Friday, May 30, 2008

Dennis the Menace and Rodney the Bully


Well, after much anticipation young Dennis is here... he arrived with a big purple D on his back to ensure that he didn't receive the Improvac vaccine which is a great alternative to surgical castration. We use it to ensure that our males don't have 'boar taint' - decreases testosterone production to the point that the testicles shrink to nearly nothing (actually I have no idea what it does to testosterone, you would have to ask James, however I do observe that our pigs have no testicles and I thought that sounded quite knowledgeable)... this fate wasn't something that was wanted for this fellow though...he needs to be firing on all cylinders so to speak. At the moment he is only a baby, and enjoys tummy rubs and pears. He is quite different looking to our other pigs, I think he has quite a cute face? I accept that I may just be spending too much time around pigs however so we will settle on the fact that he is a fine specimen. He is in the yards at the moment and will move into his own paddock with some young girls to keep him company this weekend.
Day 5 of goat taming is going slowly. Amanda didn't eat for the first 3 days, however I noticed by yesterday she was cleaning out her feed bucket. My next step is to get her to eat with me standing on the other side of the fence...if this is successful then I will stand in the yard and so on and so forth. Little Chloe is very cute and skips and hops around Mum not really understanding what all the fuss is about. Chicken watch is also going well...fingers crossed. The silky forgave me and is diligently sitting on her eggs. Buoyed up on the success of this I cleaned out the chickens yesterday and put 12 eggs under one of the Australorp hens...possibly too many but she is such a big fat hen that I thought she could manage.. will see how many rotten eggs we have at the end. Rodney rooster would benefit from a bit of testosterone reduction himself as yesterday I turned my back on him and felt him wallop into the back of my legs. Later on poor Emily turned to go back to the house and he chased her like a greyhound. If he had hurt her I am not sure whether he would still be strutting around outside the house as he is this afternoon. As it is Emi said to James yesterday "I'm afraid you need to get rid of that rooster Dad" - so she is fast becoming a farm kid...I'm not sure she really understands what getting rid of the rooster will entail. We will of course be sure to tell her that he went off to live on that distant 'farm' that our goat and the other ducks are merrily going about their business on.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

What the heck is here....



This is our new goat and her kid... with Maggie and Dora pregnant and therefore not milking my cheese making abilities are going to waste. The lady that sold me Maggie and Grace had just had a new 'batch' of kids so the farm kids and I went off to have a look this morning and look what we came home with. Conversation on the way home went like this:


Me: so kids, what do you think we should call the new goat
Felix: Rusty, or Dark Vader or Luke
Me: well, it is a girl goat so maybe we could have a girl name
Emily: lets call her What the Heck
Me: why would we call her that
Emily: so we can say What the Heck is her name! (very pleased with herself)
Me: (impressed that she has come up with that by herself but not sure if What the Heck is acceptable pre-school language and not sure if I will get in trouble from her teacher at some point this week) laugh .. NO

After much of this type of discussion on the way home we have settled on Chloe for the baby and Amanda for the mum. Being the bargain that she was (I got her for meat money) she hasn't actually been handled and attempted to climb the walls out of the pig trailer when we climbed in to lead her out. I am not sure whether this bodes well for milking... Maggie has slowly improved but have had time to work on her. Not sure if I have bitten off more than I can chew.

James has had a long weekend of fencing and has managed to catch a cold in the process - he is off tomorrow for a long 7 hour return trip to pick up our new boar... photos of Dennis to follow. I will stay and hold the fort here.

This week I also learned theoretically how to hatch out eggs. It goes a little something like this:

1. Collect up the eggs and leave them out of the fridge, pointy side down for up to 3 weeks until you have a decent clutch for the hen

our version: put them in the fridge and had a mad scramble to find suitable eggs - now have 'fruit salad' approach which means we have 4 duck eggs, 1 silkie and one unknown in the batch for the hen.

2. Make sure you have moveable nests in the main chicken pen so you can take the hen out at night and put her in a separate pen to hatch the eggs.

Our version: take the chicken out in the middle of the day because you keep forgetting to do it at any other time, make husband do it because the little hen keeps pecking you very scarily and then watch him tell you to stop being a whimp but use heavy leather gloves to pick up the hen and move her anyway. Watch her escape and run all over the hen house making so much racket that the rooster starts looking like he might have a go at you. Corner her and shove her into the new hen area and wonder whether she will ever sit on or even lay another egg as long as she lives.

