two lives gone!

Experimenting with tiles for the splash back

The cat has been in trouble again.  Edd came rushing in saying that something terrible had happened. He had started his ute and then saw cat fur stream out of the engine.  We lifted the bonnet with trepidation and yes, there was a lot of fur and the fan belt was off its mountings.  No cat bits were obvious despite a thorough search, and thankfully no blood or blood trails were in evidence. Much to our relief the cat turned up at the end of the day with a patch of missing fur, but no other damage.  That is the second of its nine lives it has used up since it has been here!

The goats that are not pregnant are still coming into season, but we have moved the bucks back into their pens because we have enough pregnant girls for this year.   Our big alpine doe, Quetta, has been sold.  This time she is went to join other goats we had sold earlier, so she was met by friends when she arrived at her new home.  It would be impossible to keep every goat, but we do try to send them to places they will be happy. They often go to smaller herds and get more attention than we give them here, which is nice.

I am trying to dry off the remaining pregnant goats, but we are still getting enough milk to make cheese twice a week.  The hard cheeses turned out so well last year that I am encouraged to make more. The vac packaging system worked fantastically.  I have now used all the olive oil I made, but luckily Ben and Indi are keeping us well supplied from their trees. Indi and I are planning to use some of their oil to make soap, so I am searching for recipes.  I ordered a book that I thought might help but it was so useless I returned it with a killer revue. I hope I might save someone else the bad experience.

The seeds I ordered for dyeing plants have arrived, but I have not yet sorted out the area where I plan to grow them.  They will be sown in pots in the spring, so this is not a problem yet.  It will make a good task when the school camps start. The book I brought on plant dyes was excellent, much to my relief.  This week Edd and I drove down to the Mornington Peninsular with a car full of wool that I am getting spun.  The plan is to have yarn available from our own sheep to dye with our own plants. That should make a good learning experience.

The last of the summer crops have to go

Drying bay leaves in the sun room

4.6.2018

We have been waking to heavy mist but by lunch time this has cleared, and the sun fills the house with warmth and light.  Edd is off on the tractor clearing up in the top paddock.  There are still dead trees there that were cut down after the fires and not tackled because they were mixed up with wire from the old fence line.  Edd is organising everything into piles that can be burnt. We hope it will then be easier to extract the wire.

I have spent the morning pulling out old tomato plants and pumpkins that were killed by last week’s frost. It is a very odd year, usually mildew kills all the pumpkin leaves long before the frost gets them.  There are still tomatoes ripening but the taste has gone out of them and they are often too damaged to be worth collecting.  We have a good choice of winter vegetables, so I thought it was best to ditch the summer ones and gain more planting space.

I also pruned the pear trees on the fence as they had already lost their leaves.  LYN made a good job of rescuing the young fruit trees from kikuyu grass that was trying to strangle them.  Last week I harvested what was left of the olives and made my first oil.  We had only one jam jar full from 3 kilos but it tasted fantastic.  I think I need a different system of pressing.  The cheese press was not ideal.

The goats are gradually all coming into season, about 2 months later than usual.  Lorna was mated yesterday but Imogen, Rita, Angie and Cassie are not showing any interest in the buck yet.  We have let the young buck into the croft next to the does so that they can smell each other directly through the fence, but still mating is going very slowly. 

slack time on the farm allows unexpected travel

18.5.2018

My mother died just over a week ago age 97, and, much to my surprise I am off to her funeral in the UK tomorrow!    I never dreamed I would be able to go but much to my amazement my kids presented me with a workable plan on Mother’s Day.  Al and Bo are coming with me, so we have three businesses and three families to sort out before we set off.

 Luckily, we have entered our slack period on the farm.  The goats are drying off as they get pregnant and only need once a day milking by hand. The chickens have been amalgamated into two groups, and the rains have cut out the need for watering.  Most of the fruit and summer vegetables have been harvested and preserved and the winter crops are mostly planted.

Today I have been making the cheese, writing stuff Edd needs to look after the permaculture students, paying bills, sending out invoices and I am about to start cleaning the house.  Al has spent the week trying to deal with a computer problem that has stopped him printing out plans and is sorting out who can care for his dog.  He is bringing Pip up to her parents tonight so that they can look after her and help her with baby P.  Indi is driving Bo and I to the airport tomorrow where hopefully we will join up with Al.  Indi and Edd are going to share looking after Bo’s kids and doing school transport.

This is all pretty major, so I had better stop writing now and get back to work.

clever cat

He looks innocent , but this cat can open that latch.

hot and dry

Sunday 12 March

It is a lot cooler today but we have had the hottest driest weather for days and everything is suffering.  I have been watering the vegetables and trees twice a day but the olives look wrinkled and the vegetables are not producing so much fruit.  The fig tree is the exception and I get a bucket full of figs everyday.  Bo’s restaurant staff are complaining about the amount they have to deal with! Bo has given me a fig and nut cake she made that was too crumbly for restaurant use.  It is delicious.

One good thing about this weather is that the sun starts to heat up the sunroom at this time of year. I have been able to dry various leaves for herbs and teas just by spreading them out on the table in there.  Perhaps I should try to dry some tomatoes.  The freezer is full and the restaurant over supplied.

Edd is working to fix the fences in the gravel pit paddock.  He has nearly made the fence on the gully side and will then need to work his way up past Indi’s area.  The horses have eaten everything they can off the hill, but we cannot move them to the gravel pit paddock until at least the bottom fence is done.  This fence will enclose all the zone 5 land where the fern trees used to grow. In Permaculture zone 5 is left for nature to do as it pleases.

The new cat has settled in but shows little interest in catching mice.  He has one odd skill in that he has learnt how to open the latched door from the mudroom into the rest of the house.  He kept escaping from the mudroom and I could not work out how but I actually heard the latch open last night as he got out for the second time.  He does patrol the big dam and the wood ducks have gone but I am not sure if these two facts are related.  I am very happy the wood ducks have gone, they are really geese and make a terrible mess whilst eating all the grass.

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.

At last I have done the dairy floor.

                              I have finally completed the mosiac work on the dairy floor.

I should have moved the plant pot away from the cucumbers sooner!