Winter Mornings

 

On winter mornings I put on overalls and a woolly hat and set off for the dairy, armed with a bucket of hot water and the milk pail. Using the water to wash Hailey's teats keeps my hands warm and squeezing warm milk out of a warm udder is quite pleasant. Once the milking is done it is time to feed the other animals.

Tonto the bull follows me to his day paddock. He gets to spend his evenings and nights with Hailey but after breakfast he is on his own for the day. He has been with us about six weeks now and unless he is a very quick mover there has been no sign of real interest from either cow or bull.

 Curly and the dairy kids Penny and Misty get some sheep nuts and a biscuit of Lucerne to supplement the diminishing grass in their paddock.

 

Each of the chook flocks gets a scoop of layer mix - we use Darling Downs - and then they spend the rest of the day scratching around for bugs and whatever else they find, which we hope is all the worms from the goats. 

Comet the calf is let in with her mum but she prefers hay to milk these days but will soon latch on once Hailey wanders up from the dairy.

 Cedric and the five does share hay and sometimes nuts in a wooden trough that lets them all have a space.

Archie and Toby wolf down their meatloaf and biscuits so fast it was hard to catch a photo of them still eating.

The guinea pigs - all 9 of them - need their cages moving and some lettuce leaves donated by the local café.

After this morning routine I can head back inside for my own breakfast.

If I have to go to work or head to our other property for the day these tasks may have to be done between 6.30am and 7.00am which can be a bit dark and cold but on other days I can leave it another hour or so when hopefully the frost has melted and the sun come out!  Despite the cold it is very grounding to greet the dawn with the animals and I find I don't mind it at all. The woolly hat really helps though!
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The Turning Point

The shortest day has arrived along with the growing hope of light and warmth. The frosts of minus seven or eight have been severe and it is hard to see how the guinea pigs manage to survive in their little cages on the lawn. We have turned the corner into another year of light and it seems an opportunity to reflect. This blogging journey started on the arbitrary date of January 1 while today would have been more apt if it was to reflect the cycles of the year.
It is no wonder that this moment has been celebrated by people all over the temperate world since humans first evolved. The importance of the amount of light in producing food is vital. The animals know. Today seven eggs were collected - up from one a day about a week ago. While there is plenty of cold to come it feels positive to look forward to enough warmth to plant seeds and watch them grow through another cycle.
At Opportunity Farm we have also reached a turning point in our major project of building our workshop/ shearing shed. The materials are coming from a friend's shearing shed that had partly collapsed. After several days of working on it the shed now consists of four standing posts and piles of wood to remove or burn and those pieces of tin too twisted to be of any use.

 

The site of our building is no longer just a plan or a pile of stumps. It has started to burst out of the ground. With the help of my littlest (seen here filling up the holes with soil above the concrete) most of the posts are now in. Out with the old and in with the new.....

 

Happy Solstice

First Green Shoots

With a long series of intense frosts and the least light of any time of year Spring seems a long way off. But there are some signs that the tide of dark is about to turn:

• One of the flocks of chickens have stopped moulting and started to lay eggs again.

 

• The early garlic is sprouting

• The first asparagus is up before all last year's shoots have died off.

There are still many weeks until we can really notice the increase in light and months before the heater will slow down its consumption of wood but seeing some growth emerging from the ground is always a good reminder that light follows dark in an endless cycle of life. It's good to be alive.

Setting up a Blacksmithing Workshop

Working with metal has long been a plan of mine, so the time had come to find an expert to show me how to go about it. I found a course offered by Iain Hamilton of Mother Mountain Forge at Tilba in NSW. He has found fame by making knives on the River Cottage Australia show but has been working with metal for the past fifteen years.

 

His course offered practical experience and advice in setting up a workshop. To work with metal you need three things: a heat source (forge), a hammer and an anvil. Plenty of other tools are useful but these are the minimum. Iain uses two different forges - gas and coking coal. The gas one looks like a small barrel with an opening  in the door. Its quick to heat up and creates a constant heat but is noisy and chews through the gas.  

 

The coke forge is quieter and has a range of temperatures but takes longer to get going.

