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:

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