preparing for winter

May 14 2017

We picked up the chook shed yesterday.  It came in 5 pieces and we need to build a floor of concrete to put it on so that it is easy to clean and foxes can’t dig in.  I hope to get this done when the camp is here a week tomorrow.   The trailer is ready to collect.     It comes with a stock crate so that now if an animal is sick we can take it to the vet easily.  The last time we did this was when Josie was a young calf and we put her in the back of my little car.  This was not ideal for the calf or the car.

The weather has been warm and sunny this week and we were all outside as much as possible.  It is a much duller, damper day today and I have lit the stove so that we get hot water for washing.  It will also help dry the olives before they are packed in glass jars under oil.  Last week they were in big jars with salt to leach out the bitterness. I now have at least a years supply so perhaps it is time to try and produce olive oil.  Ben and Indi are already getting oil from an olive grove they are managing, but they have a set up already to use which helps.

Edd is pretty much ready for his trip over seas at the end of the month.   He has a complicated timetable visiting lots of friends and family members all over the UK and Europe. I am staying to manage the farm this time and I have been trying to reduce the work that needs doing every day.  Edd has not helped by rescuing some eggs he found outside the chook shed and hatching out four chickens.  They are now in a box in the kitchen.  Just what I needed!

The sheep are starting to look very pregnant, which is also a worry.  They are doing a great job mowing all the grass on the house roof and in the house site. The vegetable garden is much more of a mess but I am leaving that so the school kids can harvest the last of the crops they planted. I have also started to make feta again now that the kids are weaned. Feta and roasted pumpkin go very well together. A friend told me this week that she gets into her pumpkins with a hammer and chisel.  I have not tried that yet.

pumpkins and kangaroos

May 5 2017

We have woken to a frosty landscape twice this week. It seems early for this but perhaps the summer just went on longer this year.  We located the new owners for Feta and Wilma and they have now been relocated.  I am confident that they will be happy and well cared in their new home, which makes parting with them easier.  Now there are eighteen adult female goats and seven doe kids so the shed looks unusually empty.  Strangely this has encouraged rather than stopped bullying behaviour and I have to give six goats their hay first before the others come in to make sure they get their share.

We are letting the sheep out to graze on the house roof during day light hours. The grass is lush and green up there and the sheep love it.  So far they have not made any dangerous forays onto the parapet.  The goat would be up there in no time at all if we let them into this area so Edd is working hard to repair the hill fences so they can graze there this winter.  The fence he is working on crossed the main winter water flow and then rises almost vertically up the hill.  This makes fencing slow and difficult, so the job is taking time.

 We have ordered the new chook shed and a trailer but it takes time for them to be ready for pick up.  This means that we have to wait before we can get any further with some jobs.  The school camp is due in about two weeks so I am preparing for their arrival.  It does not seem a very easy time for camping but we might be lucky. The long term forecast is for dry weather.

There are kangaroos most of the day in our neighbour's paddock. A mob of thirty or so kangaroos bouncing over a hill is quite a spectacular sight if you are not used to it.  The kangaroos always come out of the forest even in the daytime during the winter and they are increasing in numbers.  Where our lane makes an L shape around the property below us there are always several by, or on the road.  We call it kangaroo corner and take great care driving round it.  Some of the roos are enormous and are not the sort of thing you want to bump into with a car.

The deciduous trees are now displaying their autumn colours.  Even the sugar maples down the drive have some red leaves this year and the gingko tees are golden.  The olives are ripening and I have several clay crocks in the kitchen containing olives and salt to remove the bitterness. 

The tomatoes were killed by the frost but the pumpkins are still going. These are pretty vigorous, determined, pumpkins but luckily the taste ok.   We grow the sort of pumpkin that stores well but they are also very tough to cut up for cooking.   Some times I do not even try and put them whole in the wood stove oven but you cannot collect the seeds for next year with this method.   A friend once told me you could get into pumpkins by dropping them onto a brick floor and I even tried this today but the pumpkin was totally unscathed by my efforts.

autumn harvest

April 29 2017

The grass is growing vigorously with the abundance of rainfall.  It has been fairly controlled here but Al tells me that down on the Geelong way there have been floods and high winds doing all sorts of damage. The garage in his new house is not waterproof and the gutters are not adequate.  He tells me the plan is to convert his new property into an example of Permaculture, showing what can be done on a suburban block with retrofitting.