 

 

My most impressive achievement over the weekend was to make a hammer. The project started as a piece of scrap steel. 

 

 

 After welding a rod onto one end to make it easy to put in and out of the forge, the metal is heated up until it glows yellow. Then it is ready to be worked on the anvil. One end needed to be flattened and spread out to make the 'cross peen'. The middle needed to have a hole punched in it to fit a handle in the hammer head. The process is simple but getting the right technique is more of a challenge. I had to learn how and where to stand and practise hitting the hammer at just the right angle and in the right place. Iain had some tools that would make the job quicker but he started by getting me to work it the traditional way. It was amazing to be able to change the shape and slowly watch the hammer appear.

Once the head was shaped it had to be hardened and tempered in an oven. This gave time for shaping a handle from Queensland hickory. To fix the head to the handle a notch is cut into the top of the head and a wedge of hardwood tapped into it. We also put in a sharpened ring cur from a pipe and then coated the top with epoxy resin to ensure a lasting handle. The shaft was coated with a special beeswax mixture and the end product is both beautiful and practical.

 

A fantastic course and I am inspired to find a suitable heat source so I can start to make metal objects on my own.

Slabbing up the Dairy

The mud and cow manure in the dairy just became too much to bear and the smell of morning milking lingered on me all day. Something had to be done.

 

I had placed a square concrete block roughly where Hailey's feet stand and sometimes this worked OK, but often she would place a foot off to the side and sink into the pungent mire. When she eats she often likes to urinate and this would fill the hole her hoof had made and wouldn't dry out until the next deluge made it worse.

If the weather is bad she and her companion, calf by day and bull by night, would camp in there and trample and drip. I put it off for a while but the time had come for a more permanent solution.

First I dug down to more solid ground and moved out all the soggy smelly mud. Then some wood was attached on all four sides - level across the shed, sloping towards the garden at the front. With some reo cut to size the dairy was ready for some concrete.

Michelle is a concreter's daughter so while I mixed up the bags in the wheelbarrow she brandished the homemade float and smoothed out the wrinkles.

 

Once the concrete had 'gone off'' - that mysterious moment where the chemical reaction in the mix is completed enough to make a lasting finish on the top - she set to work again. It was important not to make it too smooth so Hailey does not slip. A bucket of sand applied to the top and then brushed completed the process and time does the rest. Tomorrow Hailey will have to milked out in the paddock to make sure the slab has set enough to be stood on the next day.



It will be quite something to have a solid floor to work from and being raised up a couple of inches will make Hailey happy as she will be able to access the feed bin easier.

 

Tonto the Bull

 

We have a guest on Opportunity Farm. He has been invited here to sire Hailey's next calf. Tonto is a young Dexter bull who belongs to our neighbours. They run pedigree Dexters and their line of bulls provide semen for customers all over the world. Last time we needed a bull for Hailey she went to their place but that wouldn't work with milking and Comet the calf. So they kindly lent him to us.

 

Tonto is a gentle boofy-headed boy who seems quite safe to have around people, especially children. He is a little smaller than Hailey so we are hoping he is able to climb high enough to perform a successful service. So far he has checked Hailey out a few times but hasn't been too interested. By day Hailey hangs with Comet but we need to keep the calf separate as she could be old enough to be in season herself - without being big enough to survive the pregnancy. Tonto gets the night shift. This makes it harder to know whether he has done the job he is here for, but I am hoping it will be obvious. Having a mature bull around is new to me so hopefully all goes well - otherwise Tonto may be with us for a fair while.

The 100th Post

100 posts is time to reflect on what we have been doing, why we are doing it and where we are going with it.

 

Since January 1st we (Matthew and Michelle - but mostly Matthew as Michelle has written 154 posts of poems as well) have been recording activities, events and musings about our life here on Opportunity Farm. It has been many parts diary, some parts instruction manual and some parts philosophy. Basically whatever seemed noteworthy about our attempts at homesteading.

The food production side has been a pleasure - tonight for dinner there were two meals, one comprising pumpkin soup and homemade bread while for the fussy ones pork mince, tomato sauce and rice washed down with a raspberry smoothie and a glass of cider (not for the kids!). The only purchased ingredients being the flour and yeast for the bread, the rice and a spoonful of local honey for the smoothie. It is great to be able to celebrate the joy of eating our own produce by sharing it with the world.

