Wet

Well, suddenly the weather has changed from mild nice days to constant rain, with an icy wind. We had about 50ml of rain! It'll be a nice good drink for all my trees hopefully it will see them through what is likely to be long hard summer. Hopefully not too long and hot, but I guess we will just have to wait and see. My poor goats were quite taken back by the sudden change, and were shivering today, poor little things. I wish it would be so simple as to just bring them inside...

The little one is walking and running now too, with quite a lot of confidence. Rarely crawls at all. Her latest thing is to carry bags and other things with straps she can get over her neck. Here is a picture of her with my handbag, and her precious wombat toy. She LOVES wombats, I'm a little worried about once she gets more mobile, that she will try and visit them in their burrows, but we will figure that out once we get to it....


Not much knitting happening, but I've been doing lots of spinning as well as lots of fibre preperations. I've had bits of different fleeces lying around the house for many months, so its nice to put them through the drum carder, ready for spinning. Here is some mohair fleece I have spun,

and the final result the first 200g or so of mohair, plyed and ready for washing. I'm planning on dyeing this as mohair takes dye really well. It will probably become a christmas gift for someone.

Playing in the garden

I have been busily preparing the garden for some spring planting - bought some tomatoe, basil and lettuce seedlings. I have also done some propagating and have quite a few tomatoes in my greenhouse, but they wont be ready to plant out for a month or so yet. You may be wondering what will we do with all these tomatoes! Well, after a terrible year last year, I'm hoping to have enough to make some sauces etc with my fowlers vacola unit. The preparation is ALOT of work, but the rewards are worth it. The little one has been helping with the 'weeding'....

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.