On our farm autumn has definitely arrived.  I light the wood stove every day to keep the water hot now that there is not enough sun for the solar system and I am finding excuses like “accounts” to stay indoors once the morning milking is over.  The quinces and figs have gone to Bo and today I started to harvest the olives.  The pomegranates are ripe, and this year we have more chestnuts. Last year’s crop was not hard to beat because there were only 3 nuts!

It has been over three weeks since the first goats were mated and they have not come back into season so by all logic they should be pregnant. Feta and Wilma are now ready to move to their new home but I was pretty stupid and forgot to get the number to phone their new owners.  We are now trying to find them through friends.

Last years kids are all due to be off milk. They are looking well at the moment and are mostly the mixed colouring that I like.  The chooks are also coming off lay and we are due to buy extra point of lay birds to provide winter eggs. The problem is that we need another chook shed to retire the older birds. We now have a big pen ready for them under the trees on the old drive but we will need to buy a new shed and put it up.

Al stayed with us last night and this morning we discussed the plans for Toby’s garden.  Al has already located some interesting plants and I brought some saltbushes and another type of native shrub at Garden world.  We went down there this week on a lightening tour of things we need to get.  We looked at trailers, brought tiles for the dairy and ordered bits for the tractor lights.

We also called into the spa place and decided on the colour and other details. We had a spa for the business before the fires.  Water is scarce most of the time and it makes sense to soak in a hot tub and treat the water rather than waste loads soaking in a bath.  I would like the school kids to have the use of a spa because they work so hard and must need ease for aching muscles as much as the rest of us.

My idea is that you walk into Toby’s garden through a seating area with a fire pit before you get to the spa house.  Al is going to design me a spa house that fits in with the rest of the house and completes the far corner.

rats both friends and foes

April 24 2017

The days are really short now. It is really dark by 6pm. We are getting some rain but also sunny quite hot days.  The pumpkins are only just starting to get mildew and are still enlarging young fruit so I have left them in place.  The same thing goes for the tomatoes; this year’s crop is going on forever.  The first round of wintergreens is in the ground but we need more space before we plant any more.

We are slowly getting the goats mated as they come into season and we have sold two of the young buck kids.  We have put the seven girls in a pen together and will wean them any day now. I am working on the milking herd to dry off as many off as possible. It is working and we will soon be able to switch to hand milking.  All this is part of the usual autumn program.

Now that Stevo has done the shed wall Edd no longer has to be chippies mate and he has been able to get back to fencing. The professional fencers have done a great job, but we still have some left to do. The next objective is to complete the hill boundaries and then the goats and horses can use the high ground during the wet season. There is not a lot to do but it is complicated work and takes time

I have just returned from Queensland where I went to spend a few days with our youngest son.  It was his birthday and his partner was away visiting her family so I thought it would be nice to keep him company. He has to stay at home because he has a geriatric rat that needs medicating twice a day.   There is not room in their town house for much in the way of a garden or pets but Josh has an amazing under water garden in his fish tank and Bobby has a luxury apartment for her very well cared for rats.

Indi has also had dealings with rats.  She is busy trying to sort out her stuff in the donga and has discovered that she shares her home with rats that have used anything available to build nests.  Last week we moved the units that she and her friends have been building so she is getting closer to having her own place for her stuff.  This involved a crane truck and was fairly scary, but with a combined effort we moved everything without any drama. 

lovely new fences

April 12 2017

Our beautiful warm sunny autumn has been interrupted by storms last weekend. On Sunday it absolutely poured and ground water accumulated behind the goat sheds making gumboots essential.  It is only today that the whole area becomes navigatable again.  This is important because now all the goats are coming into season and we need to cross this area to get them to the buck.