3. Once the hen is sitting happily in new area, lift her gently and place the eggs underneath her.

Us: push the eggs underneath her whilst dodging her beak and hope that she will organise them herself later - telling yourself that they have sat on a bench for a week and being a little outside the nest for a night won't hurt them.

I wonder...will it work?

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Ups and Downs




Its been a bit of a rollercoaster week actually. We continue to try and develop our Ormiston baby snags (latest name...still thinking). After eating enough fat and cholesterol to clog my arteries many times over and just when the thought of another sausage was intolerable I think we pretty much got the recipe right. It has been tested on a few kids, other than our own, and the next step is to try them on a few more... so far all comments are good. Earlier on in the week we decided to start signing up for the farmers markets around us, only to be told that they all had pork producers (not free range) and didn't want any more pork. My attempts at explaining the difference was pretty much met with 'well pork is pork'. This, frankly, is more than a bit of a blow for us. If we can't go to the farmers markets we can't really sell our product. If we can't sell it at the markets then we can't really build up slowly and we may as well chuck in the towel. This defeatist attitude only grabbed hold for a bit and then we rallied. A few calls to Sydney markets soon cheered us up with much excitement from the managers at the thought that we might be coming down there sooner than we thought. After coming back with enough pork to make our visitors sick of coming over here from Dubbo we took a risk and sent another 4 off for the Mudgee markets. There was much nail biting and looking at the clouds building on Thursday and Friday - a little torn because we are desperately in need of rain but were aware that if it arrived on Saturday during the markets it would affect how many people would show up.
Mudgee didn't let us down and we sold out of everything once again by 10.30 - what was fantastic was seeing so many familiar people who had bought last month come back again this month with lots of positive comments. Both of us were completely wired after finishing at 12.00pm and came home and collapsed in front of the tv with the kids. We spent the afternoon in front of the fire watching it rain intermittently and hoping it might chuck it down and give everything a good drenching. Despite lots of dark clouds and heavy winds (and freezing temperatures) it remains fairly dry...

Another sporting moment.






I'm not entirely sure which order these pictures go in...I think in fact that they are back the front. Felix starts with the ball, then he runs the wrong way only to be put on the right track and attempt to score a goal or whatever they do in rugby. This way makes him look better, but in reality I just can't work this damn blog site and am happy if they upload at all (later note: have just accidentally erased all photos and have put them back on inexplicably in a different order...ignore above comments). This is obviously to show Felix starting rugby at a pint sized age, I spend most of my time having to be held back from racing in and protecting him from the rough and tumble. He generally comes off the pitch saying 'that was awsome'. Last week for example he learned how to spit with the other boys.. charming. I guess I didn't have brothers so I can't appreciate how normal this behaviour is....James is very proud.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Our day in pictures















Well, its more fun to look at than my writing - the kids are now true farm children and are meant to be helping with the weighing. This involves fighting over who is going on the tractor, getting stuck on any number of gates and then setting off the car alarm many times whilst electing to sit in the car and wishing the morning was over. Felix has discovered Star Wars and the animals are wary around him as he spends most of his days as Luke Skywalker and anyone unfortunate to be in the vicinity becomes 'Dark Vader' (his words) to be dispatched with this 'Life Saver'.
We waved goodbye to Vanessa, Fiona and James dog who we very jealously watched drive off into the sunset for a year of adventure and carefree fun... until we can trap them here again on their way through..

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Anyone for Banglets??







