Tuesday 15 May 2012

How people find the time (and energy) to write daily blogs is quite beyond me, although maybe with winter settling in with a vengeance I shall find myself indoors rather more often. After a beautifully mild autumn, we’ve had some awfully cold, wet and windy days. Working outside has been a continuous battle against the elements. Some areas are already getting soggy, such as parts of the pig pens, but elsewhere it’s not too bad as yet.

My gravel track across the tractor crossing leading up to the goat paddocks is holding up well, but the crossing itself is a mess. We’ve had some lovely autumn colours around, particularly in our fancifully named ‘arboretum’ although they are fading fast. I so prefer deciduous trees and rather dread Bronte’s gloomy pine trees coming up everywhere over the coming years. He’s still in tree-planting mode but has slowed down a little in the cold weather.

We are WWOOFer-free now, with the last two girls - Amber and Fiona - leaving mid- and end of April respectively. While they were both here, we had another magical outing to the Hartz Mountains. It was like entering a fairy-tale world as we neared the top in the car; suddenly everywhere was heavy with snow! We did one of the medium-length walks, as well as stopping at the Waratah Lookout and tramping to Arve Falls – which was much inflated from our visit just a few weeks previously. It was snowing hard as we left, by which time we were cold, tired and glad to be on our way home.

Other outings have included Envirofest at the Botanic Gardens – a bit of a disappointment really, except the gardens were clothed in the golds, reds and oranges of autumn. Bronte pinched a few sequoia nuts from just outside the gates – the seeds are tiny. Unfortunately, I don’t think we shall live long enough to see a ‘General Franklin’ on our land.

Anzac Day was great fun. It appears that there is a tradition of an Anzac Day sports day in Huonville and since Luke enjoys his Little Athletics and we thought it might be fun, we went along and entered ourselves in the various events. Rather worryingly, Bronte, Fiona and I found ourselves lumped in the ‘open’ section, which meant we’d be competing against anyone over 14 yrs old! Hence I was beaten into 4^th in the 100 metres by a 15-yr old girl who’s been breaking state records, her very fit friend and a young mum who apparently “runs a lot”. I was fairly proud of myself actually, since I’m pretty sure I was the oldest female competitor. I didn’t do nearly so well in the long jump and discus but at least I didn’t come last. I discovered in the long jump that my muscles and joints just don’t have any bounce in them anymore! Fiona did much better, coming third. Luke did better again, coming first in his age group in the 100m and the long jump, but was beaten into second place in the vortex. Bronte was a big jess and cleared off to Mitre 10 during most of the events, not competing or staying to support his team! He was shamed into competing in the Anzac mile at the end and he and Luke finished a very creditable middle of the field. I gave that one a miss!

I was taken out last Sunday for a Mothers’ Day meal. I was really very spoilt – to my surprise and pleasure. I’d asked for a meal out but hadn’t expected prezzies too. Luke got me a teddy key-ring and bath salts. Bronte bought me a huge cookbook (no reflection on my cooking I hope), a couple of fiendish puzzle books, some woolly socks for the farm and some Ninja gloves. Unfortunately they don’t imbue one with magical Ninja powers, but they are lovely and warm and waterproof for winter. We missed Agfest owing to Luke having flu’, which was where I bought a pair last year. They were my mainstays for the whole of last winter.

I greatly appreciated the meal out, since I’ve been starving myself. I decided to lose a bit of weight really quickly. So I’ve been living on tiny salads, nuts, stir-frys (fries?), thin veggie soups and skimmed milk fruit shakes – no carbo, no fat, no sugar. I’m even drinking my tea with skimmed milk and no sugar – urgh. However, the pain is bringing reward – I’ve lost 5kgs since 1 May. I plan to lose 3kg more then go back to eating normal meals, but much smaller portions – and no desserts, chocolate etc. When the WWOOFers were here I made big hearty meals and rich puddings such as treacle tart, banoffee pie, cheesecake, brownies etc (it’s making me hungry just thinking about them). I was unable to resist when they were in the house and added lashings of cream and ice cream. The ironic thing was that about a week into the diet I received a heavy parcel from Sydney which turned out to be the ‘Flat Belly Diet Book’ and the ‘Flat Belly Diet Cookbook’ – what a laugh. They were prizes from our fad earlier in the year of doing all the puzzles in ‘That’s Life!’ and other puzzle magazines. I was amazed to have won anything – but a wad of cash or a car would have been more useful!

