Friday, May 28, 2010

Puppy!!!!

We have a new addition to the family - Georgia the Huntaway x Heading bitch. She is 9 weeks old and we'll have had her for 2 weeks tomorrow. She is super cute (most of the time) although it has been 2 weeks of broken sleep, and mopping up the odd puddle. She is getting heaps better with toileting outside now though and is growing like a weed!

Pics :-)
5 weeks old - when we first saw her

7 weeks old - first day at home


9 weeks old

She has settled in really well - happy to run alongside the quad bike, barks at the cows (who just look at her stupidly), and is mostly good with the horses although hasn't had much to do with them yet. Her and Sonny seem to get on okay, but Sheryl won't have a bar of her! Not surprising really... Problem is that Georgia just wants to bounce around and play but Sheryl isn't that keen.

The rain has started up now - grass is growing a bit, and we have a bit of mud. The quad bike has most of the farm's mud on it I think.... We still have 31 cattle, will probably get rid of 10 in a couple of weeks, probably won't get any more until spring and then get some weaners.

Still picking beetroot, and got some more to plant. Planted some more rocket and also harvested our first cabbage yesterday, yummmmmm! Had it with some venison killed by a friend of Ben's. Very tasty. The venison, not Ben's friend.

Friday, May 14, 2010

The slacker blogger returns

So, it's been a while!

Brief updates: We ended up swapping the pregnant heifer for two weaner heifers with the dairy farmer up the road. We got two cute red and white heifers that are known as "the bambis" and tend to stick together in the herd. The pregnant heifer ended up losing her calf - apparently it was a fairly big heifer calf and sounds like it got a bit stuck. She is ok though and making her contribution to society as part of Paul's milking herd.

The garden has been going great guns, since Ben installed a couple of raised beds. We realised that the reason we weren't getting very far very fast with our vegs was because of the rubbish soil. So we now have two raised beds and have planted zucchinis, cabbages, broccoli, spring onions, carrots, beetroot, rocket, lettuce and capsicum. Come to think of it I haven't seen the capsicum plant lately... I wonder if it's been consumed by the cabbages?

I also harvested our first ever garlic in late January, and got one full plait of garlic out of it. Will be planting more this June, beware any vampires!!!

We had a few pumpkins this year too - completely unplanned. They emerged from the compost heap and we ended up with 8 good sized pumpkins. Have had one batch of pumpkin soup so far, yummmm. Also spent what seemed to be days in the kitchen bottling crab apples. Brigid (Ben's sister) gave us a pile of crab apples and I went straight to Google to figure out what to do with the things. So I made about 20 jars of crab apple jelly, and also have some crab apple schnaaps brewing. Not entirely sure how the latter will work out...



The last of the tomatoes ended up being made into green tomato relish too, very yummy. Feeling like the real farm wife now what with all this preserving!

We are getting some more piglets in a few weeks, just waiting until they are fully weaned. We're getting three this year (god help the horses) and will keep one for us, swap one for a hogget and probably sell the other one.

We're also just about to get a puppy!!! We pick her up tomorrow morning - still haven't chosen a name for her though.

And some other gratuitous animal pics: