Brought to you by the sun

We are still in love with our solar power system. It produces about 7kW per day, which is great. We will see how much it will make over summer. But if we average this we wont be paying much for electricity anymore. YAY!

The apple tree in the garden is now covered in lovely pink flowers, hopefully these will all grow into apples and we will have a lovely harvest. Otherwise we will pick from the loads of road side apple trees, and do some drying and other preserving. The free road side fruit is considerable around here. But that wont be till autumn....


We have been working on another shelter for the alpacas, since our farm hasn't got enough trees (yet) for shelter. We get some pretty strong winds up there, so it really is important for the animals to have somewhere to get out of it. Not much else happening on the farm though. Grass is finally starting to grow, thank goodness.


Well our little girl is walking. Although she still prefers crawling, she can walk without holding on to anything for quite a distance. Not much else has changed though.

GO SOLAR!!

YAY, we finally have our grid connected solar power system!!! YAY! Here is our beautiful panels, so simple and yet able to generate pretty much all the power we need - the meter was spinning backwards quickly!!! We are very happy - one day all houses will have a solar array, but for now we will have to be content with knowing that at least we are making a contribution.


I highly recommend people to look into getting a solar power system for their homes, really with the current rebates available (in Australia - although other countries have much better...) its no greater cost than a new car or holiday and its MORE important.

Windy

It has been blowing a gale the last few days. Hopefully it wont knock my little baby peaches off the tree.

Nothing much exciting happening up at the farm. Have pulled out another of the old fences that are the legacy of the old farmer, including more barbed wire in the paddocks (the stuff just seems to work its way to the surface - we have walked past these spots so many times and never found this stuff, and now its there....) and more half buried hayband (which can be a danger to livestock if they eat it).

Today I put up a new bit of electric fence to extend where the horses can get to, as the grass is running short at the moment. I put in a 'bungy' gate, because the next door neighbour needs access to his property from that side of our place.

Have started another shelter shed for the alpacas, but at this stage we only have part of the frame up, unfortunately the weather has not been suited to doing building work, Ironically as the weather would be ideal for having a nice shelter shed....

The goats are doing well cleaning up the blackberry that has really started to grow back. In an attempt to make our smaller goat Cookie a little safer (he has sharp pointy upright horns) we tried putting tennis balls on the ends of his horns. Would work a treat, except that our dog Freya just wants to pull them off!!!!

The times are a changing

We got our hay shed concreted!!! YAY! We ended up getting a contractor to do the job, so it cost a bit of money, but realistically we would have struggled to do it on our own, with a baby and a dog to keep off the wet concrete. So we are very happy about this.



Not much else at the farm currently. I'm getting a vegy patch ready for planting corn and pumkins and a few other things, but that isn't quite ready. The weather the last few days hasn't been ideal for working outside, with all the rain we have had. We had 20mm here over night!!! Trees are all pretty much in, and I guess we will have to start some other job soon! (Its not like us to not have millions of jobs started, and urgently needing to be finished!!!)

Spring is yellow!

This time of year is just so yellow in our part of the world. The silver wattles are flowering, and the hills are YELLOW. Plus there are heaps of daffodils in flower too. At the farm so many 'wild' daffodils are popping up all over the place. They are remnants of the old house/farm that once was there. Apparently these daffodils are quite a rare type, although they seem so common in the area.

Most of the tree planting is now done, just a few plants left to go in, but the mad rush is now over. Fingers crossed that we will still get some more rain, so that they might survive the summer. Its already dried up so much here, I'm a bit concerned that we will have a worse year than last year. Scary stuff really. Good thing our politicians are taking the whole climate change thing seriously and not really investing in CLEAN renewable electricity and low emmission transportation.... Frustrating - our lives and those of the future generations are at the mercy of people who think money is more important than the PLANET!!!! Who can reason with that!

Anyway, should stop raving!

Here is what was going to be a photo of some of my recent handspun yarn, but she took over the photo shoot, throwing the skein on the floor everytime I tried to take a photo! You can sort of see the yarn though, blue, pink, purple and black.

Spring is in the air!

Wow, the weather has been so nice lately, really spring like. My beautiful peach tree is in full flower.

This tree is one of the best things I have ever planted. I put it in about 5 years ago, and the last 2 years it has produced MASSES of peaches. Last christmas I got a Fowlers Vacola unit, and I bottled about a dozen bottles of these golden peaches. So yummy. My mouth is watering with anticipation of this years crop. Fingers crossed we don't get hail now (we always get hail when I have tiny baby peaches). There is nothing more rewarding than picking fruit and vegies from the plants that you planted and tended. So simple and yet so special. I love spring!

Not much news regarding our little girl. She is enjoying life and the nice weather, spending alot of time in the great outdoors. Not walking yet, but she gets around and is happy.

Tree planting is finally comming to an end. As much as I LOVE tree planting, I am always glad to see it over and done with for a few months. We have recently planted 8 blueberry bushes, and about 20 raspberry canes, as well as the last of the indigenous trees, here is a picture of the empty pots and trays - 400 in all, and yes its not a huge amount but it is when you have a young child, and a million other things to do as well. 400 means we don't spend several days planting for 8 hours straight, which I used to do as a job!



We are also working out (well debating more like it!) how to plant the paddock trees. We are going to fence off some enclosures (I have found out through tears that no animal is compatible with small trees) for fruit and stock forage trees. These will also be shelter for animals, and also attract birds and insects to pollinate trees etc. We have been reading Masanobu Fukuoka's book about natural farming, so we have been inspired by this as well as permaculture principels. What we are working on though is exactly how we will fence the trees off, individual enclosures for trees, long narrow enclosures, large etc etc. We are also about to start concreting the hay shed, a big job for the 2 of us, but we should manage to get some help. Once that is done we will be able to get the shed walls cladded, and things will be moving along nicely.

Out with the old

Here we are with a scrap metal bin (6 x 12 x 4 foot) filled with metal left lying around our farm by the previous owners. The farm was a dairy farm once apon a time, and also had a house which is no longer there. Therefore 100 odd years of old rusty corrugated iron is around the place, but at least this lot is off to start a new life as cans or something else! We will probably fill onther one, as there is still more metal, old ploughs etc, and plenty of old barbed wire fencing. We really don't like barbed wire! We had the bin for about a week, and spent nearly every day of that week throwing stuff in. So its nice to be rid of it.


Here we are with the Mountain Ash Eucalyptus regnans tree we planted for our little girl when she was born (and yes we did plant the placenta with it). Its thriving, and has lots of new growth. We look forward to taking this yearly photo, and watching the tree grow along with our daughter. Her middle name comes from this tree.