Bredbo Valley View farm - providing quality education in Permaculture and sustainable living practices.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Half baked ideas


I was in the middle of feeding the pigs on Friday morning when the phone rang – it was the Cook; she had taken both the sets of keys with her to work. Well, that changed my plans for the day. I had to quickly get the kids off to the bus at the walk and then work out how I was going to get where I was supposed to be. So, I made a cup of tea, sat down and decided that I’d do nothing. Way too hard!

So I spent the day doing the small odd jobs around the farm. Fixing a hinge here and pulling some weeds there. By the end of the day I had accomplished much, but had little to show for it. Saturday I had to race into town to finish my Mothers Day shopping and pick up a couple of bales of straw. By the time I returned there were a dozen pigs out and grazing on the lower paddocks. I’d had a good run with the electric fence; it hasn’t gone down for at least a month. The problem was easy to find and once everything was fixed the fence was up and running again. I think the escapee pigs enjoyed their day in the paddock, but they all came running back at feed time when I called them – it was a still day so everybody in town could probably here me calling “piggy – piggy - piggy”

I’m pretty sure we have had a fox stealing piglets. I didn’t think that the sows would let a fox anywhere near the piglets and I thought that a fox wouldn’t be able to carry a piglet over the side of the pen. But, we lost four piglets over night and I can’t find any other explanation. It’s fox baiting season at the moment and I’m hoping that the foxes will fall away in numbers for the next few months. I don’t think I can enclose the pens for safety reasons I may have to try installing lights or try a fox proof fence around a nursery pen – but that may affect our free range claims.

The Cook had a wonderful mothers day, she received a lovely bunch of presents from the kids, including; DVD of “lost in Austin” and a preserving starter kit from the living green people – which went over really well, but not as good as the dust pan and broom from Ben, which she loved.

Speaking of Ben, he’s been banished from the computer for a couple of weeks and spent all week end entertaining himself by being a devil. The Cook spent Saturday cleaning the wood burning stove and after many weeks of no home cooked cakes and biscuits spent the whole of mothers day cooking. It had nothing to do with the cooker and kitchen being the warmest part of the house either. In a day she managed to cook biscuits, a chicken casserole, cooked chicken nuggets and calamari, baked a roast and veggies and a pot of Milo! What a woman!!!

The Bitch is on heat as well – I’m talking about the dog JAAAM. We had organised to get her to a chocolate colour Labrador near Yass for this year and hopefully we can still do this. The Cook desperately wants a chocolate puppy or two and Shadow is just dying to be a mum.

1 comment:

Jaaam said...

Good story telling is one paragraph leading into another and here I thought we were having the same day, mothers day turning into BITCH DAY.I am sure that a fox proof breeding pen would not infringe on your free range scam as again it's only the size of the pen that counts, e.g. ten pigs in a 3x3 is the same as ten pigs in a 100x100 pen and since working at the govt job I am sure that you could fine someone to put the spin on breeding pen quality of life and high mortality rate.

This one is by James