrow

Noise's in the night

The horses are fine. But, it would appear that our phantom gate keeper is back. On Sunday I took a walk with the dogs out to the NSF site to collect a pair of sun glasses, on the way back I opened up a gate – which at the time I remember thinking how strange it was that the gate was closed. Jack boot Jane (aka The Cook – but she won’t take off her new gumbies) went to check on the horses last night and found the reason they hadn’t been down to the house. She found all the gates were shut and latched.

We had been leaving the gates open so that the stock had easy access to water, particularly during the hot period we just had – why anybody would want to close them is a mystery.

The piglets are both drinking milk from a bowl – which is great. Means we don’t have to feed them from a bottle and they can have as much as their little bellies will hold.

Hopefully we can pickup our pig brand number from the LHPA this week. That’ll put us another step closer to getting pigs processed. There’s just purchasing a couple of extra freezers to go. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks we will be eating our own pork.

I was reading on another Blog about foxes taking piglets. The farm is on the other side of Canberra so within about 100km of here. I was quite surprised; I didn’t think that foxes would take on a mother pig. We’ve never had a problem that I’m aware of, with foxes – and I don’t doubt it’s true, I just never considered it could happen. I suppose it’s another thing to look out for.

No more rain.

The rain didn’t quite make it down as far as us. We ended up with a little bit of drizzle this morning but nothing much else. I finished two sides of one of the pig outbuildings, a few more modifications and we should be ready for an improved and more comfortable winter for the pigs this year.

Once I’ve finished this project it should nearly be acorn collecting time again. I’m planning on a big collection this year to carry us all the way through winter – which equates to approximately one bag per day or 400 bags. Normally a bag weights in at 25kgs so I’m looking for about 10 tonnes of acorns, which is about 10 trailer loads – last year I gathered about 3-4 trailer loads.

Then it’ll be time to get the garden back into shape for spring – after that I have plans to …………… Can’t say too much about that yet!

The young chickens keep escaping from the chicken pen. This weekend we’ll spend sometime collecting rocks and making the bottom of the fence pig proof. The piglets keep pushing under the wire and last week they stole a whole clutch of eggs from under a broody duck.

The house is full of animals again, we had to evict a bunch of chickens to look after a sick piglet and there are already a gathering of chicks and ducklings sleeping next to the bathroom.

I took a walk up to the NSF site to collect a pair of sunglasses one of the group left behind last week. George, Shadow and Archer all came along for the walk, George lasted the entire way and I am sure he thinks he’s a dog. We ran into Mildred who is still wearing her bell, she makes a lovely tinkling sound as she bolts across the flat.

Anyway – more plans to make, need to get in amongst the weeds soon as well. I’m sure the Cook has something lined up – especially after the one gum boot for valentines and one gum boot for her birthday debacle!!!!! That reminds me – I need to find a cake. It’s never too late to make up the lost ground.