Shearing and harvest

                                                          This mornings harvest.

                                                  Cucumbers behaving oddly.

Wednesday 28.2.2018

We are very much in harvest season and I am swamped with buckets of produce. The freezer is about full to capacity and we take bucket loads of vegetables into Beth’s restaurant each evening.  I am trying to find out how I could run the freezer from a generator if we had a long power cut.   We produce more solar power than we use and the power company still pays us but unfortunately our system cuts out if there is a power cut, which is maddening.

We have asked about trying to fix this but if we alter the power system we get cut off the good rate we get for power sales.  The contract lasts till 2024 so we are hanging on hoping storage batteries will be cheaper and better as that year gets closer. Putting a generator in as a back up is hard because we have two-phase power (what ever that is). My latest idea is to get a smaller portable generator and plug the freezer straight into it in an emergency.  I would hate to loose all the food I have grown, carefully packaged, and stored.

We had a big weekend. On Saturday morning Edd met twenty permaculture students in Yarra Glen and they followed him out here in a long string of cars for a site visit.  We spent the morning explaining all that goes on here and then we ate a shared lunch in the ruins.  As soon as they left we sprang into action because the shearer was coming.  We have waited for him for weeks so we were not going to argue about the timing.

He was a lot later arriving than he though he would be and it was starting to rain so we had to put the goats into the small pens and get the sheep in the shed under cover.  This man is very good because he does the sheep’s feet, worming and anything else we need at the same time and also does the alpaca.  It is a great relief to have someone else do all this now we are older.

Getting the sheep in was easy.  Last week a committee of sheep accosted me and made it very clear that the time had come to supplement their diet with barley.  I had started to do this so they were all primed to come when I called and follow me.  They went out with equal ease.  We have them in the house site at present and they are doing a great job grazing the roof.