Yesterday I went with Luke and his classmates for a walk along the Pipeline Track, from Fern Tree down to the Waterworks just outside of Hobart. It was a lovely walk along part of the route of the old water supply pipe for Hobart, installation of which was begun in 1861. It’s redundant now but the infrastructure including a stone aquaduct and sluice house, still appears to be in good condition. The girls were as good as gold, whereas the boys took every opportunity to climb things, scramble down banks and ditches and chase one another. Luke largely ignored me! Two other mums who live locally came along and gave me a lift back to the beginning of the walk to pick up my car.

Things have been busy as usual on the farm. In fact I’ve been having a bit of a killing spree. Having been meat-free for about a month, we now have one freezer full of meat and the one in the garage is slowly filling up. 17 roosters have bit the dust, one piglet (3 months old at that stage and about 15kg) plus 3 geese. Jasper the goat is still in my sights and there are a handful of younger chickens whose gender is currently not clear. I’ve kept one colourful red rooster to keep the 6 remaining pullets (we’ve sold all the others) company. They have just starting laying and suddenly we are awash once again with eggs. I also culled all the older hens and Nigel the Australorp rooster, plus poor Handles our old goat buck.

I had a huge day of drenching the goats, trimming their hooves and moving them around to their new paddocks to be with the bucks (or not, in the case of the young ones). I also soaked all their feet to try to prevent any foot rot bacteria getting into the new paddock. Handles was in one of the old paddocks and Seb was in the new one with his girls. A week or so later, I woke to find Seb in Handles’ paddock and Handles standing hangdog to one side. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t performing. I tried to catch Jasper the wether to keep him company and thus delay the inevitable, but having failed I made the hard decision that Handles had to go. Seb had been through at least two electric fences at 7,000v, so his urge must have been pretty strong!

The two remaining piglets appeared to be suffering from PTSD for a couple of days after I’d so rudely torn their brother from their midst – but they seem quite happy again now (clearly not too upset then). I was so concerned that the one to go would remain unstressed and innocent of his fate, I didn’t think about the effect on his siblings! We’ve eaten half of the pork and one of the roosters so far and the meat was delicious. Some free-range hens can be a bit strong-tasting, particularly in the leg, but these are just right.

The geese turned out to be impossible to pluck. I remember that the three I did before Christmas took an age and I ended up using the blow-torch to take off the tiny pin-feathers. This time I literally couldn’t pull the feathers off without tearing the skin. I soaked them in hot water (60-70 degrees C) for several minutes, including using detergent to ensure they were wetted right down to the skin. It made no difference whatsoever. I was trying to do this in the kitchen one evening as well as keep track of our serial. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get them in the freezer before going with Luke on his excursion the following day. In the end I got up early the next day and skinned them. It was pretty easy and took very little time. Today I rendered the skins so as to extract any fat that floats to the surface and sets. I shall have to wait until tomorrow when it’s cooled down to see if it has worked. The cooked skins have gone into the compost.

All the adult goats are now settling down with Seb in the new paddock. They are reluctant to venture far into the bush and stick mostly to the open grassy area and around the edges near the fence. They are gradually making inroads into the big area of blackberries at the bottom. At present there are no huts for them in there, so when it starting pouring last week and was bitterly cold and windy with it, I cut another gate between the new paddock and the old one alongside and let them through to access their huts. I drove around and filled all the huts (for goats, peacocks, turkeys, pigs, geese and hens) with fresh bedding and fixed up one of the goat huts that was sagging and getting holey. I finished in the dark, frozen and fed up, but at least the animals were all cosy. Actually I don’t know why I bother for the turkeys and geese since they prefer to sit outside in all weathers.

