Dream For Three

Daisy our future house cow is slowly getting quieter in preparation for the day when we will get some lovely creamy milk off her.

Last week she had her first ever visit from the AI man, and she was not at all impressed, but she was well behaved. If she holds then we can expect her first calf on 10 July next year. Now that only gives me 9 months to get her completely settled to being handled by us.

Today I brought all the cows in. Cricket got to just walk through the yards and out the other side. SweetiePye and Daisy both got a good brush and had there udders washed.

 Daisy has never had her udder washed this morning, so I was unsure whether she would go into a panic or what would happen.

 Well she came in after Cricket, and I put her halter on and tied her to a nice sturdy pole with a hay net and a food bucket. When we first got her, she was too nervous around us to eat while I was around, but today, after all the work we have done, she was so interested in the feed bin that she didn’t even twitch while I brushed her.

 All was going well, Daisy had never been so relaxed while I was working on her before, so I was very pleased. I had a bucket of nice warm water, a sponge and a towel. So as quietly as I could I brought them over and went ahead and washed her udder.  Now I have been giving her udder a bit of a rub while I work on her, but washing was a new thing. Well, she stopped eating and just stood there stock still. She didn’t move a muscle until I was finished and then she went back to her feed bin.

 I went around to wash from the other side as well, and made the mistake of sloshing the water when she wasn’t expecting it, and she backed up as far as she could. I stopped and took a few minutes to settle her again, and then carried on a washed and dried her and gave her another quick brush.

 Now I have been wondering how we will cope with a kicky heifer that we are trying to milk for the first time, but after today, I feel that there is a chance that if I keep working with her she might just except being milked when the time comes next year.

 After Daisy it was Sweetie Pyes turn. She is getting close to calving, so I am wanting to establish a good routine for milking her in advance. I also need to form a plan for keeping the calf out the way while I milk her so all this work is important for making my life easier later.

What a morning. I went out to do the usual feeding and checking of all our animals. Chickens are all good, pigs are all good. Normally I would feed the horses and check the cows next, but today I checked one bunch of sheep in the paddock. Some of these are looking a bit thin and since they are due to lamb anyday now, I check them every morning. The fat sheep are in another paddock with less grass and when I checked them a couple of days ago they all looked good and a long way off lambing.The hoggets and the last of the late lambs are also in with the skinnies. All looked good, not little bundles – twins mum and triplets mum both look almost ready to pop. Turned around and ran my eye over the hoggets and one of them had a hugh bearing. Not good! She is not a friendly and there is no way I could get up to her in the paddock, so Sammie and I had to get them into the yards. Now I know twins mum is getting really close, because she was really stroppy and didn’t want to play. She gets like that with her lambs. We ended up being able to leave her behind and got the rest up all the time watching the bearing getting bigger and bigger.In closer examination I decided this was something that was too hard for me to deal with on my own so the vet was called in. Turned out to be the best thing as the prolaps had torn and needed stitching up. Poor girl looked really uncomfortable.Now I thought I had better go and run my eyes over those fat sheep again just to make sure all is well. Well what a surprise! Heres what I found when I went down there.

 A healthy, fluffy little ewe lamb. It took a while to convince the new mother to move up three paddocks away for the other sheep to where there is better grass for her to feed her baby on, but we got there in the end.So it has definately been a sheep morning and although she was not the one I thought would pop first, she did have a successful and problem free birth. Now we just have to wait for the others to come.

I have decided to make a photo diary of one growing season in the garden to watch the changes as they progress.

It is spring, and things are just starting to kick off for the season. Most of the garden, right now,  is either empty, waiting for the remains of the winter crops to come out or busy growing weeds.

I have been weeding a mulching as the weather permits for the last couple of weeks and have some seeds started and ready to go.

I may have over done the tomatoes but we will have plenty as we go along. And of course everything is being planned out in the Planting Planner to give us a continuous supply throughout the year.

So now we are just waiting for the right weather and temperatures to really get up and running.

Now come and see my garden at the beginning of spring.

This winter I planted four blueberries. Bevan said that I could not  have a raised bed there for them so I have planted each one in an old tire. I had problems with the birds digging them up, so a few broken bricks on top seem to have kept the plants in the ground and the birds gone. The plan is to be able to attach aome bird netting to the fence to drape over the plants at fruiting time. We will see if we get there.