Today's tasks of preparing to concrete the dairy floor, putting in the first stump for the shearing shed/workshop, attaching a sculpture to the studio, assisting the farrier, pruning a vine and mulching a garden bed were all practical, physical and also an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday. We blog to share this life with people who may be interested or inspired to follow suit in whatever way they can.

 

Our eventual aim is to have people come and visit us at Opportunity Farm and take advantage of some of the skills and knowledge that we have in supporting children to learn, scouting and homesteading as well as simple practical activities they want to try or practice. We hope to have a list of these activities on a page at the top of this blog soon.

 

The difficulty is getting this blog out there and increasing the number of people who come across it. So far more there have been more than 1000 hits which is a little more than 10 per post. When I publish a post there are 5 hits within a very short time which means there are some who have linked our site to their email. We believe there are a lot more people out there who may enjoy our blog posts if they can find it.

What we haven't had is any comments. We would love to hear your responses and feel more connected to those that have visited this blog. If you link our site to Facebook or any of the other forms of social media it will also increase our profile. This will help inspire us to continue blogging about our life and growing a rewarding and ethical business as well as lots of yummy food. Many thanks to those who have been following us - here's to the next 100!
 

The first day of Winter 2015

The Roof is Off

After three and a half days of dismantling, all the roof from the shearing shed is down. All the decent pieces of tin have been removed to our paddock and the piles of useful timber remain on site to be denailed, trimmed and then driven home.

Removing the shearing plant remains a challenge. It was working well when the shed ceased to be used about thirty years ago. Michelle will be using an electric handpiece to shear our sheep so the plant would only be decorative and suitably authentic. I am going to try to bring down two plants and the flywheel in one piece. However today's efforts ended with the crowbar flying back into my face and chipping my tooth. Having been so careful with all the flapping tin and timber balanced over my head it was a bit of a smack in the face!

Next time I go out there I hope to have the chain saw back from the repair shop as it could prove very handy in dropping the final posts and maybe cutting up some post for firewood.  

 

 

First Day of Winter

This morning we woke to the quiet sound of fallen snow. Once there is settled snow it seems to deaden all other sounds. No vehicles on the road adds to the eerie silence. At 5.30am there was a light dusting but it hadn't settled on the paths or roads. An hour later it was blizzarding and settling everywhere. There was not more than an inch in total before it stopped but it was enough to stop the school buses and allow the kids to have some fun with snowballs and snowmen.

 

 

Opportunity Farm is at 900m above sea level so snow is common. Many years there will be a couple of dumps but not long ago snowfalls were much more frequent and heavy and the farm would have been cut off for a while each year. Whether this is global warming is uncertain but if you talk to the old-timers they will often say that maybe we will get a real winter this year. This one has certainly got off to a cold start.

Progress on the Shearing Shed Dismantling

This was the front of the shed. The building at the front has to be removed as the roof is attached to the shearing shed and the roof is poised to collapse. The door will be a useful score to build into our new shed.

The shearing shed back to its bare bones with just the roof poised and hanging overhead. The shearing plant is still attached in the centre. Apparently it was still operational when the farm changed to cattle thirty years ago. I will try to salvage some of this just for authenticity. The piles of timber will be denailed using the reciprocating saw before being loaded up for the half hour trip back to Opportunity Farm. The scraps will be burnt or dragged off to the tip.

This was the rear of the shed. The back wall has collapsed and much of the tin from this side of the roof is twisted and tangled. The roof is held up by four enormous log poles that are set deeply into the ground. When the shed has fallen one of these posts has burst through the roof.

Now all the tangled tin is removed and most of the rear of the shed roof is dismantled. The longer round poles in the foreground are to be rafters in our new shed while some of the fatter wall poles will do the same job in the rebuild. The challenge is to gently collapse the front part of the roof without dropping it on my head.

Cherry Guavas

 

Once winter comes there is often only the memories of fresh fruit and hopefully the rows of Vacola jars and tubs of dried fruit to keep those going. However we have found a tree that produces an abundance of succulent fruit that ripens in early winter. This is the Cherry Guava (Psidium cattleianum).

