More rosellas, a raffle, garlic planting and a new supervisor....

The farm was back in full swing on Saturday with a variety of activities as you can see from the accompanying pictures. Lisa picked rosellas as the Rosella tea is selling well.

Anita introduced us to a new supervisor Ted who despite his stern appearance was most unobtrusive and diligently guarded the list of tasks for the day. I photographed our Easter raffle - an orange apron with an artful representation of Opal the big black hen (along with a bottle of Black Chook wine and Easter eggs)...

..and we ALL planted our 2011 crop of garlic. We put in two varieties - one the same as our 2010 crop and the other a very large variety that is sure to be popular.

As always, leaving at the end of an eventful day with a contented heart.

Change of Season

Coming from New Zealand where all 4 seasons are gloriously distinct (except perhaps summer), I often complain that Queensland has no seasons. However, there are seasons and seasons - and all of these are reflected in the farm and its current 'progress'.  There are seasons of extreme weather, and (violins please), there are the seasons of our lives. And the recent season of extreme weather in Ipswich - namely flooding - obviously led to another season of my life. That unwelcome season of getting my act together!

A lot of my stuff got spaced out during the flood and interacted most unpleasantly with mud. That involved tedious daily chores like cleaning and scrubbing - uninspiring at the best of times. Then of course, after you've cleaned what you can clean and thrown out what you can't, comes the rather more fun part of replacing it all. But, faced with the possible occurrence of another natural disaster, do you get less and better quality stuff or less, lesser quality stuff that is more expendable?*

Such philosophical (or are they practical?) questions, along with the mud-scrubbing thing have so consumed my time that I hadn't been out to the Farm for ages. So, it was with great excitement and anticipation that I returned last Saturday to see what effect the extreme weather season had had on the Farm.

Well, I should have known. As in life, some things had flourished - weeds, passion fruit vine - while other things - like saleable produce were (excuse the pun) very thin on the ground.

No silverbeet, No lettuce. None of our usual standby's. Basil going to seed. A handful of tomatoes here and there. But there was lemon grass, and aloe vera, and the paw paw orchard looked as though it couldn't wait to yield up fruit - in another season.

One thing there was in abundance however, was Rosellas. See pictures. So the current project is to pick them and dry them out for tea to sell at our roadside stall. With the consequence that now in these post-flood, post-mud days, I have the luxury of helping the farm at home by drying the rosella flowers in the bright but sporadic late March sunshine. And being at home is not just about getting things back together everyday. Thanks to rosellas, I can commence my new season of moving on.

So it is at the Farm. I weeded a garden bed on Saturday - hey, I almost combed it free of weeds, and then Anita made fine, straight furrows in my work of art and dropped in seeds. They should be ready in a few weeks, and by then, we'll be well into another season...the little veges, the herbs, me - all of us probably.

Rosella flowers modelled by Tess Lovely who should be a 'hand model'

Actually, I'm coming to realise you don't have to be hit over the head with a season - like Autumn in New Zealand, or a flood in Queensland - to recognise it. It's a subtly changing transformation sometimes and right now, I'm completely fine with that.

*Answer to everything: Move to higher ground!!










..

Rosella Magic

It's been really wet!

You know that it's been raining in Queensland don't you?  Well it has, to the point of flooding.  My house was flooded so I haven't been to the farm as much.  Janet's home was flooded too and she's busy repainting and recouping, so she hasn't been there much either.

However, on the day that I did manage to get there, here's what happened.

Lisa's car got stuck in the creek and had to be pulled out with the four wheel drive.  We  all got wet (again) when it started to rain (again) and eventually we just had to leave, all of us together so that we were there to help each other if we got stuck.

Before that though, John decided to give the chooks a bit of freedom so he put up an orange fence and let them into the paw paw grove.  Their claws are pretty strong though and they quickly started to damage the shallow paw paw roots and then the rain started again so they were shooed back into their pen in case we had to exit quickly.

Bid for freedom!

The drake has been a bit clumsy with his feet amongst the new ducklings, so he was exiled from the flock for a while.  He took up residence in the shade house, only moving to give us squishy presents in awkward places!

The clumsy drake

After some pretty heavy weeding (that nut grass is something else) I decided to take a rest and contemplate the world  above, while the sky was still blue!

I have done some work!  You can see the box of weeds! My head is resting on a bag of mulch.

Below is a view of the sky through the passion fruit vine.  If you look carefully you can see the green passion fruits.  In the background, on the left, is the duck house covered with shade cloth.  The larger green structure is the shade house where the drake is currently resting!

Lying on the ground, looking up through the vines.

Happy new year to you all.  We look forward to your company throughout the year.

cheers for now
Norid

Between Now and Then.

