Ponies and Ponderings

Its been a while since I last wrote, and rather than bore you with complicated stories of happenings over the last week I thought you might like to look at some photos of our picnic today in one of the far paddocks. We are looking after a little pony called Joker for 6 weeks and despite coming with a bag of tricks that include: turning on taps (making me think Alzheimers had hit early after the yard was flooded 2 days running until I caught him at it); closing his eyes and running through the electric fence when he knows it is off (not beeping) and nipping me when my back is turned and I am trying to pick out his feet - he is absolutely lovely with the kids and they adore him. We have been going out on a track that James cut with the tractor every day with either one or both childen and Emily declared last week she would like a picnic under a tree that is on top of the hill. It was a good idea and we packed a bag and took dogs, children and horse up there today. We are so caught up in the day to day running of the place that we forget how beautiful it is.

Just to update you however the last weeks have included the following:
- Orange markets (very successful but a long way and we managed to knacker the automatic transmission in our car on the way back - 200 km in 2nd gear takes a long time. It is still at the garage and we await the bill nervously)
- My phone has been 'played with' by a paddock full of pigs. It no longer works for anyone trying to send me messages.... the phone shop found the whole thing very funny and are attempting to salvage it.. I am trying to be optomistic.
- Our silky chicken hatched out a single chick - Brad seems to be the father and I am not sure how the hell the egg got in there...a Bantam Isa Brown Rooster I bet.
- We are getting ready for Sydney markets this weekend - 8 pigs and a clear out of anything not growing well to make sausages (I regret that Dale and Delores 2 the handraised piglets had to go...I was very sad but got to keep Dorothy. She has repaid me by getting out of the adult paddock 4 times and running about trying her best to make James take back his promise to let me keep her).

Enjoy the photos!

Our picnic with Joker (the horse)...

Bank holiday - what bank holiday?

Well, whilst the rest of the state slept in the knowledge that they had 3 days off, we got up at 5am as is getting usual for us and set off for Dubbo Farmers Market for the second time. Luckily sleepless nights pre-market are pretty much par for the course as we both toss and turn, wondering if it will rain, if we will sell anything...what we should do with the house..where the next fences should go - I could go on but you get the picture. This restlessness makes it much easier to get up when the alarm goes off and this week the kids had a reprieve as Grandma and Grandpa were here to save them from being dragged off to spend the morning in the back of the car with a DVD. Once there our fondness for Dubbo (two words I wasn't sure I would ever utter in the same sentence) appears to be growing, we had a steady stream of customers, many returning after trying our meat the month before and ordering 3 times as much the second time around. It is a huge and lovely market with fresh flowers and lots of produce and and we sold 3 pigs by about 11.30 to our huge relief. Both of us were pretty exhausted by the time we arrived home although James started putting tree guards around the olives and I finally decided to take the goat by the horns and milk her no matter what. This was actually much easier than I thought it would be and although she continues to be a tricky thing to catch my shoulder has only threatened to dislocate when she has jumped about but held itself steady. She is still on antibiotics for a uterine infection so no goats cheese for a little while yet.

Chicken hatching failed miserably on Saturday when the hen got a bit confused and decided to abandon her eggs (1 week off hatching) and sit on a solitary egg laid in a neighbouring box by one of the other hens. Although the eggs were cold I made James pick her up (cunningly avoiding any pecking that I thought she might dish out) and move her, but her brain had reset itself and the old eggs had to be buried after I again found her out of the nest the next day. My dad and I spent the day on Sunday making another nesting cage for her - this appears to have 'declucked' her if that is possible, because now she just paces up and down and squawks at me when I go near her.

Monday morning James and I decided to tackle Harriet's feral family who have been living quite happily up in the big paddock with the adults. They are very healthy little things but we knew it was going to be a struggle because they wouldn't come anywhere near us. Plan A was to lure Harriet out and as her piglets followed put them in the stockyards and then separate Mum out to take her back. This failed in about 2 seconds, when Harriet came out and the piglets bolted on sight of us. Plan B was very complicated and once again put James' life at risk as he decided to try and put the piglets into a box and then carry them all to the weaning pen on the tractor. All was ready for this option when we looked at all the adults that would probably try to kill him every time he picked a piglet up and we decided on Plan C... take all the adults down to the stockyards and hope the piglets would follow. Adults happily trotted down to the stockyards and piglets were like a wild herd of sheep..but smarter. They came up and then one false move from me caused them to stampede to the back of the paddock and hide. Woody, despite my comments about him last entry, saved the day. He was sent in as a last resort and managed to herd the little piglets out after we had tried before him for a good 20 minutes and failed. I was so delighted with him that it took a minute to realise we couldn't 'turn him off'. A lot of tooing and froeing followed with piglets escaping and running back towards their paddock before we settled on Woody, on a lead controlled by James and me with pigboards, pushing them very carefully forward. The plan worked and we got them to the stockyards. Ear tagging followed and luckily James was wearing heavy wellies because they obviously take after their Mum and once held by the legs tried quite hard to take a chunk out of James' leg to show their displeasure. My arms are still sore from running about with pigboards.