When we moved here this garden bed had a hugh flax plant in it. After much effort we pulled it out and then grew very late corn in it. Last summer we grew our wonderful chipawa potatoes and over winter cauliflower and broccoli was in there. It was good as the garden is right outside the door and has a path next to it. The last stumps from the brassicas are still there waiting to be removed and composted. I had carefully removed as many potatoes as I could find when we harvested in the autumn, but as you can see some got missed and they have popped up again.  I have also planted my only lone raspberry plant, as this is on the colder shadier side of the house.

At the other end of this garden, I have planted this years garlic under the papaya tree.

Then we come to what was the main vegetable garden.

As you can see I have started to mulch a bit with the grass clippings, they make good worm food in the garden. I have three still small zuchinni plants in the corner, two green and one yellow, and the bigger plant is a hydranga.

On the other half of this garden, I have a row of carrot seeds that can’t be seen yet, and some more cauliflower. It is a garden waiting for some plants mostly now.

Next is the asaragus bed, it has been mulched this year with seaweed and grassclippings. I have been enjoying nice fresh asaragus for a couple of weeks now and there should still be plenty to come. At the back of this bed are several clumps of chives, and to the side some rhubarb. Above it is a very healthy crop of spinach and a few silverbeet plants.

Now this was a strawberry bed when we moved in here, which was great until there ended up just too many buttercups. It became too hard to weed and since the two plants seemed to have a similar look I decided to just replant all the stawberries and use the box for other things. Over the winter we have had plenty of carrots as well as some beetroot from this bed, with just a few carrots left at the end of the box. At the top are just a few lettuce seedlings.

The peas are coming along well in this box, they are meant to be dwarf peas but they are growing alot taller than was expected, but they should be starting to flower soon too. When we arrived there were potatos in this box, so we do get the odd potato popping up here too.

This is the box that Bevan built for Sammie. She has been slowly filling it with animal manure, compost and grass clippings. She has not yet decided what she wants to plant in it but is thinking about corn this year.

The developing herb garden survived the winter with the Lemon Balm, Sage, and Rosemary, still intact. The thyme and orageno did not survive here, so a new orageno has already been planted and I do have another thyme plant in another spot, so all is not lost.

The parsley went to seed in the autumn so I only have this little seedling right now, which is also mulched with grass clippings. I do plan to plant more though.

Now this is one of the two new garden boxes we are building around the other side of the house. At one end I planted some cabbages and the other some celery over the winter. Now I am planting potatoes so that as they grow I can hill them up and slowly fill the box with compost. It is a big box so there should be lots of potatos by the end of it.

This is the other new box and as you can see it is still to be finished. My plan is to put my tomatoe crop in this box since it is on the hottest side of the house. We also have plans for more boxes around this area, but who knows when that will get done, in the meantime I am planning to grow our pumpkins where the boxes will be so that I can start to work the soil.

So that is our garden at present, I think it is going to be good to see how the plants grow and what changes we have as we move more into the growing season.

We are about to embark on the newest phase of our food production chain.

That is the production of dairy products. This is  not a road we were originally planning, but as time went on, it just seemed to be the next step.

With soaring food prices this year we could not help but wonder how well we would of managed had we not been taking this journey on our little patch of dirt.

We had some good fortune that someone offered us the use of a nice quiet cow to learn on and also be sure that we wanted to go down this road.  That cow is Sweetie Pye

She has only been withus for a week, and already she is tugging at the heart strings. She is so quiet and sweet, she even talks to me whenever I go out to the paddock.

Unfortunately she has developed a limp that the vet is having trouble pinpointing, but thinks that she may have taken a fall in the truck on the way down and injured herself somewhere. Being so close to calving is hindering her treatment a little.

She is starting to bag up, so we wil be on calf watch in a couple of weeks and hopefully in a months time we will be in full milk production and on our way to making our own butter, ice cream and eventually cheese.

Our plan is to share milk with the calf, that way if for some reason we get too busy to milk one day then the calf can help us out there.

From the same lady we also got Sweetie Pyes calf from last year, Cricket, she is a white faced beefie, and will be future food for us.

And then there was Daisy.

Daisy also came from the same place and is 5/8 Jersey and 3/8 peidmontese. She will be our future house cow and we are working on quieting her down in preparation for this.

When she came as a 10 month old we could not get near her at all, and she could not bear to be touched. I spent some time in the autumn getting her use to having people around and having a halter put on from time to time. We reached that point where she would let me walk up to her in the yards and pat her. She tolerates being tied up and brushed, but she would not relax or eat while I was around. She still runs away if approached in the paddock.