It is an evergreen bushy shrub that grows to 3 - 6 m in height and originates from Brazil. Its leaves are smooth, glossy, leathery and about 5 - 8 cm long. The fruits are the size of a small plum and a round shape about 2.5 - 4 cm in diameter. When they are ripe they go a deep wine-red or even purple colour and feel soft. They are very juicy and despite the seeds are delicious to eat whole. Our Cherry guavas obviously like a sandy loam soil with decent drainage and can tolerate frosts up to about minus 5. Apparently the fruits are about the richest source of Vitamin C there is and make excellent jams and jellies. We generally just snack on them by the tubful. Yum.

 

Winter Gardens

 

Once the summer crops are harvested and taken down then the beds need a rest. The soil we have is a sandy loam so the nutrients tend to leach out when it rains. During winter there are less plants taking up these nutrients so there is an opportunity to revitalise the soil. This year we spread lime over the soil and then a good layer of partly composted horse manure. A thick layer of Lucerne hay acts as a mulch and will slowly rot down over winter as well. There are some winter greens and vegetables which poke through this layer to produce food over the next few months. 

 

The garlic has been sown in raised beds outside the vegetable garden cage. While we have had trouble with a wombat some years ago the fence around the outside of the yard is now effective at keeping anything that would eat the garlic out. The bower birds have sometimes kicked the mulch about but only if there are some seeds within or underneath the mulch. We have planted early varieties so hopefully we can harvest them before it gets too dry.

Lighting up the heaps

 

Fourteen months ago a huge bushfire surrounded our bush property and the community was under threat or on high alert for nearly three months. At one point we were unable to access the place for three weeks as the roads in were burning or too dangerous.

One of the good things about this was the support from the department of primary industry who provided a bulldozer to do any work required around the house. We took full advantage and pushed back the bush from the north, south and west. All the area below the house - which is the area at most risk of a fire running uphill is now cleared. Behind the house and on the side of the prevailing wind there is also a cleared area.

This work inevitably left some large piles of debris sitting in heaps around the property, with one in particular directly below the house. As part of the recovery process the department sent a contractor up to set fire to these and keep piling the stumps up until all is burnt. He was very adept at using his machine to pick up stumps and pile them in the best way to maximise burning.

 

 

While he was on the property he was quite happy to help out to remove stumps that remained in the ground, to level off uneven ground and clear a track into a firewood stash. Weeds will grow where the fire has been but once they are dealt with, the whole area will grow grass and this can be mowed annually. It is wonderful to live right in the middle of the bush but it is also vital to have a good cleared space around the house to offer some protection from the ravages of a fire.

The One Bad Day

 

After seven months of twice daily feeds and water top ups I have become very used to Blanche and Maud being around. But scraps and fallen fruit are diminishing so we have been feeding them more pig pellets to finish them off. They weigh about 65kgs with Blanche being closer to 70kg. It is time for their one bad day. The night before I entice them up into the stock crate which I have lined with tin to make it more sheltered for them. They step up happily, willing to go anywhere for a white bucket of food. They spend the night in the shed on their bed of hay, protected from the howling gale and savage gusts of rain outside. 

  



 

The next morning we take the windy 100kms to the nearest abattoir. I take it slowly and when I stop to check on them, Maud and Blanche don't seem too phased by the new feeling of speed. It is hard to tell what their reaction is but they do not seem to show any signs of stress. I back into the abattoir shed entrance. The system here is that you drop off the pigs and write in a book your contacts, how many pigs, how they are marked and where you want the carcasses to go. Blanche and Maud are sporting an Opportunity Farm orange ear tag so they can be easily recognised amongst any other pigs. We are the first to arrive (they only deal with pigs one day a week) so my pigs get the place to themselves. It is not an easy departure but I have to leave sentimentality behind and concentrate on the fact that they have had a good life before this day and the thought of the wonderful pork that will fill the freezers in a few days.



 

Farewell, Maud and Blanche and thanks for all the pork. They will be remembered as almost every time we sit down to a tasty portion the children ask "Who is this we are eating?"