In an attempt to vary our diet further, I strung a continuous line over the big dam on pulleys either side and suspended several hooks from it with various tempting baits: grasshoppers, home-made flies sporting colourful peacock feathers, worms etc. Unfortunately it has been a complete failure. The trout circle around the dam blowing raspberries at me and refuse to take any of the baits. It became a real chore as I had to rig up the hooks and then rush back before it got dark to take them all down before the platypus came out and got snagged. Discouraged, I’ve continued to save worms (I’ve got a little worm farm going in the garage now), but haven’t been able to motivate myself to rig up the hooks again for a couple of weeks.

We did at least have great fun one afternoon making different types of flies, with peacock and rooster feathers, sequins etc. Pity they just don’t seem to interest the trout. I also relearnt to splice ropes. To reach across the dam and back again needed a continuous loop of around 60m. I remembered my grandad teaching me to splice ropes together when I was young, but I couldn’t remember the technique. I found a great set of videos on the net and discovered that using a crochet hook was the best way. My splices are a bit lumpy but seem to have done the job. It’s the same principle as interleafing the pages of two telephone books as demonstrated on Mythbusters – it’s just friction really that holds them together.

Once the goats were all in the new paddock, we took the opportunity to fell an ancient dead wattle that was growing between two of my old fences. Having cut a gap in one of the fences we positioned the ute about a tree’s height away from the base and Bronte tried to throw a hammer on the end of a rope between two big high branches. He did this quite quickly but the hammer pulled straight out and wasn’t heavy enough to pull the rope down where it could be reached. Eventually (about 100 times later) he managed it again and we were able to wrap the rope around the hammer to hold it fast and tie the other end to the back of the ute. As the tree was so rotten Bronte wouldn’t use the chainsaw, so we took turns using the axe to bash away at it on both sides. When the axe went through to the rot within, we pulled with the ute and once the rope had stretched until we thought it must break, the tree finally crashed to the ground. Bronte’s since chainsawed it all up and stowed it away in the dry in the tractor shed. We should be just about OK for firewood now for the winter, but I still need to go foraging for my piggy brews.

Talking of piggy brews, the old brazier I was using had nearly collapsed, so Bronte kindly angle-ground another 44 gallon drum in half for me and cut some air holes in the bottom section. I mounted that between steel stakes driven into the ground and wired lengths of reinforcing iron across the top, for the ‘bowl’ to sit on. To make it more efficient, I’ve created a ‘shroud’ around it at full height from old bits of galvanized iron. This ensures that the hot air comes up the sides of the bowl and heats the contents more quickly. It works amazingly, bringing the whole container up to boiling point in about a quarter of the time it used to take – therefore using heaps less wood and saving me wood-gathering time.

I’ve had a couple of unexpected animal sightings recently. Walking across to the tractor shed I looked down towards the bucks’ pen and saw a wombat wandering along in broad daylight, well away from cover! Luke was off sick, so I tore back indoors as fast as possible, yelled for Luke to come outside, grabbed the camera and rushed outside again – only to find the wombat had disappeared! The pigs grunted and shot off in surprise so it must have taken cover in the sedge alongside the pig pen before disappearing in the bush near the creek. What a great surprise though! Another day I saw a long slinky creature which moved a little like a weasel, race from one patch of bog to another. The end half of its tail was white and looked fairly fluffy. I could only imagine it was a water rat or possibly a ring-tailed possum – however, it just didn’t move like a possum. There has been a great influx of the pretty green rosellas for winter. It’s great to see them back in big numbers – the last two years they’ve been noticeably thin on the ground. Less common suddenly are the black cockatoos.

Luke has taken to soccer like a duck to water. His team has played several games now, winning two, losing one and drawing the first. Luke was sick during the losing match so he can feel that they lost owing to him not being there! Last Saturday Bronte took him to a school in Kingston and Luke’s team won 15:1! I felt so sorry for the poor little souls in the other team – and was quite glad I’d chosen not to go along. Since Luke had never seen a proper game of soccer I recorded the FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Chelsea and we sat and watched it the following day (fast-forwarding over the boring bits). Liverpool was always my team (along with Luton and Bedford) in my youth when I used to go to football matches each Saturday with Grandad Tib. So I was rather disappointed when they lost 2:1.It was quite nail-biting in the second half however, when Liverpool piled on the pressure and looked like they might score an equaliser.