Then she went out for the winter.

Today I decided it was time to see where she was at. Over the winter she had her horns removed so was very unhappy about going back in the yards. Sweetie Pye had to have her foot checked again so I brought them in together, delt with the foot and turned my attention on to Daisy.

Having watched Sweetie Pye being let out of the smaller pen on the other side of the race, she was only too keen to rush in there. At 15 months she seems so small after the very pregnant Sweetie Pye, and I could still climb in with her and brush and pat her.

I put the halter on with hardly a batting of an eyelid so it appeared she remembered her lessons from six months ago. I attached a rope to the halter, opened the gate and after only a little effort managed to get her tied to the loading ramp post. She didn’t pull much and very quickly remembered what she had learnt.

As we stood there with her tied and me brushing and chatting away to her she decided to explore the bucket of food I had left for her. Now I can’t say she ate it, although I am sure she had one mouthful, but she did lick the inside of the bucket while I was brushing her.

In fact things were going so well that I untied the long rope and just clipped a lead rope onto her.  The idea was for her not to pull against me, but to step towards me whenever there is pressure on the halter – and she did.

I came away feeling that we had taken the first step to having her being lead around easily. I am not quite sure if I will ever be able to pat her in the paddock, but time will tell.

In three weeks time, we will have been here for two years.

In two weeks it will be spring.

Now is the time I have been looking at how we have been fairing especially over the winter. We have not done too badly for beginners at this really.

The animals have come through an especially wet winter without any losses. The horses have their daily feed of hard feed and hay, but have made a hugh mess of the paddocks, and there are puddles and mud everywhere.

The cows have been happily munching in the big boggy paddock down the back. Daisy was dehorned and seems to have got over that quite well. Curly Sue will be ready for the homekill guy as soon as the paddocks dry out enough to for him to get his truck in. We are still hoping to get a cow we can milk this year, but if not it will still be a year away before we have our own milk.

The pigs are up to there bellies in mud, and I will be going back to what I first thought. Never have pigs in winter. They have not been much fun and we have had problems with their rings. We went to the trouble to get the vet to ring them both, and they have both managed to pull them out. The paddock has that plowed look and we have to wade through ankle deep mud just to feed them

We chose to lamb late this year, and I am not unhappy with that choice. The lambs should be arriving at about the time the grass flushes. It has been so wet this year that the grass might even be slower in coming.

The chickens have been laying again and we are now back to the point where we have an abundence of eggs.

Most of the pruning has been done in the orchard although there is still some waiting, but the weather has been detrimental to pruning so it has to be just slotted around the rain.

We have not done too badly with our winter garden this year, although things are starting to look sad now. We still have celery growing well and are down to our last row of carrots, some of which are still quite small. The broccoli has pretty much finished and we only have one cauliflower left coming on. The cabbages have been extremely slow and we have only had one so far. They are starting to head up now, but I will have to get them in earlier next year. The lettuces have finally gone to seed and the spinach and silverbeet has slowed right down too.

Things to change. Well we need to grow more potatoes next year without a doubt. We have also had word that the seed potatoes of the types we like will no longer be available in the future so we need to grow some especially for seed too. I would have liked a few more pumpkins as well and need to get peas into the freezer. The beans held out well but have come to an end now. The tomatoes that I bottled ran out way to early and we only have one jar of apple left. In saying that, we did not try to stretch them out, but just had them when we felt like it. We still have plum sauce and jam as well as the mint jelly. So although it is slim pickings at the moment, we have eaten well over the winter anyway.

So what is to come. Well I have already started some of our potatoes and will continue to plant them for a while yet. My tomato in my fish tank is growing well and although it will probably go out later when it is warm enough, it gives me hope that we maybe able to grow a few things in there next winter. I have already planted some more lettuce and carrots and since my poor little choko drowned i the rain, I am hoping to get some more of them started. The first sowing of peas is up, with a second smaller one just planted this week. I will make a big sowing of peas in the next couple of weeks so that we can have them harvested before the hot weather wilts them.

I put an order into King seeds on Sunday, and by Wednesday the seeds where here. Pretty good service really. I am looking forward to getting the plants in having some changes to the vegetables again. It is fun to plan what we will eat in the coming year, but hard to wait for the ground to dry out an warm up. Still it will come soon enough and in the meantime, we have had a good winter of schoolwork and sewing while it was so wet and cold outside.