Pruning the Stone Fruit

As the autumn heads toward winter and the leaves have all fallen it is time to prune the stone fruit. Keeping the tree small enough to fit inside the cage yet big enough to produce good fruit has always been a challenge. This year I have learnt to 'summer prune' and remove the fast growing vertical shoots that head up through the cage roof. Without most of these vigorous shoots the winter prune is much easier. I try to keep the branches from overlapping, heading into the middle or growing up too far. The longer branches are cut back to an out facing bud to reduce the chances of them snapping under the weight of summer growth and to ensure the new growth heads out rather than up.

 

 

 This year's bumper crop of peaches led to one branch snapping - seen in the picture to the left of the centre.

Last winter I planted two dwarf stone fruit trees - a peach and a nectarine. Both had curly leaf when spring came so at leaf fall they were sprayed with a mixture of Bordeaux powder and water. Hopefully with more vigorous growth and another application at bud burst they will grow healthy. We are hoping that these dwarf trees will be a real success inside the cage and will need less hard pruning. If this is so we will slowly replace the least productive trees with dwarf varieties.

The Shearing Shed Roof

Finally there is a day when I can start the process of dismantling the sheds on our friendly farmer's land and drag some materials back to Opportunity Farm for our shearing shed and workshop. The night before I load up all sorts of tools that might be useful and pack myself a lunch. The day dawns and after the children have headed off to catch the school bus I set off. The only problem is the howling gale, frequent squalls and icy blasts. I start with the easiest job.   

 

The hay shed has collapsed leaving its roof easily accessible on the ground. The nails come up easily with two hammers in sync and a tyre lever to prevent the corrugations being squashed. Once a sheet is free I have to battle the wind which tries to hurl the sheet into the next paddock. The sheets float horizontally over to the trailer and only settle when below the sides as the trailer is parked across the wind. Once the tin is removed and loaded then I can dismantle the rafters - 4 by 2s and the battens - 3 by 1s. The central ridge pole is a score - two lengths of 6 by 2.
I crank up the generator and set to with the reciprocating saw to zip off all the nails. Each rafter takes about a minute to clean off and stack in the trailer. All that is left are the round poles used as top plates and the posts that were holding the roof up. I will return later with my chainsaw to deal with the most promising of these.

 The farmer has a tidier paddock and we have all the tin needed for the roof of our new building and enough rafters to be turned into joists for about a third of the floor space.Then I can head up to the main game - the collapsing shearing shed.

Dealing with Flossie

Poor Flossie had fallen on hard times, but hopefully she has turned a corner and things are looking up now that she has joined us at Opportunity Farm. She was once  a much loved pet. She is very friendly and comes up for food or a scratch. When you have food for her she runs around chasing her tail like a dog with excitement.

 

For the last year or so her coat's needs have been sadly neglected. It is long, bedraggled and in places dreadlocked. Besides a great deal of sand in its locks there are no seeds or burrs. So the paddocks she has been kept in have been pretty clean of weeds. At some time one of her back legs has been broken, and then set again crooked. She walks with a limp. Her hooves at the end of her twisted leg have grown sideways. When we first saw this hoof in particular, we thought that her hooves had not been trimmed in a long time. But besides this damaged foot they were in pretty good shape.

 

Today we are tidying her up. To shear her matted coat Michelle uses the hand shears. They only cut well when the blade is at the right angle. It is slow work. Flossie is pretty calm overall but gets much more agitated when the blades get near her bottom or her damaged leg.  When we cut around her face she closes her eyes and stands the most calm as if 'blissed out'. For the various higher maintenance areas we try various positions and angles: standing over, kneeling or sitting beside. Michelle tips her just like a sheep but she doesn't stay in the position. Standing over her is the easiest, starting from her backbone. Slowly the blades move down the sides leaving a trail of tangled ringlets still attached and trailing. It takes about two hours to complete her coiffure and tidy her toes. We made a coat for her so that the shock of losing all her insulation would not be too great, but she got it off in minutes. So into the warm goat barn she goes. She is on her own for the next little while until she gets used to her new look and we decide who would be the nicest goat friends for her to hang out with.