Quick Update

I have very slow internet but thought I'd do a quick update. I've been busy lately in the garden and in the kitchen. Sometimes I wonder what I do all day, because there's always more to do. Who used the "retirement" word? We certainly haven't retired. They always say a little place has as much work to do as a bigger place, it just doesn't make you any money!! ha ha.

Anyway we're happy and healthy and not getting bored.

Kim helped me plant all my root crops the other day - carting soil and laying hay mostly, but it was good to have his help. It's almost time to plant out my seedlings for my fruiting crops. I plant using the phases of the moon and using this calender.  I will take some pics when everything is up growing!

I've been preserving eggplants and had a crack at a mixed veggie pickle using some home grown snake beans and some traded chokos. These will be interesting to try in another couple of days.

I swapped some chickens for some chokos and chillies and a pot of chives, so I think I did quite well.

These chickens have quite a story attached to them. One of my very good friends has a brother in law that is also an highschool Ag teacher. He took delivery of about 40 chickens two weeks early - at the end of term instead of the beginning. He needed to get rid of them and because my very dear friend was visiting at the time she thought I might like some......I got the lot. Next time she asks if I want some of anything, I think I'll say no. Alls well that ends well. Edmund quickly finished off a chook tractor he was making and we have managed to find homes for some. There were about 15 meat chickens, which I was quite happy to have but the 25 layer chickens are probably more than I need. I'll keep 6 for my son and family and 6 for us to replace some of our old girls and after this weekend, will have given the others away.

For those that follow this blog and also follow my facebook (Lucy's Farm Kitchen) you will notice that I haven't been on facebook since Easter. Some scumbag hacked my personal page and Facebook haven't completed their review, so I've been shut down. Not sure I'll get back on either. I don't really care for myself, but I did enjoy posting on my kitchen page (it's linked to my personal page, so was collateral damage). Anyway if you don't already follow me on instagram, you could give that a burl if you like. You'll find the link here: @healthyfarminghealthyfood

This weekend, we have a BD500 horn burial planned, so I'll post about that once we've actually got it done. 

Trying to manage grazing on Serenity

Serenity, this beautiful piece of dirt that we call home was already set up for rotational grazing when we bought it. We kind of fell in love with the place and had bought it and moved here before we really took stock of what development there actually was. We knew it had been looked after, there were few weeds, and at least 20 paddocks on 50 hectares. What we didn't really think about was that yes it was weed free, but it was also pretty much tree free. That's not quite correct, as there are quite a lot of trees, but not as many as we'd like and in the places that we'd like. Especially when we start splitting up the milker paddocks with electric fencing. It's been hard to make sure there is enough shade for the poor girls! 

The other problem we have is the water system - or lack there of. There are a couple of dams - fenced into separate paddocks and just about every paddock feeds into one of these dams. So the main mob of cows have to walk down the hill to the dam for water. There's a few problems with this, that have really come to light over the summer. 

1. Ticks - we can't get enough rest around the dams to break the tick cycle, so we've had to resort to chemical treatment to get rid of them. Not what we want to do at all, but if we don't it then becomes an animal welfare issue.

2. Wet/muddy ground - we have hills, that have water flowing out of them. I'm not sure if it's just that we've had an exceptionally wet summer or whether it's always like this, but there are springs just flowing out of the ground. Lovely, but messy when it's where the cattle need to constantly walk to get to water.

3. Cows are lazy and won't walk to far, so when they come down the hill to the dam for a drink around mid morning, they hang around until mid afternoon before going back out. In this time, they just graze around the dam. The paddocks around the dams are too large and so this also encourages them to overgraze.

We have now set up temporary electric fencing around the dams and will only allow the cattle into sections, which means that when we move them to the next paddock, they then have a fresh area to go down to drink. One thing that has made this so much easier is kiwi tech fencing. It's an amazing portable electric fencing system. We use it to section off the dam, for the milking cows to break up the paddocks smaller, and for the sheep and goats - we've somehow managed to train them to stay behind 2 electric wires.

We are currently working on a farm plan, which I'll discuss when it's finalised, but we will put in a solar pump on the dam and then pipe the water to a high point and then reticulate back to each paddock with it's own trough. We will also do some Natural Sequence Farming work to hopefully stop some of the springs from just running down into the creek. The contours will spread the water out along the paddock. This will be a little tricky due to the steepness of the hills, but we'll do what we can where we can. 

The idea will be to make the contours wide enough that we can drive a buggy along, which will give us a lot more access over the property. Trees will be planted along the contour also. As we'll have to fence these off, this will effectively break up the paddocks so that we will get a far better rotation. 

I like the idea of planting a mix of trees - timber trees, fruit and nut trees and fodder trees for the animals. Hopefully we'll get started on some of this over the winter, although we need to start propagating some trees asap. I'll share our activities on here and through my instagram @healthyfarminghealthyfood. 

Moving paddocks - The cows are still getting used to us.

Kim attaching the kiwi tech wire to the existing electric fence.

Splitting the dam into sections