Hello March

When I'm out and about, I occasionally meet people who follow this blog. I'm always thrilled to meet readers, am always humbled too, and in there somewhere I still feel some awe of this modern tech world that we live in. After all, here I am sitting at my desk, tapping out words to put underneath a few photos of our simple life, and the consequences of that are, to me, overwhelming in so many ways.
Unfailingly, over the last few months, I'm asked about Lavender. My dear little cow who suffered an awful trauma late last year. Lavender and Freddie and I realise now that I haven't done a very good job of keeping you up to date with her recovery.

I posted some photos a few weeks ago of how we were managing to milk her with three cups of the milking machine whilst catching the milk from the injured teat in a container placed on the floor.
In late January the teat looked like it was healed well enough to try putting the fourth cup on, and it worked! Initially she flinched because it must have felt strange, but now she accepts having the cup placed onto the teat with no fuss at all.

There is just enough length on the injured teat to hold the suction cup on securely. (Front teat on the other side furthest from the camera)

I'm pleased to report that her beautiful friendly nature has returned. Once again, she's usually waiting at the gate, ready to knock me over when I let her into the dairy lane-way. No more do I need to walk up to the paddock to bring her down, instead we can call out "C'mawn, C'mawn" in the loudest voice that carries across the valley to reach her ears. Her head goes up, ears go forward, and she sets off towards the lane that leads to the dairy.
She's cunning though and won't let down very much milk for me to take because she's waiting for me to let Freddie back in with her.
(On the days that I want to milk, Freddie is sectioned off into a separate paddock in the morning, so I can get some milk in the evening).
But we have a cunning way to prevent this happening. As Lavender is standing in the small yard before coming into the dairy, we open the gate to Freddie's yard and allow him to suckle for approximately half a minute and we can observe the milk starting to flow. Then we ask Lavender to 'Hup, hup" into the dairy, while blocking Freddie from following her.
We get twice as much milk by doing this, and now they know the drill, it's quite simple to manouvre.
Now and then I try bringing her straight into the dairy, thinking that surely she will let me have all her milk, but it doesn't work.

We took the two Angus steers, Ambrose and Gordon, to market last Thursday. Cattle prices are still holding, so it's definitely worth the effort of raising calves.
The temp was in the low thirties, but the stock were comfortable, now that the sale yards have water troughs in each yard. About time!

After weeks of temperatures in the high twenties and thirties, we had a refreshingly cool day yesterday with a few downpours. Gardening was abandoned, and the wood stove was begging to be lit up.

A look at the forecast weather for the next two days showed that it would be cool enough to have the stove lit for two days. So a rummage in the freezers resulted in a couple of bags of cooked bones that I'd been saving from our meals over the past few weeks. The bones are all from our own organic home raised chicken, beef and lamb, so are perfect for bone broth which needs to simmer for twenty four hours to release all of that goodness held in the bones.

This big wire spoon is perfect for taking out the bones at the end of cooking. I bought it in Kathmandu, Nepal, and I don't know what it's called but I'm pretty sure this kind of utensil could be purchased here in Australia.
I then tip the broth through a finer sieve before pouring into containers for the freezer.

I think my favourite storage container for broth is zip lock baggies. Sit them into a container in the fridge to cool before placing into the freezer.  Remove the container once the broth is frozen into a block. This makes it so easy to grab a small amount of broth when cooking. No need to think ahead and thaw it out the day before. Who's that organised?? Need to make gravy... grab a frozen bag of broth, into the pot on the stove, and within a few minutes it's thawed.

Another two batches of chutney were churned out; this one for the lovers of spicy hot..!

A small batch of Raspberry and Apple Jam.

A few sourdough loaves. It would be wasteful not to utilize the oven as well as the stove top. ;)

Tasting...for purposes of quality control. Someone has to do it!

Autumn has officially arrived, but here in South Australia we're getting the summer weather that we missed out on during Summer, so the stove has been allowed to go out, as we return to high temps for the next couple of weeks.

Gosh it was a nice two days though.! Come on Autumn.

Cheers and thanks for dropping in. :)

Bye Bye February

I've been entering a few things in the Angaston Show over the past few years; maybe for the reason of following in our family tradition? I'm not sure.  My father was a keen supporter of our annual local show, by way of volunteering for the ring events Horses in Action, and he would also enter his flowers in the floral section, mostly the huge Dahlias he specialised in growing.
Then my older brother Mick, became a keen supporter in his adult years, and was a tireless volunteer in many areas of the annual show.
My sisters and I competed in the Horses in Action events with our horses from a young age too.
So when prompted five or so years ago by a young friend who was trying to drum up entries for the traditional and historic show hall display,  I promised I would support her by entering whatever I could manage, and in recent years it has snowballed from there.