Christmas has been and gone and New Year is happening tonight.  The garden though continues to be timeless (almost an inverted oxymoron, that statement) and the chickens and ducks, kangaroos, magpies, crows, the bush rat that lives in the roof of the shed - all are completely unaffected by the phenomenon of counting days or years.  A very wonderful lesson!

The water falling from the sky (you can't really call it rain, more like a deluge) has flooded many parts of Queensland and we were afraid the garden would be affected too since it is in a low lying part of the grounds, but it's still there - waterlogged and soggy with every bucket and bathtub and dish we left lying about filled with water.

Oddly though not much has grown.  We expected to be overrun with beans and tomatoes and weeds but no, things have not moved on much.  Probably too busy gasping for air amongst all that rain.

The good news is that there are at least 15 new ducklings - yellow and black mostly and moving about in a group so that they almost look like one being.  It's hard to count them as the mothers won't let us get too close - very protective and fierce.

There'll be six new chickens too when our routine gets back to normal.  You can see the chicks in the box below.  They've been hand raised.  Lisa took them home over Christmas and although she's loved having them, I believe her son is rather amazed at how much mess they can make in the kitchen (where they run free).  So I'm guessing she won't miss cleaning up after them.

We're pretty sure the really big one is a rooster

The previous entry is about the rose flower and how, as a climber, we hope it will screen the chook palace.  In between the roses are rosellas (plants not birds) - a relative of the hibiscus so they have lovely flowers.  They also grow quite tall and will screen the palace and provide lovely shade. The flowers eventually turn into fruit and will be dried and sold as tea.  Very refreshing and tasty.  The nut grass, which is probably our most pesky and persistent weed, was rivalling the rosellas so we mulched heavily with newspaper and then with straw.  Below is the picture of our progress.

Mulching the rosellas

Next time I write it will be next year, but then of course, it'll be this year.  A toast then to the timelessness of life; it's always the present - and that's the best place to live.

Cheers for now
Norid

Titian

The Garden at the Centre of the Universe has it's first rose!

Titian - climbing rose

 You may remember me writing about this previously.  We wanted something to hide the Chook Palace, which is such a paradise for hens and such an eyesore for humans.  What better than the favourite flower of a Favourite Person.  Thank you to Jane for donating the funds to make this possible.

Imagine this beauty in maturity, hiding The Palace

It rained and rained again this Saturday but we harvested and weeded in the rain.  Better than last week because this week it was hot and humid so the rain kept us cool.

Here is our golden garlic.  Beautifully presented in little gift bags made by Anita.  It's selling like hot cakes too.  Hopefully the proceeds will keep us in mulch for a while!

Our path to wealth!

On another note entirely, the ducks have ducklings.  You can just see a little yellow dab in the right hand corner.  I had to take this picture through the mesh at the front of the cage because the ducks are very protective and hiss and peck if you get near their babies.

Brian has been building his masterpiece for quite a while now and it's nearly finished.  It's a raised garden bed for those of us too decrepit to bend a lot.  First crop will be lettuce and sweet basil.

Brian, working on his masterpiece

 The tomatoes are absolutely wild.  We have planted ones and volunteers and they are growing faster than we can harvest and sell them.  Thank heavens Margaret, who is a great cook, has taken lots of green ones to make into green tomato chutney.

Lisa picking tomatoes

 We were determined to get into the crop rotation we have been planning for months, but which somehow has never come about.  Yesterday John marshalled us all into a work party (5 of us) and we dug over, weeded and prepared a whole garden bed which will be planted with beetroot and lettuce.
To fertilise it John mulched up the cow manure he had gotten from a local cow farmer.  It really stunk too.

John mulching cow poo

 This is amaranth.  On the packet it says "leaf amaranth" and in the catalogue it differentiates between leaf and grain.  Trouble is, we don't really know what to do with leaf amaranth.  It hasn't sold well, and to my uneducated palate it tastes terrible.  So we're leaving the flowers to see if they'll turn into grain.

Leaf Amaranth

And finally, another chick was born on Saturday morning.  We called this one "Smoko" since he was born around smoko time.  We all reckon it's a "he" because, unlike Saturday Morning, he was big and bouncy and loud and active from the minute he came out of the shell.

If you've not seen our calendar, please have a look at it.  You can find it by going to the top of the page and clicking on "Chicks with attitude calendar".  It's a fundraiser - but you can read all about it when you get there.


Cheers for now
Norid

Organic Vampire Repellant

Before I start on the vampire repellant have a look at this tiny chick.  It was born just a few minutes before its first portrait was taken!

It was the rainiest day we'd seen for a long time.  It was one of several rainy days in a row, but this was definitely the heaviest - it barely let up.  Anyway, we were drinking tea and chatting under shelter,  waiting for the rain to stop, when we heard this little "cheep, cheep" sound.  We finally realised it came from the incubator and sure enough, there was this little wet looking chick, shivering.  John picked it up and held it in his hands to warm it up.  It is wrapped in the sleeve of an old shirt and finished the first part of its day wrapped in sleeves, in an ice cream container sitting on top of the incubator.