I feel sorry for the goats.  Unlike us they cannot just put on winter clothes when the weather changes this suddenly.  I have put down lots of fresh straw for them to bed down in and made sure they have stomachs full of roughage to create internal warmth but there is not much else I can do.  They are not complaining and the sun is out again today which helps.

With better weather the fencers have returned and are now working on the new fence below the big dam.  We hope they will also have time to put in the posts for the fence at the bottom of the gravel pit paddock. Whilst we are fenceless we have had the horses shut in one of the small crofts, which they have churned up into mud.  We are desperate to get them onto the hill where they will have more space and shelter.

Stevo was due this week to put up the end wall of the goat shed but he has flu. At least this means we can concentrate on the fences first. Yesterday it was too wet for any workers, even us, so we drove down to Warragul to pick up a new motor for the milking machine. Our old one is on it’s last legs and we are afraid it will collapse and leave us hand milking all over Easter.

Sunny autumn days

April 5 2017

Rosie the large black goat went off to her new home today.  She left in a trailer covered with a tarp this time, which I felt happy about.  Wilma and Feta are going to the same home once they are mated so she will be joined by her friends soon.   We are selling several of the older goats this year because we have too much milk now that the kids are almost weaned.  Usually we buy a calf but this year they are very pricy so we are just trying to slow milk production down instead.

We are still having warm dry sunny days but the valley has been a bit smoky from controlled burns in the forest.   So far they have stayed well under control too, which is good.  In the garden the tomatoes are dying back but the pumpkins are showing no sign of mildew yet. We are still harvesting a few zucchini and amazingly we still have Tuscan black Kale to eat from three of last year’s winter plants. We have lots of beans stored in the freezer and with them a huge amount of tomatoes so we have plenty to eat.

Indi’s bees have not done well at all and she tells me that other beekeepers are having the same problems.  It has just been a really bad year for honey with plants in flower and the weather not working together well.  It is also a strange year for goats.  I have not noticed any of them coming into season yet, and it is well after the usual date when they start to cycle. 

We are now on winter timing and with the hour change it is dark at 7pm instead of 8.  We now do the evening chores at 4pm and have a much shorter working day. Today we have Chris and Edd moving the dangerous trees opposite the ruins before we replace the fence down the gully.  The fencers start at 6am tomorrow, so they are pretty serious about doing the job.   Steve might come soon to do the shed end.  We have been waiting weeks for the people we needed to do this work and now they have all come at once,…typical.

Cleaning the goat shed

March 28 2017

I was hoping for a bit of relaxation at the weekend but I was out of luck.  John turned up with a truck and a digger and we spent all Sunday scooping the deep litter out of the goat shed and trucking it down to the hay paddock.   We now have a mountainous pile of compost that will have to last over the next few years until the shed is full again.   We had to take down the pen fencing to do this, and then we had to put it all back again before the goats came in at night.  It meant a long day of work but we managed.

On Saturday we cleaned up and did the washing, which sounds OK but we also had people here to buy goats.   Mellissa, Qantas and Hatti have now gone to their new home.  The couple that brought them were very nice but I was worried about how well the goats would travel as they were in an open trailer.  I hate selling goats but we need to make room in the herd for the new ones we have bred.  It is much nicer when several goats go together because at least they have friends to share the experience.

The remaining goats look very happy and smaller now that the shed is back to ground level with only one layer of golden straw.  Edd fixed the fence round the closest paddock so that they could go further to graze, and that pleased them too.  We had to leave the fence down until we picked up all the posts from the old vineyard but the students did that last week which was great.

The next thing to do is to repair the fences so that we can let the horses loose into a larger area.  Edd has started working on this today but I am back at the house trying to restore some order.  We have UK friends coming to stay at the weekend and I want them to feel comfortable. 

The hour changes next week so our long summer workdays are coming to an end.  It has rained well enough to get us some water in our newly roofed tank and the grass is going green again. Luckily there are still very warm days so the grass is also growing and we look to be getting a good autumn break.