 I always say that I'm not entering to win, but I can't deny the thrill of seeing my produce and entries displaying prize tickets when the judging is finished and we, the public, are allowed entry to the Show Hall.
The Barossa Valley Cheese Company are sponsors of the dairy section.  I was lucky to win the most successful overall points in that section with yoghurt, hard cheese, soft cheese, milk and butter.
For the second year in a row I've won their donated voucher to spend in their award winning cheese factory shop, and this year there were squeals of delight when I opened the envelope to see the generous amount of $50.!

Back to daily life again, fruit season, and this is my kitchen right now.  Wooden boxes (half cases) of fruit, picked from neglected orchards around the area, are  on the floors of the kitchen, passage and spare bedroom.
Great care is needed when getting up for a twinkle in the middle of the night, for fear of tripping over a box of pears!

The dehydrator is running around the clock, drying pears, peaches, nectarines and tomatoes.

Jars of preserved tomatoes, tomato sauce and chutney are being turned out daily.

The raspberry patch is productive and I'm picking every day. 

A few jars of a new (trial) jam made yesterday that passed the taste test, Raspberry and Peach, so another pot of the same ingredients is on the gas hot plate today.

That kombucha needs bottling off too.. Ahh, not enough hours in the day..!

 A new apiary that we're managing, over the ranges, roughly forty minutes away with a different flowering aspect to that which we are experiencing here this season. 

The hives are full of honey! So we extracted a few kilograms last week to put us back into the honey selling business from the Farmgate shop.

The hives have been neglected for a few years and the owner contacted us with a plea for help. After putting her on the right track, we asked her if she would like us to manage them for her, which was gratefully accepted. So, in exchange for a bit of honey for her own use, we now have two more stands of bees closer to the Adelaide Hills. 

Some of the hives were smothered by blackberry bushes, so there was a need for  suiting up to cut back the prickly bushes that were covered with tasty berries. I kept a few cuttings to pick off the berries when it was safe to take my suit off. Berries are irresistible to me, and I would have loved to pick lots more, but our work was cut out for quite a few hours, dealing with the bee hives.

We transferred all of the (triple high) nuc boxes, into full brood boxes with a super on top.

The owner had placed nuc supers on top of the nucs to give them more space to breed, thus stopping them from swarming. This was the best she could manage to do, being a rather elderly lady, and we praised her efforts. Even though it was an unusual way of bee keeping as such, she did the right thing in her limited circumstances.

The temperature was approximately 29 degrees, but fully suited, and working hard, it was like a sauna in our suits. I was trying to take some photos, but with my thick gloves on, it was a bit difficult. Later, I found lots of unintentional selfies! 

The shed on the property had lots of boxes stacked up to the roof, full of wax moth, and desperately in need of maintenance. We loaded up our cattle trailer and ute to bring them home to work on.

Brian has spent every evening this week, after his day job, scraping and burning off the wax moth residue and eggs, before sanding and then giving every box a new coat of paint. This is the third and final row of boxes.

We've booked ourselves up on Sunday for another full day of bee work at one of the apiaries, and will bring some frames home for extracting.  

These are long days with an early start, traveling to the hives, sorting and inspecting the hives before choosing frames full of honey, then traveling home to extract the honey in our honey shed, then one of us (Brian) takes the empty frames back to the hives, while the other (me) remains here to clean up the extracting equipment.

There's honey in the Farm-gate shop again, and the customers are grabbing it while they can.

This morning I walked up to the top of the hill to move the cows into a fresh paddock, as I do every few days. I had my phone, so snapped a photo looking back down to the house and gardens from the rear view. Although we're having a hot week or two now, this summer has seen more rain than I can ever remember experiencing here. The lawn grass around the house is still green, and for the first time ever, has needed mowing every couple of weeks right through summer.

The paddocks still have a good coverage of dry grass with green pickings of rye and phalaris coming through to keep the cows happy.

Now eleven months old, Ambrose and Gordon are off to market next week.

Lavender came on heat earlier this week, so Mulga Bill was very attached to her for a few days. Getting her in for milking, and away from him, was a bit interesting. Luckily we have lots of interconnecting yards and a clever gate system, so with the assistance of a few slices of bread thrown in the right place at the right moment, I tricked him into parting from her for a few minutes each morning and evening.

All being well, her due calving date will be December 7th. We will observe closely in three weeks time for any signs that Mulga shows interest in her. If not, we will know that she has been successfully mated.

I'm not milking Lavender twice a day, but I do need to bring her into the dairy so I can move her calf, Freddie, into another paddock for the day. I then milk Lavender in the evenings and let the calf in with her afterwards so he can spend the night with her.