Yesterday we started our new school term with a field trip. With Bevan on holiday, we are having a much lighter week than usual, and also doing a few different things.

So in keeping with our animal habitats theme for the year, we went to the zoo. Now normally when we go to the zoo it is quite crowded and the animals are just sitting around sleeping or hiding, but this trip was different.

It was almost as if after two weeks of having constant large crowds of people through the school holidays, all the animals breathed a big sigh of relief and came up for air (so to speak). There were a few families with preschool children there, but mostly it was nice and quiet, so we got to enjoy the full impact of the sites with interference.

As we worked our way around the zoo, we saw the younger zebras playing. We watched a noted how they really were just like horses in striped pyjamas as the song says. It was nice to see them frolicing around a bit rather than just standing looking bored.

The lions were wandering around and then settled in a nice sunny spot in full view, and the flamegos just across the way were being very noisy. As we watched them all squacking away, they suddenly, as if with one thought took off running to the other side of their enclosure and then slowly wandered back, only to repeat the exercise. It was very interesting to watch.

The elephants were munching happily on there hay right by the fence, and then they went to the back of there enclosure for a wander around.

When we got to the hippos, they were both actually out of the water. As we watched they too wandered around for a bit and then instead of going back into the water or into their mud wallow, they chose to lie in the sun. The other hippo in the other pen was also out of the water, but the water was being drained out and then they waterblasted the area, so cleaning day in the hippo pen.

The servil got up and explored its pen, and the meerkats were all sitting in aline against the wall. They looked so funny you would almost think that they had been placed there. It reminded me of an Anne Gedes type of picture.

Now the funniest sight of the day was when we looked on at the orangatangs. One of the larger ones was wearing two towels. He was strolling around slowly, being careful that they didn’t fall off. It was hard to tell if he was pretending to be a person or if he was trying to hide under them. Either way, it was a great source of amusement for us.

The prize for he best posing animal had to go to the lemurs. When we reached their enclosure they were sitting there minding their own buisness. As we were planning a school exercise on this trip we were taking alot of photos of the animals. As soon as the camera came out, a couple of the lemurs sat up and put their front paws out as if they were posing for the camera. It was very funny to watch and they kept there arms up while we were there.

The tigers had babies, but the mother still had them in the den, so the zoo had set up some movie cameras and screens. In the corner of the den was a smaller enclosure into which we could not see, and that was where the cubs were. While we were watching father tiger came bounding out of the doorway he had been sitting in, and proceeded to play with some of his toys, and pull funny faces while he did.

Back in the den mother tiger decided that this was the right time to bring the babies out. Not outside but into the camered part of the den. So we got to see at least one of the cubs wandering around. A great treat indeed.

Back around in the rainforest area, the tamerin monkeys were quite prepared to put on a show as well, with one little baby practicing forward rolls over and over down a hill. And the macaw decided to talk to us as we went past.

All in all it was a very exciting trip and we were very glad that not only did the weather hold, but the animals put on a show for us as well.

It all started a few years ago when friends of ours came over from England for a holiday. Although Jason and Nicole had been married here a few years earlier, their visit at that time was consumed by wedding plans and the ceremony. This was Nicole’s first chance to get to see a bit more of New Zealand.

After just a few days Nicole had concluded that there was no such animal as the possum. It appears that the squished things on the road were knitted bags, put there by the government to keep up the myth of the existence of possums. In all her days here she had not managed to see a single live possum! On the other hand, she had seen many live pukekos and had very much fallen in love with them.

Jason and Nicole’s first child was a long time coming and it was not the easiest of times for them. Fortunately all worked out well in the end and I was pleased to hear from Jason earlier this year that they were expecting another new addition to the family. I remember Nicole’s love of pukekos and I had seen a pukeko quilt hanging in The Applebasket Quilt shop in Kaiwaka.

I discussed it briefly with Sharon and we decided to buy a kitset version, which Sharon would make up and we could then send to them, hopefully before the new baby arrived. I must admit that Sharon worked long and hard on the quilt, managing to complete it in just a few months.

Finally, with just two weeks to go before the new baby is due, I managed to post the completed quilt off to England. Given that they are not that far off from heading into Winter time, Sharon put in a double layer of wool filler, ensuring that the baby will be snug and warm in the cold English climate.

It should arrive this week and I’m hoping that it will serve them well.

Sometimes things happen that leaves you wondering. We read funny stories in books and wonder how someone would think of it, or if anyone would be dumb enough to try it. And yet we have one of those stories ourselves.