For entertainment on an evening, we’ve turned from film DVDs to TV serials. It’s great being able to watch more than one episode at a time, not have any adverts or interference (our signal is pretty weak here) and not have to wait until the following week to find out what happens. We really enjoyed The Slap, probably the first Aussie drama we’ve really enjoyed – Aussie films are usually so depressing and overly arty (everyone dies, takes drugs and ends up miserable). Now we are onto the second episode of Breaking Bad, which is surprisingly good. We’ve got a list of others we want to watch such as The West Wing and Lost.


I forgot to mention that before the WWOOFers left, we went to a sculpture trail on the coast. Here are some pictures of the artworks:

Kid in hole from which he and Bronte had dug a protruding rock and rolled it down the hill:

Diabolically difficult helicopter model sent by someone (can't remember who unfortunately) for a Christmas present for Luke. Bronte started it and gave up. I finished it, but eventually when its rotor blades starting drooping, I snuck it into the bin!

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Fabulous sunset a week or two ago. We sat watching TV in the lounge room  and I suddenly noticed
everything had  gone pink outside. When we looked at the sky it took our breath away!

So much has occurred in the last month I hardly know where to begin. To name a few things: we’ve stored 414 bales of hay, brush-cut a track through the bush for the new goat fence, spread 14 tonnes of gravel, hauled an enormous fish-farm net into place into the farrowing pen, mowed (by hand) a big fire-break around the house and been on many adventures and outings.

The boys have gone now having had three weeks with us. Tracy and Katrijna - the WWOOFERs - have also moved on. We now have a lovely German girl staying with us, but for all too short a time. A couple booked for next week had to cancel but we now have another Northern European girl starting early next week. I need to make the most of WWOOFERs at present, since once it turns cold in a month or two’s time, I shan’t feel able to ask someone to work in the cold and rain (even if someone were willing to brave Tasmania in Winter!).

Getting the hay in was a major achievement. It took all of one afternoon and evening, then as I couldn’t sleep for worrying I started again at 5.30am the following morning. Gradually, the boys joined me and we finally got finished late morning. As a reward we went to Hobart, watched a movie (I don’t recommend Happy Feet 2) and joined Bronte at the Hogs Breath Café for dinner. It was a fearsomely hot day with no relief in the restaurant.

Another marathon effort was spreading a truck-load of rough gravel on the other side of our tractor crossing en route to the goat paddocks. It lays wet there and gets terribly rutted and difficult to negotiate over winter. This time it had left great holes and was a real mess. So I got the truck to roughly dump the gravel over the area and then spent a couple of hours getting it level. What a job – I realised then why the women tennis players grunt when hitting the ball as hard as they can, I was grunting at each shovelful with the sheer effort. I’m pleased with it now – there must be 250mm or more thickness over the wettest part so I’m confident it will last a fair while.

Bronte took the boys (and Luke) for a day of mountain biking on Mount Wellington and Tolosa Park (North Hobart). They had a great time and Luke was very brave and determined on his new bike over the bumpy tracks at Tolosa. They also had a day of making their own boomerangs. The boys spent an age sanding and decorating theirs – they were works of art. Luke made a lovely job of his too. Bronte finished Tracy’s for her and we all signed the back of it – hopefully it is a nice souvenir of her stay here. The boys mowed a cricket wicket between the house and creek and tried manfully to roll it flat with a concrete pipe (they were on a hiding to nothing there - even worse Michael broke his first boomerang on it). Sean made some great stumps and bails - although Rosie chewed up the bails before they could be used!

View from Mountain Bike track on Mt Wellington

  

Towards the end of the holiday I went with Luke and the boys for a creek adventure. We headed up Crabtree Rivulet, negotiating slippery moss-covered rocks and many fallen trees, before eventually reaching Willies Falls. The Falls weren’t in full flow but still looked very impressive, set in a great gully with smooth sheer rock sloping up on one side. At one point the whole steep bank above us was a scree slope balanced atop a large, half-rotten fallen tree. Michael tempted providence by sitting under it and Luke scrambled across the face of it while I had my heart in my mouth. The boys and Luke set such a great pace going up the creek, that I was quite knackered when we got there. It was clear that Luke was too but wouldn’t admit it. It was only after a couple of mishaps that I made him slow down & stick with me – much to his chagrin.

