Busy week ends

 

22.3.2022

 

Autumn, such as it is, has started. The Virginia creeper and decorative grape vine are going red, but as usual our view of gum trees stays a permanent grey green colour.  The last few weeks have been very dry and the garden still needs watering every day. The pumpkins are changing colour and we have started to eat the silver beat and lettuce. My freezer is totally full, and I am having to shuffle things around to get the rest of the bean harvest in.  It is a very big chest freezer so this is quite an achievement.

 

We have used the lack of co-vid restrictions to visit family. We made the long trip down to Al’s place and the following week end we went to the city to visit Wayne’s mob.  Wayne had organised for us to have lunch at a beach near his house which was wonderful.  It was lovely weather and a perfect small bay with boats and an amazing land formation behind golden sands. We ate fish and chips on a small terrace above the water and then walked to examine the interesting looking cliff. It was a perfect way to pass a day with our two beautiful granddaughters.

 

This weekend we have been back at work with a permaculture group camping here. We had to provide a tour and meals, which kept us fully occupied. Luckily the weather was perfect and everyone seemed to have a good time.  We had to turf Josh’s cooking equipment and experiments out of the ruins kitchen and do a thorough clean up everywhere, but it feels so good when the place is all sorted.

 

One very sad thing is that my most loved goat, Dixie, suddenly went down with a sort of mastitis we have never seen before. It is actually over 20 years since we have had any mastitis so this was most unexpected. We put her in the back of my car, took her to the vet, and came back with all sorts of stuff to inject her with and squeeze up her affected teat.  She never actually looked sick, just sore.  She is still alive but will at least loose some of her udder function.

 

The young buck, Ronan, made us laugh last night. Edd and I were leaning over the gate trying to work out how to catch him and hold him to give him a worm drench when he spotted the syringe, we had the drench in, leant over the gate and sucked it down himself!  It will soon be mating season but we do not plan to mate many this year. The kids and lambs are now weaned and we are aiming to get the work down for winter.

A very wet spring

 3.10.2021

 

Everything is water logged. We have never known it quite so wet.  Josh had to drill holes in some plant pots to stop things drowning.  It is actually quite warm, so there has been lots of growth and today when it is sunny all the pumped-up vegetables are looking deflated!  The snow peas are shooting up and I try to help them cling on to the supports as mostly they are not very good at doing this themselves.  No flowers yet but it can’t be long. 

 

Also, I have planted out the first of the zucchini seedlings. They have been growing in pots, but today I made clearings in the mizuna patch and put them into the ground. It will be so good when we actually eat zucchinis again. They seem to have so many uses. I think the last broccoli crop will be ready first. The heads are now almost harvesting size. Meanwhile we use lettuce, silver beat, celery and various lettuces. We ate the last cauliflower but there is a second planning on the way. The asparagus have started to shoot too. Most noticeable are all the fruit trees that are in full flower and the oak trees that have now a full canopy of bright young leaves.

 

Our preserved vegetables in the freezer are depleting too. This is good because I need to get to a point where an almost empty freezer can be cleaned out and ready for the next years’ crops.  The beans and tomatoes are almost all gone but we still have fruit that we eat with our muesli for breakfast. This year I have frozen cauliflower which has worked a lot better than I thought it would. 

The animals are not really happy with the weather. The sheep have wet feet and resulting problems and the goats are staying in the shed for much of each day.   This week Bo has come up everyday and helped us do the farm work so that we could get an odd sort of at home holiday.  It is at least 2 years since we had any break at all, so this has been very welcome.  Edd and I are both feeling age related problems this year and even getting an appointment with a physio is almost impossible.

 

We have not seen any of our great grandkids for months and it is feeling a bit too long an interval. We are lucky that Josh and CB live on the farm or we would feel much too isolated. The good news is that cases in NSW seem to have peaked and there is hope the same thing will happen in Victoria as the numbers of vaccinations mounts.  There have been anti vax protests in Melbourne and we got a surge of cases after football grand final parties but most people are trying to do the right thing.  We are just keeping our fingers crossed.

 Our two Persian lambs have staled in well.  They come running up to get their bottle of milk twice a day and eat gay and Lucerne chaff along with their greens.   We are building a sheep handling area next to the cattle yards so that we can manage our small flock with less work.

The male goat kids have now been sold and the females are managing on twice daily milk.  This is great progress.  The adult goats give enough milk to feed the kids and lambs and give us some.  Selling the males usually gets the milk production balanced with what we use so that there is enough but none is wasted. 

Good and Bad news

 

The solstice has passed and though the days will gradually get longer, the coldest days of winter are yet to come.  This week has not been too bad. We are into he third dry day with sun shine, not that the mud has noticeably started to dry up yet.   It was dry last week too and the machinery arrived and put all the earths back around our new carport. It was too wet to do the top soil but the back hoe was able to lift the car port roof beams up into position.   Luckily Edd and Stevo had got all the measurements correct again, and the bolt holes all lined up perfectly.  It was all pretty worrying, especial having machinery on the slope behind the carport. I chose not to watch!

Indi is moving house. She and a friend who also a single mother are renting a mud brick house on a small holding,  She is even able to get her horse back again.  Moving with a toddler is hard and she is very stressed but we will all go and help later in the week.  She also plans to move her bee hives but luckily Josh is very keen to get his own hives here so we will still have the benefits of pollinators and honey.      Indi has brought her caravan here and left it by the ruins so Josh could move in to it. I am sure he likes having his own space but I am missing having him around the house already.

