Autumn

We have been blessed with some lovely autumn days (as well as lots of rain), but despite nice weather winter is just around the corner.  In our part of the world the sun sits very low in the sky and the shadows get longer.  We are now in 'power saving' mode here, with a very modest off-grid solar power system (with trees to our north!!! Probably THE worst situation - but its only temporary).  We have to be more and more careful about how much power we use, particularly the stuff that is left on over night (as in appliances on standby mode etc). 

halloween in the southern hemisphere! At the RIGHT time of year!

Autumn here has been a busy season with garden harvests, roadside harvests and lots of preserving.  I've tried to expand my collection of preserves this year, with green tomatoe relish and pickles, pickled zuchinni, tomatoe sauce and bottled apples (cooking apple variety Belle de Boskoop from a nearby organic apple orchard).  I also made the usual chutneys and jams.  I still have Apple butter and chestnut jam on my list to do before I can rest in the kitchen!

bottled apples

We have made 2 batches of wine this year - cherry plum (from the roadside trees) and apple and blackberry.  We finally got to taste our blackberry wine that we made last year and it was a sucess!

I have been doing lots of work in the garden pulling out the summer crops and preparing the soil for the winter crops and new perrenials like asparagus, rhubarb and strawberries.  I'm also planning on planting a good number of fruit trees this winter so there is plenty of preparation to do before the fruit trees become available in July (mostly fencing to keep out our free range goats!).

some action on the house too!

On a wanna be self-sufficient farm there is no 'quiet' time it seems, as there is always plenty to do (hence there has been very little activity on the blog!)

Ducks

Yesterday we added a new species to the farm.  Four Welsh Harlequin ducks, about 6 months old and just started laying.  I had planned on getting Indian Runner ducks (primarly because they are good layers and the come in the 'typical' white with orange bill colouring - our daughter is a mad Jemimah Puddleduck fan...).  As it is the Welsh Harlequin is a rare duck breed, which was derived from the Kahki Campbell duck - which is a very good layer.

The ducks are very beautiful (I would love to get a drake of the same breed they are stunning!), and fairly calm for ducks, although they don't really like the kids running around them too much.  At the moment they are confined to a small pen and yard.  I have 2 side by side, so I'll rotate the ducks between the yards once it gets too muddy.  We will eventually fence off an orchard and let them run around there.  I'd love to set up a 'duckaponics' system to grow rice, but that will probably be a few years down the track.

Our reasoning for getting ducks is to complement the egg laying of our hens - ducks are happy in the winter and lay well when the hens mope an moult their feathers and don't lay much.  The ducks will slow down when the hens will pick up the pace in summer.  We do lots of baking and cooking and use lots of eggs, so diversifying our egg production is important to keep us in good fresh eggs. 

The kids are rapped in the latest additions, and the paler duck is of course Jemimah Puddleduck. 

Abundance

Its been a while since I've posted on the blog.  Life has been very full, and there is just never enough hours in the day to do it all! 

We have had an amazing growing season here.  Although the weather hasn't been as typically warm as most years, we have had LOTS of rain (over 200mm in February...  2 years ago we had about 7mm!!!).  Everything has remained green, which has been lovely, and has meant no worrying about bushfires or watering the garden.  I'm enjoying it, although it has meant that we have had a dismal tomaoe harvest this year. 

We have enjoyed a very abundant zuchinni harvest however!!!  I've had to get a bit creative with using them up!  This year I've grown capsicums for the first time and I'll definately be planting them again.  They have been pretty successful.  I also planted sweetcorn which grew well, but we did have issues with pollination (I think our site is too windy). 

Currently we are getting LOTS of apples (from our own tree as well as from friends and roadside trees).  I've bottled some lovely cooking apples from a nearby organic apple orchard, and made some chutney, and cakes etc.  I've also got a batch of apple and blackberry wine on the go.  I'm still hoping to make a batch of apple butter or sauce or something and maybe some more bottled apples.  

In the next few years our fruit trees that we have been planting will start to bear fruit and we will be able to enjoy a real abundance.

I've spent a bit of my time building a duck pen to house a few ducks for eggs.  We finished it off today.  As I understand it, duck are much better winter layers than hens, so they'll offset the reduced egg production from the hens. Next up on my list is to improve my vegetable garden fencing (and expand it - its currently about 8mx8m but I think double would be ideal). 

Work on the house building has stalled, but I think work may start up again soon.  Its hard as owner builders to find the balance between working to pay for the building and doing the actual building.  Both take alot of time.  I think there will be an update on the house soon on the blog.

Roadside plum harvest

In almost any place around the world you will find wild fruit trees on the sides of the roads, particularly small country lanes.  In our region we are lucky to have an abundance of 'cherry plums' and apples (and plenty of blackberries too, but you would want to find an unsprayed patch - as most blackberries in our area get heavily sprayed), as well as chestnuts, peaches and pears.  Some groups are putting together 'scrumping' maps so that the whole community can make use of the harvest. 

I took the kids recently to pick a few buckets full of plums.  The kids ate heaps of them, about a kilogram was turned into a delicious chutney and another kilogram or so was made into wine.  I had planned on making jam as well, but didn't get around to it (last year I made several batches of plum jam).  Chutney making is very well suited to the woodstove, as it requires long slow cooking (something I never could do well on our old electric or gas cook tops - as I've always felt guilty about power use...).  My chutneys have become more or less just a creative process, not much measuring or weighing, just a bit of this and a bit of that!

The wine making is probably the least abount of work.  Last year I made about 12 or 13 bottles of blackberry wine (its been sitting for almost a year now in our cool pantry - we get to sample it in April this year).  This year I thought I would try to make wine from our local plums. The wine is fermeting away in its glass demijohn and will probably take a month or more before it stops, at which point I'll be able to bottle it. 