The next part of its life included a ride in a ute, being carried up a steep hill in the rain and finally being delivered into the hands of its new Mum, who doesn't have feathers and doesn't cluck, but has a way with newborn chicks.

Meet "Saturday Morning" - so called because that's when it was born.

Well, if a film star can name her child Sunday Rose, we can call a chicken Saturday Morning.

OK, on to the vampire thing.  Garlic!  You knew that!  Both Anita and I (whose homes are redolent of garlic) can vouch for its efficacy.

So.  The garlic crop has been ready for harvest for a week or so.  Garlic doesn't like wet soil and it can turn mouldy quickly.  Garlic is our gold mine.  Put all those things together and the garlic had to be harvested and dried on the wettest Saturday this year!

So off went the troops to harvest in the rain!  But, once harvested, then what?  Dry it in the rain - oxymoron to say the least.  Solution?  Go to Anita's house and work on the verandah.  You can see the pictures below.  It doesn't look like a wet day does it?  But it was, it just didn't stop pouring.

trimming the roots and pulling the muddy leaves off so it can be dried better.

We did several trays of garlic and we were wet and muddy by the end of the day.

I said above "go to Anita's house".  Easy when you say it fast but in fact it was quite a business.  We had to load two cars, in the wet, with boxes of muddy garlic - trying not to get it on the upholstery.  Then we had to transport it from the driveway at Anita's house to the back yard, without letting her chickens out onto the road!  But it WAS fun and we finally settled down to a routine of washing trimming and stripping.

That's me, stripping, above, and that's Anita, washing, below.  Crazy to think of having to use the hose in all that rain!

Washing garlic in the rain!

But wait, there's more.  The redolent part.  The garlic wasn't going to dry out in the air, and mould is a very real threat.  And as I already said, garlic is our pot of gold - $30 a kilo in the shops!  So now Anita has a wire bed frame in her lounge room, covered with garlic, drying with the aid of an electric fan.  The things we do!

Thanks to Janet for the photos.

cheers for now
Norid

Things are Growing

Things are growing fast at the farm.  With the warm, and often wet, weather growing conditions are ideal.

As you can see from the pictures below, the chicks are growing really fast too.  They're only three weeks old in this photo, probably at the toddler stage in human terms.  They're certainly acting like toddlers, exploring everything and climbing (or at least flying) wherever they can.  A favourite perch is the top of their house.

They're beginning to look like their mums.

Proud dad is growing too.  His crow is fully developed now.

John is building a fox proof, crow proof home for the chicks

We're trying something new.  Up until now we've pretty much sowed straight into the ground but the birds and ants and grasshoppers take their toll. So we're having a go at starting things in the nursery and then transplanting them.  Some things don't like being transplanted however, so Janet is making pots out of newspaper which can then be put straight in the ground.  As the plant grows the pot will disintegrate.  Neat.

Making pots from newspaper

Artichoke seeds.

Sweet potatoes were recently planted in the field.  These are cuttings from last year's crop.  They've taken well.

Sweet potatoes

Watermelon seeds after 1 week.

We're also harvesting tomatoes.  Small and juicy.  Some cucumbers have come up and we have wonderful purple beans.

The fruit fly has gotten into the zucchinis though, so our namesake isn't doing too well.

We've also had two garden forks donated.  In fact, if you'd like to see a list of things that have been donated go to the top of this page and have a look at the "Projects etc." page.  The farm is growing sponsors too!

A moist buttery texture .....

On Sunday a very special recipe was followed at the farm.  The farm is officially certified organic and has the certificate to prove it and that means that all sorts of chemicals are off limits, even some that you would think are harmless, or even organic, like fish emulsion.

So, what does a resourceful farmer do? Make bio dynamic compost of course.  Here's the recipe:

manure
wet hay 
a variety of green material

Mix very well together and make into a pile.

The pile will heat up to around 50 degrees C.

Leave in this pile without any turning for 4-5 months until it has all converted into a very concentrated natural fertiliser with a moist, buttery texture.

Below you can see the photos.  It was a wet and mucky and satisfying process, occasionally a little smelly.  Definitely good for your inner child.  Imagine wearing gumboots in the bath and stomping the straw in the water, then sloshing about in mud and straw and cow manure.  Oh, and you get to play with the hose!  VERY good for your inner child.
 

You get to play with the hose.

 

Sloshing in gumboots

Mud, glorious mud.

This pile took 8 people 4 hours to build.

The pile was shaped rather like a steep pitched roof of a house.  When all the ingredients had been piled up like this, the whole was covered with "biscuits" of straw.

Now it will sit there until early next year.

Watch this space for when we break it open!