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Tag Archives: Farm Life
Another goodbye
No posts for a while … I’ve been … distracted.
This week we are on holiday and have had to sell 4 cows because of the odd extremely dry October. Summer has come way too early and there is just no way to sustain our 8 cows who are already on the borderline of being able to continue grazing.
Yes, this includes Balti. Our hand reared pet-like cow has gone to a friend’s house and will stock their freezer in the not too distant future. Balti was always intended to be food, but when it comes to it, we are just too soft and can’t make the transition from pet to plate.
We’ve never split the cows before, last year we sold them all together and it is a bit sad to hear Skye pining for Balti. We sold all the males (4) and kept 4 females as we can then make a decision about trying to produce calves, preferably nearer to autumn. With the early summer, autumn seems to be in the very distant future …
So, yet again at this time of year, the farm breaths a little wisp of sadness as some great personalities move onto their next phase.
Pipers at the gates of dawn …
If you’ve read The Wind in the Willows you’ll know from the title of this blog, which animals have joined us on the farm.
Richard sheepishly returned from the auction this morning saying he had bought me a present and I that I had to promise not to be upset. He popped the boot on the car and there were four little eyes looking back at me.
They belonged to …
Admittedly, at first peek I said ….”awwww lambs”… but luckily not out loud. They are actually baby goats. It’s not that I can’t tell a lamb apart from a goat, but I could only see white faces and cute eyes poking out. I guess I was close enough to keep my farmer credibility intact?
We have called them Tansy (who I named after the herb) and Tara (who Richard named after a friends human kid). Don’t ask me why, but I felt an overwhelming urge to name a little girl goat after a herb or wildflower. Goats seem to be so symbolic of the wild, untamed, unruly chaos of nature – embodied in the great god Pan of course.
Here are some photos.
In their behaviour, they are very lamb like anyway, apart from emitting goatish wee and poo pellets of course. They make the funniest noise and have a lamblike skip/jump skittish dance. They sit on your lap, drink from a bottle and follow us around on wobbly goat legs.
It’s not fair to call them lamblike and bring their goatishness into question, but if you imagine a 10 day old lamb with clumsy hooves, you’ll get the idea.
I felt that I had to test their interest in my garden statue of Pan, the goat god, who’s calm austerity might mike a good goat role model.
I think that probably made them feel at home and that the great god of goats was looking after them.
Yes yes, we know they eat *everything*. We’ll worry about that very soon, for now it’s simply nutritious enough to be in love with them.
Patchouli arrives
The patchouli plants arrived safe and alive and I’ve potted them to get them established first. So if you’ve ever wondered what patchouli looks like before it’s rolled into a pleasant smelling incense stick, here they are:-
Heirloom vegetables …
This is just too much for one evening online. I have found a fantastic source of heirloom vegetables in Australia. I have joined the club (called Diggers) and ordered:-
DRAGONS TONGUE BEAN – a climbing bean with purple stripey bits
PEANUT VIRGINIA – peanuts
TOMATO BLACK RUSSIAN – gothic tomatoes, blood red/black
CAPSICUM SWEET CHOCOLATE – a deep brown capsicum
CARROT, 3 COLOUR PURPLE – purple carrots
These are vegetables how they originally were before we gave in to mass supermarket shelf selection. These seeds are also around the same price as shop bought seeds but you get less per packet. We always have hundreds of excess seeds from commercially bought packets so this is about quality and not quantity.
I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight with the promise of patchouli and heirloom seeds on their way to me, and my future permaculture learning day …
Pogostemon!
No, it’s not one of Harry Potter’s spells, Pogostemon cablin is the patchouli plant. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to order these as they are only $6 each, but I have finally have some wee smelly plants on their way in the post.
The leaves are beautiful and very aromatic in that special intoxicating patchouli way. http://www.herbalistics.com.au/shop/popup_image.php?pID=163
I don’t know why these plants are so difficult to find, but I’ve found out that you can also grow new plants from cuttings. Who knows, perhaps this could be the start of my patchouli farm????
My reason for growing them is just for the loveliness of picking off fresh patchouli leaves to put in my cuboards and drawers. I currently put in sticks of incense which tends to make a bit of a mess with the powerdy crumbs!
Also, patchouli scented clothing and linen is just another way of bringing that little bit of India to this part of the world. Mmmm …
I can’t wait for my four little plants. I hope they like their new home.
Balti’s first girlfriend
Raising Balti from a day old calf by bottle and teaching him to drink milk from a bucket last year was our first calf raising experience.
It’s now pretty amusing to watch Balti enter his teenage years and start to get frisky with the ladies. I watched a beautiful cow ritual of head rubbing, eye gazing and even eye lash fluttering. There was definitely some cow flirting going on. Although I didn’t catch any of the courtship action on camera (I’m no cow perve!) here is a photograph of Balti and his cute girl, Skye.