Its fun to use the foods that grow locally, and to learn different ways of preserving them.  I am looking forward to the apple harvests this year, as our roadside apples are loaded with fruit.  I am planning on drying a whole heap, plus making chutney, bottling some and making some cider.  Meanwhile the blackberries are starting to ripen...

Chicks

Then end of last year was a pretty dismal time around here, regarding our flock of chooks.  We lost some to the fox, some to unknown causes, chicks either failed to hatch, or died soon after (the fox took my 2 good mother hens...).  The last attempt at hatching chickens was going well, till about 2 days before hatching, the hen abandoned the eggs (it was very hot, and her broody cage was probably not situated in the best position, she was also bothered by lice).  Out of her 4 eggs one chick hatched.  Since its as much work to care for one chick (and keep it warm) as it is for a few more, I few 'day old' chicks to keep it company.

Raising chicks in a brooder is not really my ideal scenario.  Although they are all doing great, after having watched our mother hens care for and teach the young chicks how to behave, I think its the best way to do it.  I've been feeding them as natural diet as I can manage.  Lots of egg (with crushed garlic and dried nettles), millet, seasame seed, a little wheat and rolled oats.  I also collect some wood lice (slaters) for them. 

What I find amazing is that even these chicks who haven't really seen adult chooks, know how to scratch and have a real appetite for bugs.  Its quite incredible that an animal regarded as unitelligent as the chook can have so many inbuilt instincts.

The kids are enjoying these chicks, they actually get to pick them up (probably more than I would like) and watch them, which is harder with a protective mother hen about!!!  I'm thinking that we have 2 roosters and 4 hens, but only time will tell!

summer

Life has been good, but not particularly eventful here.  We are probably in one of the few parts of our state that has not had extraordinary rains, although still more than is typical for summer.  We have also been lucky to not have our typically hot weather - with more mild 20-35C so far this summer.  Summer usually makes me nervous, and adds a whole new dimension of work as far as watering the garden goes.  So the garden is growing well, the grass is still green (not the usual thing in mid January!). 

sweet corn

zuchinni - the best I've ever grown!

We are devoting most of our spare time to building the house, along with other urgent jobs like shearing (which we finally got around to do this week - again Brad did them using the hand shears), and pulling out Ragwort.  The Ragwort has been very prolific this year, not just in abundance, but also in the sheer size of the plants (some are as tall as us).  Personally I don't think its such a big deal, its real problem is that the most common livestock here don't eat it, so therefore its taking the place of grass.  I've been doing some reading on 'natural farming' although I use that description loosely - a book by Joel Salatin.  The book (The Sheer Ecstacy of Being a Lunatic Farmer) has 'joined the dots' on alot of things I read about and know, and the issue of Ragwort is one of them.  By consistently grazing the same animals, and getting them to graze the grass down before moving them on, you are actually encouring the growth of plants that they DON'T like!  As they eat the stuff they like and let the 'weeds' grow strongly.  Makes sense, yet that is how pretty much all 'produtive' farming is done.  Litres of chemicals poured over the land to deal with an issue that cross grazing with sheep or goats would control....



I've been inspired by Salatin's example and am currently reading more about our food system and diet (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food).  Its definatley a topic that is close to my heart, and we are pretty passionate about producing real food, that hasn't been adulterated by the industrial food system. I'll leave it at that for the moment, but I highly recommend reading about these topics, especially about how our food system works and what you are eating.  Food is probably THE most important thing in our lives, and we should be eating the best food (even if its expensive) and in its 'natural' state - not processed.

The weather (apart from when it has been raining) has been very nice for taking photos.  Such beautiful blue skies.  Here are some snapshots of the last few weeks.

2010, 2011 and beyond

2010 was a very short year for us, well it felt short, like we could have blinked and missed it.  I think that is because of the preparation for building the house, you know how time flies if you have a deadline....  We have been pretty busy with the building stuff now, and its nice to actually be able to do something, instead of just waiting for paperwork etc.  You can read more about it here.

As far as general life on the farm 2010 was a bittersweet year.  We lost quite a few animals, our goat gyspy, an alpaca, but by far the most abundant losses were in our hens.  We started spring with 13 hens, and now we have 5 left.  But typical of the way nature works, one of the hens is sitting on a few eggs, so new life may replenish the losses. This quote pretty much sums it up, and keeps coming back to me, as it seems so 'real'.

"Earth brings us into life and nourishes us. Earth takes us back again.  Birth and death are present in every moment"

Since we left town, I feel that we have come closer to nature and the cycles of life and seasons.  Its easy in town to disconnect, it doesn't matter what the weather is like because you have the same temperature year round due to the wonders of heating/cooling systems, you don't eat seasonally as farmers will run heated hothouses to provide tomatoes year round or we import from warmer climates, so we can eat watermelon in winter.  Out here, the seasons are 'in your face', if its cold its hard to not notice it.  When you grow any vegetables, you become aware of when the naturally would grow in your area.

2011 is promising to be another full year for us, which will probably pass by far too quickly (considering we almost half way through january already - how did that happen??).  The house building will be a dominant part of our lives for the next few years.  We will also focus our efforts on establishing good infrastructure such as fencing, water pipes and additional tanks and catchments, more protection for trees and gardens and setting up yards etc for animal management.  Due to our sagas with our hens, we will also be looking at setting up a portable house that can be moved around the paddocks with a herd guardian of some sort.  We will also try and inrease our food production, and reduce our reliance on outside sources of food for us and the animals.  We will see how far we will get with that this year.