This morning we had sad news from the UK because Edd's brother in law has passed away. He has been in hospital for weeks but took a sudden turn for the worst this week.  We feel so sorry for Edd's sister. At present Edd can not even phone her because she can't hear us.  We are not sure why but think there is a problem her end as we can phone every one else in the UK.   Luckily Edd's niece is keeping in contact with us.  We just feel so bad about being unable to help or offer support.

This has been a bad Covid week too.   Most states are in some form of lockdown now that the Delta strain has got loose in the community. Victoria is OK for the moment but things could change fast. The problems are that hotels have been used to provide suboptimal quarentine accommodation and there does not seem to be enough of the recommended vaccine. Al and Josh have had two shots but the rest of us only one. There are long waits for appointments.

bad gets worse

14.6. 2021

 

This week has probably been the hardest one we have experienced recently. On Wednesday night the state of Victoria was hit by horrific storms.  The electricity went off in the night as trees fell and took down all the power lines. After a few hours all the phone lines went dead too. There are electrical connections on the mobile phone towers and thel nodes on the landlines that have a limited time of battery backup.

 

We were already under covid lock down rules and so when we lost communications it was illegal to physically visit anyone. To make matters worse the torrential rains caused the flooded rivers to overflow into the surrounding land and closed the main road into Yarra Glen, among many others. 

 

Indi had a friend who lived in a yurt by a river. On Wednesday she gave birth just before the floods started to rise. The midwife, (who we all know), was worried about the family so she ended up swimming through the water next day so she could check up on how things were going. The water was just below the platform supporting their yurt, and she was worried that the whole set up was in danger of floating off in the flood. The baby’s father was not worried and felt that if the worst happened, he could load his family into his canoe!  Somehow the danger of being afloat in a raging flood had escaped his thinking.

 

When Indi heard about this, she tried to ring the SES, but of course the phones were out of action and even the triple zero emergency line was not working. She thought about going to the police but as the living arrangements for the family were not exactly legal, she decided to mount her own rescue.  She could drive through the water to a certain point but then she had to wade to get everyone out. They all ended up at her mother’s house, but I don’t think anyone got much sleep.   Some candle wax got on the carpets too, which did not go down well.

 

We were all very relieved when our power was restored, and we could communicate again. We are the lucky ones and only had this situation for 4 days. Other areas with more trees down are still waiting and it might take another three weeks. Our house works OK without power too. The water still flows by gravity, the stoves are wood, and gas and our toilets still work without the pressure pump. We also had brought a generator so we could keep the freezer and fridges cold, but everything still took more effort.

 

Progress with the car port, at last.

 27.5.2021

 

We have been lucky. The weather managed to stay dry and warm enough to allow work on the car port.  Josh dug the mud out of the trenches and he and Edd laid down the drainage pipes and covered them with chippings. They then fixed Drain cell to the walls and put in the down pipes that will take water from the future guttering.    Then it was a matter of getting Skiddy, our geriatric skid steer loader and carefully tipping scoria behind the walls.    Edd worked the loader and Josh got behind the walls and raked it into the correct places. My job was sweeping up spilt stuff and painting water proofer onto the front of the wing walls.

 

The result pf all this effort is that we are no longer worried about mud being washed down into the cavity between the walls and the earth cut out. Actually, we now need mud there and hopefully a bigger, younger piece of equipment will arrive next week and move the huge pile of dug out mud into its final location.  We can now park our cars in this space, but we cannot put the roof on until the steel beams arrive.  Edd borrowed Josh’s car and drove up to Shepparton last week to put in the order for the steel, so that is on the way too. 

 

We just got our work done before a storm hit us. Lots of rain turned the drive into a muddy mess and the power was off for most of the evening.  We have candles and Josh has all sorts of torches so with the gas cooker we could do all the usual evening stuff.  The water can run by gravity, even without pressure pumps and the fires use the dead wood we have collected. Josh has set up a way we can have music on our speaker from our mobile phones, so we had a very relaxing evening.

 

Edd is still feeling very sore after running into the glass door at the post office last week.  

(This is dead true; I swear I did not hit him).  He got two black eyes, a massive scab on his nose and a sore hip and wrist from when he fell backwards.  The people around him wanted to call an ambulance but he just came home and has been going a bit slowly.  He found that working on skiddy made his head woozy and his hip painful.  He has stayed at home until he has begun to look a bit more presentable.

 

This meant that it was only Josh, Bo and I who went to the opening of a friend’s exhibition in town.  The traffic was awful, and it took ages to get there but we had a good time to talk and enjoyed the exhibition when we finally arrived. The art was all these pastels still life works that vibrated with colour.  Josh liked one of sunflowers the most. Sadly, our friend’s husband was not there due to worsening dementia, that was just starting when we were last together about two years ago.

 

The big news is that Bo’s family is considering buying a Tesla car. Simon is test driving one this week. We get together with Bo’s family most Sunday evenings for a family meal around the huge table in her new house.  The whole family is much happier in the new place.  The boys are both in trade apprenticeships and only Silky is still at school. 

 

 

Edible fungi.

 We have field mushrooms and pine mushrooms growing this year.