Yes, love in most certainly in the air, as thick as pollen, ‘twixt the trees in the paddocks. It’s a festival of free spring cow love.
We’ve only ever had just boy cows before, so now with a mixed bunch it’s interesting to watch the difference in the dyamic and learn a bit about cow courtship. Very cute. All our males are steers though so there will no calves without vet intervention.
Vegetable patch – the sequel
Having hired a rotary hoe last spring and removing all of the sheaok roots strangling our inherited vegetable patch, we thought that we had cracked the dry soil issue. At the end of the summer though we found the trusty sheoaks and their spaghetti roots had returned to the vegetable patch and we were back where we had begun. Also that fact that at times we had to irrigate with saline bore water down there pointed a big finger to the fact that it just wasn’t the right spot. We gave it a go though.
So, this spring we decided to abandon that vegetable patch and make it a general orchard area instead, which is currently a work in progress.
In the meantime, we spent a Sunday siting and building our new vegetable bed which can be seen below. In a few weeks time we have a week off work which will see the planting of the new patch taking place.
In terms of siting this one, we think this has the classic attributes of a promising patch:-
a) handy to the kitchen for that last minute tomato or okra
b) west facing – morning and late late afternoon summer sun
c) rainwater supply
d) a nice view of the summer sunsets over the sea to make growing and harvesting just that bit more special
Being quite near gum trees we might have to compete with a few intrusive roots in future, but it will be nothing compared to the sheoak situation.
I also had today off work this week which I spent planting seeds for the site.
Sown in trays (listed in order of germination)
-10 days
Radish (Long Scarlet)
Italian tomatoes
Broccoli
Cabbage (Sugarloaf)
10+ days
Capsicum pepper
Aubergine/eggplant
Okra (please grow, this is so hard to buy here and I miss it!)
Radicchio (Palia Rossa)
Chilli Pepper
Carrot (Early Nantes)
Beetroot (Detroit Red Globe)
Pak Choi
and for good luck …
Sunflowers (to attract the birds away from the vegetables)
Echinacea
to be sown direct ….
Silverbeet
Pumpkin (Golden nugget)
Mini sweet corn
Courgette/Zucchini (yellow variety)
Climbing beans (purple king)
Climbing peas
Chinese snow peas
Online (Californian Red)
Lettuce (Lollo Rossa)
Lettuce (Green Mignonette)
Lettuce (Green Cos)
Gone to the wild skies …
Well, little by little you realise that the simple formula of nature is that the more animals you have around, the likelier you are to experience death much more frequently. The last thing I wanted to be doing on a Friday after work was lifting the dead weight of our two lovely ducks (gifted to us by the previous owners and with us for nearly 2 years now) into sacks, but that’s what I did. I am quite girly about dead animals. I can handle a dead mouse, dead possum, dead chicken … but ducks have a different weight that tells you that you are handling a ‘being’ – that’s probably not the right word, but it describes the exact feeling.
The chickens at the moment are not able to free range because of the wily fox last seen a few weeks ago now. Although the chicken run is large, it’s not right to keep ducks within it, and with a few days of warmer weather I had decided to take a risk and let them out for the day so that they could get onto the ponds.
I’m not going to write too much about the circumstances in which they died, because it’s speculative – I didn’t see what happened or when but I chased off a domesticated dog that isn’t ours. I’m not going to write about it here as I’m just writing to purge my fragile thoughts so that I can get on with my weekend. Of course part of my fragility is down to my own decision to let them out for a swim. There’s guilt there that will ache for a while.
Anyway, I thought I was cool about disposing of the bodies, talked to the chickens while I was doing it to distract myself, busied myself doing weird stuff I didn’t feel like doing (I baked some cookies! – why??????) … but then – the inevitable. In a tsunami of sadness whilst cooking falafels (pretty inconvenient) I realised that distraction is sometimes not the best approach.
It was strange, to have such a delayed dose of freaking out later on, but I felt much better for it, even though the falafels and the cookies came off worse, in an inedible sense. 😉
At least I can now get back to my normal self and be analytical and philosophical about duck death. There are no more ducks now.
Plus, it’s just another learning curve, and next time I have to ‘feel’ the weight of something dead, I’m sure it will probably be a bigger animal again, and I’ll wonder why I felt so haunted about the ducks – and haunted I am. I can’t get the image of how I found them out of my head. It just seemed tragic to see such beautiful animals, that I associate with wildness and freedom and flight, instead inanimate and cold-eyed.
Gandalf in a box
Gandalf is still proving himself to exist on the more bizarre side of cat personalites. What with Merlin having a fanatical love for Chicken Tikka Masala and refusing to drink out of anything except a glass cup (he was like that when we adopted him!) I’m really starting to worry. Perhaps I’m nurting these cats into becoming the funny freaks that they most certainly are?
Well, I’d rather have odd-balls than fur-balls …