Some days I don't milk her at all. ie, when we've got a full day doing something else, or if I'm working, so on those days the calf is allowed to remain with her. This is what I call share milking and  in my opinion, the most humane way to get milk and keep a happy cow and calf.

Oh another epic!

OK enough for now,

Cheers and thanks for popping in.

Time...lack of it, and finding the remedy.

Like most of us, I'm usually feeling overwhelmed by the demands of all that needs to be done, but now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of a Monday night, I woke and decided that now is the time for me to retire from my paid employment.
No, nothing went wrong at work, I still enjoy my job, but it hit me suddenly that now is the time for me..... to slow down and allow myself some time.
Due to living a simple, rich and frugal life for the past decade, (yes those two words rich and frugal can belong together) we have no debts, so we are perfectly placed for me to step down.
So it's official, and after a few more weeks of fulfilling my work commitments, I shall be a retiree.
It's a wonderful feeling and I'm so very grateful that my life's path has led me to this point!
Life has been so very full these last few weeks (what's new?) and this post is long overdue.
I really don't know where to start. Can you sense that rushing sensation coming through my writing?
A few deep breaths, perhaps a cup of tea.....
So I'll just run through what we've been up to lately with a few pictures.

Last week I took a day away from the farm and work, to spend some time with my oldest longest time friend, Rachel, on her birthday.  She lives in the beautiful Adelaide Hills so we drove down to Brighton beach for lunch on what was a perfect day.
I could get quite used to having a day away a bit more regularly.

Rachel has been drawing and painting ever since I've known her, when we were pre-schoolers. Her art works are stunning, and I'm very lucky to have a few of hers hanging in our home.
I'm completely in awe of people who have great talents, and here are a few of her pictures that she has hanging around her home.

 A couple of weeks ago Brian and I went to an auction sale in Angaston. Of course, the things that we were interested in bidding for were at the beginning, in the middle and right at the end, so we were required to be there, waiting around for the whole four hours.
That was a test of my patience I can tell you.....

But I hadn't been to an auction for years, and it was good fun. The large items that Brian was keen on, fetched higher prices than he was prepared to pay, but we fluked a few very cheap purchases.
I couldn't resist offering $1 for a few lots of odds and ends that no-one wanted.

So many treasures in this tub for $1

 

 

This was also in that $1 lot. I'm a sucker for a pretty jug, and I reckon we can never have too many!

 And so was this pile of plates and bowls.

Glass cups and saucers are sure to come back in vogue some day! ;)

Brian picked up a gas heater for his shed for $1, and I got a little two burner gas camping stove with small gas bottle included for $2..!! We came away happy. We caught up with our neighbors during those long waiting around hours, saw some rather interesting sights, and as far as a cheap, half day's entertainment goes, it was a cracker!

 Both Brian and I, over the space of two days, sighted three small Brown snakes a bit too close to our living areas for comfort. I'm most concerned for the safety of these two precious members of our family; Alan loves to play with lizards, so an encounter with a snake is quite likely. Meg would probably just stand and bark, but it's possible she could also get excited and go for a grab too.

One snake was located and dispatched, but I placed this net wrap from our large round hay bales along the snake access areas, so they will get caught if they try to slither through.

We're not irrationally fearful of snakes as such, and have total respect for them if they would just keep away from where we and our animals are moving about.

Hay bale net wrap around the base of this compost bin where I saw a Brown snake.

There have been two birthdays in the family during the past two weeks, so dinner in the dining room is called for on these special occasions. 

Special guests from Victoria stayed with us for a couple of days, but it wasn't for long enough, so we talked and talked into the small hours each night. 

Lots of cooking and meals preparation. 

We're picking a half case of tomatoes almost every day now, so some are bagged and put into the Farm-gate shop.

Some are washed, put into 2kg lots, and into the freezer until I have time to do something with them.

Two big batches of Jembella Farm Tomato Sauce have been made and are still waiting for the labels to be stuck on.

There was a hot spell in the past couple of weeks, but on this 41 degree day, cooking tomato sauce on the stove top was no issue. The smells and heat went straight up the chimney. 

In fact, lots of my summer time cooking happens on this gas hotplate on top of the wood stove.

These plums from Brian's roadside foraging, made a big batch of plum jam.

 

Plums also provided the fruit element in both batches of Jembella Farm Tomato Sauce

 Last week Brian received a call from one of our  Beekeeping Workshop attendees.  Ray had inherited some hives on his property but doesn't have the equipment or experience to look after them, so Brian went to check it out and show him what to do. 

As it turned out, Ray and Lynne are happy for us to maintain the hives for them, in return for a small bit of honey, and as they are located over the ranges, more than forty minutes away, their climate and flowering patterns are different to what we experience here. 

This season has been a tough one for our local area, but over there at Ray's, it's a different story.

So Brian took a day off work last Monday and we spent all day sorting hives, cleaning them out and collecting honey.