A recent conversation we had reminded me of this event that happened a couple of months after moving here. We were very new lifestylers and were still trying to get our heads around a totally new way of living. Bevan was still trying to work out what it was that was on the otherside of the walls that he had spent his whole life within. Of course he now knows(I hope) that it is just outside.

Anyway, that weekend I had asked Bevan if he could have a look one of the water tanks because I thought we had a little leak in it, and we needed to decide what to do about it. So off he went to find the water tanks.

He had been gone for quite a while and I had forgotten all about it when he came in and asked if we had any chewing gum.

“In the pantry,” I said “what do you want it for?”

“I’m going to fix the water tank” was the reply

Now you can imagine all the thoughts that were going through my head at that comment, and with a certain amount of disbelief I decided that he must have been joking and that even he wasn’t that stupid.

A short time later I heard a shout for help and rushed to see what the problem was.

Well there was Bevan out at the water tank, frantically trying to plug the hole and stop the water from gushing out.

It seems that he was infact that stupid, and when he had tried to put the chewing gum in the tiny pinprick of a hole, he had managed to poke it right through, and so made the hole bigger.

“Help me” he says

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, trying not to laugh at him.

“Get those two empty containers there and put them under the leak to catch the water.”

Now I must have been short a few brain cells that day, because I did as he asked, and then had to ask him what he was planning to do with all those litres of water in the tank when the containers where full. At that point I think he realised the foolishness of trying to save the water, and I came in to find out the prices of new tanks.

Now we have all heard the story of the boy who put his finger in the dam, and we have all heard of chewing gum holding in all sorts of conditions. But I never once thought that any of those stories were real. But I guess some people will believe anything really.

I am trying to decide if I am brillant or a bit slow. I suspect a bit of both really. In Glenfield we kept seahorses. We have a wonderful big half round tank, but our last winter there, we had some power spikes that fried the chiller and all the seahorses froze.

You are probably wondering what an empty fish tank has to do with our current lifestyle, and I have wondered that many a time over the last couple of years.

It has been such a warm winter this year that I decided to grow a tomato indoors, just to see if it would work. Tomatos being sub tropical don’t really like to grow in the cold.

Well I planted the seed and got it to germinate in the hot water cupboard. Then it lived on one of those defroster pads next to the fire. Then of course, just as it was starting to grow, we had a cold snap so all growth stopped. The poor little plant has spent the last two weeks on top of the heating plate on the coffee machine. You know the little cup warmer thingy, so we have been drinking our coffee out of cold cups because the plant was more important. But of course the coffee machine gets turned off at night or else it overheats.

Yesterday I planted my lettuce. I have one of those mini seed raising glasshouse things on the deck. It has three shelves and zips up in the front, but the sun is not warm yet so I needed to put the seeds elsewhere to germinate.

I came up with the idea of turning the fishtank lights on to see how warm it would get and putting the seeds in there. It has both day and night lights, and although the nightlight isn’t as warm, it will hopefully be enough and give the plants some downtime.

So now I have both the lettuce and the tomato plant in there. It is like a mini hot house, and if it works out well then maybe I will invest in some mini tomato seeds for next year and we can have homegrown tomatos all year around.

We we have just finished up our Desert Habitat study.

We followed the schedule from WinterPromise, and followed it up with a lapbook from Hands of a Child. This combination seems to be working for us really well. The Animal Habitats study is pretty easy, but has some very fun books, and it is great to have our learning days full of laughter and awe. In some of the books we either have our breaths taken away because of some interesting fact or picture, or we have to stop reading while we control our laughter. WinterPromise have done a fantasitic job of putting together an interesting, fun and informative program.

Our Desert Lapbook and some of the books we used in the desert study.

Because this program is so easy, we have chosen to raise the bar bit and have added a lapbook in with each habitat we study. So far we have done Grassland Savanahs, Rainforests and now Deserts. In between we have done some geography and culture relating to the habitats we have been learning about. So we have also done Africa, and North and South America.

We have a fabulous 5′x3′ wall map that we are labling as we study each continent. Sammie has learnt so much about geography, which we then reinforce with various games as well. The map also came from WinterPromise, along with their Children around the World program, that we are alternating our other stuff with.

In fact, we have liked our WinterPromise study so much, that we have just recieved a language arts course from them. Next year we will, also, probably continue with the same company.

It is great when it all works out well.