Last but not least, James decided to take advantage of his fishing rod birthday present, and the last day of the fishing season here and go to the local fishing spot on the river. An hour later he screamed up the driveway in a cloud of dust and got out with his rod and a fish still attached to it speechless with excitement. Both the kids were very excited and are obviously becoming a bit more accustomed to the harsh realities of life with Emily exclaiming "is he dead Daddy, did you kill him" and then telling me "the fish is dead because Daddy bonked it on the head and now we are going to EAT HIM". A quick biology lesson followed with the kids enthralled by the fish gutting and me staying well away in case I threw up. It made a lovely starter for dinner. Pity he has to wait another 5 months to go again....

Australian Sheep Farmers?

James has been sowing his oats (not his wild ones as far as I know though) - the early week was spent spreading seed far and wide on the tractor. The kids and I followed spreading a hay mulch over the top to try and protect the seeds from the birds and keep the little moisture in the ground that we recived in about 15 mm of rain. The kids gave up after about 5 minutes and decided it was more fun to jump in the muddy puddles that were through the paddock. With the little rain that we have had it is starting to look like a pig farm up there with enough mud around to keep the pigs happy turning the soil over and generally making a mess.

We have also finally got some sheep.... and Woody has got something to practice on. Unfortunately for him we have so much grass on the paddock at the moment it is very difficult to spot the sheep in the paddock, let alone learn to herd them. They seem a fairly wise old bunch of ewes that have seen dogs come and go and are quite happy to take on a young pup and butt him as far as needs be to get their point through. I feel a bit sorry for Woody at the moment, the pigs are so easy for us to handle that he has little to do, today he got in the thick of things like a teenage boy that wanted to show everyone his manly abilities and eyed one of the young pigs off that had broken away from the herd. The pig just walked a few steps up and nudged Woody who was a bit wrongfooted and decided to just try and make friends with him instead... he then cut his losses and trotted up to the paddock and the pig followed him so all in all it was like watching a scene from Babe.

This week's ponderings...

Some of our latest dilemmas and ponderings for you:

- what is eating our olive trees.... probably rabbits but there is so much grass around I really can't believe it. James returned from mulching the trees with Felix to put priority 1 on putting piping around them before we lose them all. This has had the unforseen effect of taking away all the sympathy I held for the bunnies leading up to James' gun licence coming through. I am looking up recipes right now.

- Is Dora pregnant, falsely pregnant or am I feeding her too much... like me, I am hoping that even in early pregnancy her stomach muscles drop and falsely give the impression that she is about to give birth when actually she is only 2 months in.

- will the new goat ever be tamed? I stood with Maggie while she was eating today, she is very confident now and no problem to catch or touch... she is more jumpy around Dora's horns that around me. New goat will let me stay in her pen whilst she eats as of today.

Actually it feels like it has been a relaxing weekend. Yesterday we were selling hot pork rolls at one of the local wineries. The combination of a band, beautiful weather, lovely location and a nice stream of people rather than queues that we can't keep up with made it feel like a day off for us too. The kids soon tired of it all and the video below shows how our tent becomes a gypsy style childrens play area... after having faces painted and eating as much crackling as possible they soon tired of the novelty.

This morning we weaned Lucy, she positively ran out on her piglets up to the dry field and Maguire very quickly tried to jump on her. She told him to sod off in no uncertain terms and re-established herself as top pig before getting a little confused and trying to feed Harriets ferals. We also moved little Dennis into his field, where he spent the day playing with the little piglets that ran under the fence to say hello. Everyone had some fresh hay in their beds and paddocks cleaned and I finished with an hour in the vegie garden weeding and planting. Emi has given up trying to be girly and when asked what she would like for going a night without her dummy she chose a 'light saver', Rodney the rooster had better watch himself. James managed to vaccinate almost all our sows today. Armed with his new vaccinator gun he has perfected his technique - feed in a mass so they are all jammed together, jab in gun and run with pig. It did seem to work very well.