On another day I took them all to Hastings Caves and Thermal Springs. I let them go up into the caves – which are incredibly impressive - while I waited at the Springs. They all seemed to greatly enjoy the tour and we all went on the local walks and had a swim in the warm pool afterwards. If only it wasn’t such a long drive, I’m sure we’d be tempted to go there more often. On the way back from the Caves we picked up 'Clive' a 4-month old turkey gobbler, who looks like a mini-Darth and hopefully will prove in time to be more prolific than William (he couldn't be worse). We also went round to the 'brethren' - frankly we are not sure what they are, but they appear to be some sort of religious community who live in Glendevie. We've bought goats and a gobbler from them in the past - this time they had no spare turkeys, but we came home with some luscious plums and blueberries from their roadside stall.

The boys and Tracy came and supported Luke at Little Athletics, both in Huonville and at a multi-centre event at The Domain. Mike was able to compete at a local championship as a guest 'under 15'. It made it altogether more fun for us to watch two competitors. It was made more interesting by Mike having only opponent, a certain 'Wes', who is a darling of the centre - Mike really gave him some keen competition, thrashing him in the 800m and the discus.

There have been a few incidents on the farm front. Little Pea, the younger peahen, hatched out 4 peachicks which all promptly died within a few days. No idea why, but they didn’t seem to figure out what to eat, despite us putting out tempting dishes of crumbles and other goodies. The pigs as usual have proven their worth once again by producing another litter of 8 little cuties. This is Blaize’s (formerly ‘Ginger’ or ‘Stripes’ or ‘Mrs Pig’) first litter and she’s been a great Mum, very attentive. It caught us by surprise and I had to rope in the boys to help mend the fence on the other pig pen that I’d mowed down with the Suzuki and goat-float only the previous week. It was too difficult to move Mum & piglets so instead we shepherded Connor into that pen (now mostly covered with fishnet to discourage digging). He’s a little disgruntled but is coping well. Tracy and I caught the piglets a couple of days later and castrated the boys and notched the ears of the girls. As usual there were more boys than girls – 6 out of 8! However, the castration was over very quick and they were fine once back with Mum.

Peachick

Pig fence repairing

Fishing net spread in pig pen - Connor's new home

One day old piglets

There have been ups and downs with the goats. We sold 4 for a tidy sum early in the year and have only 4 young ones left now, one boy which we plan to eat and 3 does to grow on to enlarge the herd. It was clear that the weaning paddock was unhealthy (the babies kept scouring) so we moved them out of it after 3 weeks and got them into the smallest paddock up the hill and moved the mums too so they were separated by two fences. They all seem to have settled down. There has been a bit of sickness in the main herd too but we seem at last to have got on top of it and they all look in fine fettle now. When we’ve had problems it seems to have struck overnight – one day a goat is healthy and eating, the next it’s either very sick (scouring badly, lagging behind and not eating) or dead. Despite closely re-reading all the goatie health stuff I can find, I still can’t be sure what has been happening. I’m monitoring them very closely and any goat that looks even mildly off-colour is instantly treated for worms and given a large dose of my ‘kill or cure’ goat remedy: a mixture of molasses, olive oil, bicarbonate of soda, rehydration sachets, vitamins and concentrated garlic. It seems to work – providing I get to them quickly enough. The only answer is to get the new paddock finished and to keep them well supplied in the meantime with hay and browse, in addition to their grain and chaff rations. Today we struck lucky, finding that the Council had cut down a load of wattle branches on our road, prior to bringing the grader up. We asked the Council and then collected the lot – 4 huge ute loads. The goats aren’t terribly impressed as wattle isn’t their favourite, but I’ve no doubt it will disappear over the next few days.

The weather hasn’t helped things much recently, being either terribly hot and muggy (great for parasites) or pouring with rain (again great for parasites). Nevertheless it was gradually drying off locally, so we thought it important to completely tidy up around the house and beyond, to minimise our bushfire risk. Bronte has been slashing madly and I’ve been hand-mowing all the awkward bits around the house. Hauling the mower up and down the steep slopes was awfully hard work and just about finished me off. It didn’t help that the grass had got to nearly 2ft in places, having grown so quickly. Plus I was mowing in 30degC and 80% humidity. However, it’s about done now and does look very neat.

