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