 It's good to have some honey in the storage cupboard again.

And now, back to the serious business of preparing my entries for this year's annual Angaston Show on Saturday.

Yoghurt and soft cheese are both in progress on the kitchen bench.

I've gathered all types of various jams, sauces and pickles, honey, eggs, apples and tomatoes to add to the entries for displaying in the beautiful historic Show Hall for celebrating this 120th Annual Show.

Oh dear, this has turned into an epic, and there's still so much to show and tell..!

So for now, I look forward to slower days ahead....maybe! :) 

The raspberries need picking, and so do the nectarines, before the birds take more than their fair share. 

Cheers for now and thanks for visiting.

I love reading comments, but often don't have time to respond, so I apologise in advance for that.

I also totally get it that you may not be inspired to leave a comment, so I'm just grateful that you've made it this far through reading my posts.

However, if you DO feel inspired to leave a comment, I'd love to know from which part of the world you're from and a little bit about you and your situation in life.  If you're a blogger, I generally trace you back to your blog, and have discovered wonderful blogger friends who inspire me in many ways.

Thank you sincerely!

Summer Days

Ian calmly urges Mulga Bill into the race and onto our waiting trailer.

 An early start is always on the agenda during these hot summer days, especially if we need to move stock around.
It's time for Mulga Bill to return home after a two month working holiday at Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills. This is his second time at Ian and Pam's beautiful property, as they requested him again after last year's nice crop of calves.
Today's temperature is rising up towards the forties, so we were on the road early this morning for the fifty minute drive to collect him, and were home and unloaded by 9am.
Mulga started roaring his arrival as we pulled into our gate, but he walked calmly off the trailer and down the ramp to greet Lavender and the two black Angus steers.

I had done all of my morning chores at sunrise; let the chooks and geese out of their sheds and fed them, fed the pigs, cleaned out and filled water containers for all the poultry and pigs.
I also brought Lavender into the dairy so I could seperate her calf into another yard for the day because I want to milk her tonight.
So when Brian got back from his early morning work at his paid job, I was ready to go.

It was still cool enough to pick some mulberries before retreating inside for the hottest part of the day. I've filled many containers over the past few weeks while the mulberry tree is producing a bumper crop, and am storing them in one of the freezers until I decide what to do with them.
When the peaches and apples are ready I'll make jams. Peach and Mulberry... Apple and Mulberry.
When I finish picking I grab a few unripe berries and head for the nearest tap or the water trough in the paddock near the old mulberry tree.
Squish the berries and rub into the stained skin, then rinse with water. Viola!!! All stains are gone!
Meg and Alan always love being with me when I'm in the paddocks, and today as I was busy avoiding stepping on any snakes whilst picking, Alan snuck off to have a lovely roll in the smelliest stuff he could find. But I didn't realise this until later.

Yesterday evening we processed two hogget sheep, presently hanging in the refrigerated cold room for a few days before we cut them into chops and roasts.
Where they were killed in the paddock is where Alan must have found a lovely smelly place to have his roll.
So when we all came inside to the cool house at late morning, the dogs went to their favourite sleeping places in the passage and bedroom. I was preparing lunch and kept getting a whiff of something not good.
I thought it was me, smelly from hosing off the trailer, until I stepped over Alan sprawled out in the passage.
"Oh my goodness Alan, what have you rolled in?"
Off we went outside to the hose, armed with a bottle of shampoo. A perfect day for a bath, I think I ended up just as wet as he did.

Look who watched our bathing shenanigans without moving a muscle.

Lizard watering station.

A damp smelling dog snoring next to me on the rug that he always has to scratch at to get it just so! He likes to be near me at all times when possible. A little bit of separation anxiety there perhaps.

Meg, on the other hand, is content sleeping under the table on her bed in the spare room.

Today is the first of four hot days forecast in the high 30's to low 40's here in South Australia. On the weekend we had more than 40mls of rain, so it feels quite steamy now! 

This is most unusual weather for us at this time of year, where we are used to it being hot and dry in February.

Our old house wears the heat staunchly, if we keep the doors and windows closed. So far this summer, the air conditioning hasn't been turned on, but oh it's lovely to know it's there if we need it. Perhaps after four days of extreme heat we may need to run it for a couple of hours. 

The ceiling fans do a great job, and I prefer them to air-con unless it's absolutely sweltering.

During the school holidays I had a visit from my blog buddy Emma who writes A Simple Living Journey.

I finally got to meet her three boys, and oh what fun we had together and.... to my complete joy, she wrote a blog post about their visit here.

 There might be a bit of this at some stage today!

Happy summer days to you my dear friends! 

Do whatever you have to do to cope, it's the only way, even if it is a bit unorthodox at times!