Its been a lovely couple of weeks on the farm with the arrival of two more sets of autumn piglets... despite James and I daily meaning to move a very pregnant Harriet down to the maternity wing she couldn't keep her legs crossed and had 11 piglets in the middle of our largest field on the windiest and coldest night Mudgee has seen in April for a long time. James and Fiona struggled to build a makeshift pen from straw bales by the light of the ute with a boar, 5 sows and an irate mother..they both lived to tell the tale as did all the piglets. We have since put a pen in there and they are often seen playing around the bigger pigs who are surprisingly very gentle and tolerant of them gambolling about. Meanwhile Debra had a litter of leapord piglets (see pic) the next day and we got her to her pen in time. Despite our worries as she wasn't the best mother last time (remember Dale, Dorothy and Delores the handraised piglets), she is doing brilliantly and has only trodden on (and killed) one so far. This means that we have suddenly got another 50 piglets in the space of one week. They are a lovely bunch and Bev's are particularly nice - I have of course got my favourite and have named her Beatrice.. unlike the other piglets, who are curious but don't like to be touched too much, Beatrice follows me around, loves being stroked and will roll over for a tummy rub - she is only 2 weeks old so it is all ridiculously cute. I am sure that she is of super intelligence and realises that the quickest way to ensure a long and happy life is to worm her way into my affections. She is of course quite right, and you can see her above making friends with Coco...she will make a nice breeding sow.
Woody's ears have decided to both stick up the right way for almost a whole week now and the search for his sheep continues.

We have had a few events, the first of which was an airshow called Wings Wine and Wheels. Expecting about 1,000 we thought we had over ordered on the food and had 8 loins of pork and about 400 sausages to sell. James got called away to a colicking horse quite early and left myself, Fiona and Vanessa getting the stall ready... although slow to start with things soon became utterly hectic with queues of people seemingly 100's long and not enough equipment or people to cook enough food. Poor Fiona inhaled smoke bent over the barbeque for most of the day - the hot pork rolls ran out within 15 minutes of being served, leaving sometimes fed up and irate customers. It seems that there were closer to 4,000 people and the feedback was once again positive - we are finding that the sausages are starting to get a reputation of their own.

Buoyed up on the success of WWW, we took four pigs off to the butcher for the Dubbo markets - again it is a large farmers market with around 4,000 people coming through and although we hadn't done any advertising we were hoping we wouln't be left with too much to take home. The market is indeed fantastic, with a huge range of produce as well as beef and saltbush lamb to choose from - I did all our meat and vegie shopping whilst we were there too. Being unable to have tastings due to tight Food and Safety regulations made it a little difficult for us, and although we sold about 2 and a half pigs worth of meat it was much slower going. In some ways it made it much more relaxing, we were able to spend a lot of time talking to the locals and they seemed a very loyal bunch of customers, however our freezer is now full to bursting and we have a lot of pork to get through that didn't sell. Luckily for us we are trying to invent our next sausage - a small chipolata that can be used for kids (or for canapes - there could be a sales line in there somewhere). Much deliberation is happening over the name, so far we have had 'baby bangers' and 'banglets' - suggestions very welcome please. Our first tastings were pretty awful, with a strange rice flour that seemed to turn it into a paste like sausage. Felix summed it up well when he exclaimed that they 'were yuk'. The second lot we were happier with - almost all pork with a light seasoning they were brilliant in the initial patties (we fry up a little from the mix before we commit to casings) but disappointingly dry when cooked. It is difficult because they are so small to get them right. We are now playing around with the fat content and the mincing size to see what works.

Meanwhile we have just put our name against a new boar, who is on one of the free range farms and growing nicely whilst waiting for us to come and get him. Dennis will join Maguire as our Large White boar - meaning that the daughters of Maguire that we are keeping as breeding stock will be able to start entering into the breeding program. Yesterday was spent planning the next lot of fencing to decide where the new nursery paddocks, boar paddocks and weaner paddocks could go. We still have huge amounts of land doing nothing.

It is a beautiful time to be on the farm at the moment, the weather is cool and the flies are almost non-existent (when working). I went for a walk last night with the dogs, the sky was blue as the sun was setting and the kangaroos were out in force - they watched us from a distance and then hopped away as Coco bounced around the long grass trying to see where they were. Last weekend was spent cleaning up a very neglected vegetable patch and finally accepting that sporadic rainfall means daily watering a necessity - accordingly we have installed an irrigation system in there and sod's law says that it will probably now chuck it down with rain - it was looking promisingly cloudy today but we are heading into at least our second month of no rain.

Felix is very excited because tomorrow he starts rugby after pre-school...he even has a cute little pair of football boots which he hasn't actually taken off in excitement. Although hazy on the actual game, he says his friends have told him that it is great fun because you can be a) really rough and b) huddle together to try and push the ball away - he gets a bit confused with c) you can't touch the ball with your hands. As he tried to tackle the kids who were fielding with him in cricket for the ball I think rugby might be a good choice for him...