I’ve done a heap of brush-cutting too, partly on my new paddock fence-line, which is almost totally cleared now (helped by Bronte & the boys chain-sawing and moving a big fallen tree) and also on and around the veggie patch and some of the slopes which were just too steep for a mower. The veggie patch and its banks were so dreadfully overgrown that brush-cutting was the only option. No doubt the debris will make great mulch to improve the soil for when we finally finish building the veggie cage and plant something!

I’ve finally cracked sausage-making! The goose sausages referred to earlier were pretty awful as expected and were mostly fed to the birds. However, I closely followed a recipe another day from the book which came with the mincer and sausage-filler and – amazingly – the results were absolutely delicious. Just the right texture, moistness and flavour! Can’t wait to try some more now.

Sausage-making with Tracy

Have also tried my hand at making liquid soap, ie handwash, with mixed results. Several of the bars from the last soap batch turned out a bit peculiar, so I decided to have a go at turning them into handwash, having consulted several techniques listed on the internet. We grated ours in the food-processor, then added water at a rate of 4 x the weight of soap, brought it to the boil and simmered for 15 minutes stirring occasionally, then let it cool overnight. It was quite bizarre, like a really thick jelly. I consulted more recipes, added more water, boiled it again, added some salt and loads of rosemary and lavender essence and now it’s sort of usable. Having decanted it into various plunger and squeegie bottles, some seem to be better than others for some reason – for instance some are much too watery. I added more salt to one and shook it vigorously and that seems to have helped. Must do the same with the others. But it does wash ones’ hands quite well and smells lovely! Trouble is it’s a rather gruesome cat-sick colour.

Handwash

 Kristina and Luke helped me clean all the windows in the entire house, inside and out a couple of days ago. I thought it would be a quick job, but it was a nightmare. For one thing we have an awful lot of windows, for another many are a long way off the ground! I removed all the fly-screens first and then brought the ladder indoors in order to clean the inside of the skylight in the dining room. That was quite terrifying in itself. Then I had to climb up onto the roof and clean the outside of the skylight windows. That was actually considerably less frightening! But then came cleaning the outside of the upstairs windows all around the house. The plan was for me to go up the ladder and scrub them with detergent and for Luke to hose them down afterwards. I’d been told by a window cleaner that this does a perfectly good job. The hitch was that the ladder was awkward and didn’t always reach and also that Luke didn’t believe that hosing was an important job and spent most of his time aiming at the dogs, me and Kristina or jetting the water into the ground. I gave up on some of the highest windows and scrubbed them with the mop from the inside – that was hard work in itself and somewhat precarious. We also had to wipe down all the flyscreens which were dusty and cobwebbed and then re-fit them all. I was quite exhausted at the end – but even though they are not perfect, wow, what a difference it has made!

Murphy Cat and Rosie Dog have been having good fun together recently. When it gets cooler in the evening, Murphy goes out and taunts Rosie from the long grass with his ears flat and eyes like saucers. Rosie comes crawling up excitedly and gets repeatedly whacked until she goes nuts and starts running round and round in circles whereupon Murphy leaps upon her each time she passes. It’s a scream to watch. Trouble is Rosie gets just a bit too rough for Murphy sometimes and I have to step in and rescue him.

We had a bit of bad news a while ago. I rang up the agent to find out the latest news on the land we tried to buy alongside us over Christmas. It seems that far from going to an overseas buyer (as we thought) it now belongs to the daughter and son-in-law of my arch nemesis: Peter Pepper, ex? Forestry Tasmania and now sadly, on the Huon Valley Council. It is he who sent out e-mails with lies and exaggerations about me, terming me a political activist and saying I was in league with extremists. There is no other person that I loathe with such a passion (even the Horrible Hogman)! I still feel bitter about it and get a pang each time I drive past the ‘sold’ signs. We are hoping that the daughter might be a different type of person but I daresay she has been fully briefed (with prejudice) about us, by her father.