Well we
certainly haven’t been sitting on our backsides the last couple of months, but
I know that we have been slack in the blogging department. I will do my best to cover the gap, so make
your cup of tea/coffee/scotch/gin/cider now and get settled, this will be a
wordy one. But read through, I promise
you may learn a thing or two!
As you could see
from our last post we had been milling quite a bit of timber. We’ve finished
that off and now have a great deal of working material stacked and racked. Some of the stuff that came out of the mill
was so impressive we earmarked it for future furniture. I still have to cover all of it to keep it
out of the elements, but once that is done we will have a resource that will
last us years. The only question we have
to answer now is: what do we want to build first?
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| Father and son on the wood pile having some morning tea |
The orchard
really kicked up a gear in September and has continued to go beserk in October. At the end of August we hired someone to come
help us knock it into shape, and even though after four weeks they didn’t work
out as an employee their efforts in preparing two of our blocks for grafting
was great. We estimate that
approximately 2,500 trees were cut down and mulched up, with wound paint
applied to every cut to stop the trees getting diseases through the cuts. It really was a herculean effort, and set us
up beautifully for grafting.
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| The "Hinchinbrook" block, freshly cut and grafted |
Now, to the
grafting…. it is a strange thing to cut one tree down, take a little stick of
another tree, make a few cuts to it, wedge it into the bark of the first tree,
and then have it grow. But this is
essentially what happens. We had two
legends of the game, Clem and Boxer, who are 74 and 71 years old respectively,
come down and do our grafting. Now this
didn’t mean that Coreen and I could kick back with beer and skittles, it was
our job to follow them along, taping the grafts so they wouldn’t blow over or
come out, and putting wax around the joins so no air or moisture could get in
and cause the graft not to take. These
guys are so fast, they put on about 1,300 grafts a day, that’s about 650 trees
that we needed to tape and wax. They
would finish their day at 3pm, after just ambling along since 9am, and Cor and
I would be there until 6:30pm trying to finish before dark. It was a real lesson that first day, so for
the next couple of days we roped in some help, but then by day four we ran out
of friends (our “friends” learn quick!) and it was just back to us again. When they are really moving these guys can
have up to 6 people working to try to keep up with them.
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| Boxer and Clem, having a break and letting us catch up (just a bit) |
We had a
wonderful time working with Clem and Boxer, despite working hard the jokes flew
thick and fast between us, and they took time out to show us how to graft. They even gave us grafting homework over a
weekend and came and inspected it on the Monday to make sure we had done it
right. Lucky we have plenty of trees to
practice on! It was absolutely
brilliant, and I still have a bit of scion wood from four heritage varieties
courtesy of the Steenholdts (who have been in apples for decades) that we hope
to graft onto some hand-picked trees.
Boxer even brought five of his favourite varieties and grafted them for
us. We are certainly going to have quite
a range of tasty apples for you to try when you visit!
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| All done, Matt with Clem and Boxer |
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| Such a strange thing to turn this into new apple trees |
In other apple
matters, we have had a bit of an issue with our equipment, namely our orchard
sprayer. I bought it last year and it
seemed to do the job OK, but when I pulled it out and gave it a test run a week
before I was due to start spraying it failed dramatically. After waiting a week I then spent a few days
up to my elbows in grease at the mechanic’s trying to help them get it fixed as
they were snowed under with work. It
took about 4 weeks (during which time we had to borrow a sprayer from a good,
good friend) but finally it is now back and working. The failure taught me that it probably wasn’t
working properly even last year, but after much time, effort and sadly, money,
it is now working great. We spent more
than the sprayer cost in the first place fixing it, and though the thought of
buying a replacement did play on my mind, the total cost is still less than the
price of a fancy new one that is likely too big for our orchard in any case.
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| Mad Matt, the Orchard Warrior |
A quick word on
spraying. “But aren’t you going organic, how can you use sprays?” This is a common misperception about organic
farming. There are actually a number of
chemicals approved for use in organic farming.
In the USA the list is actually so big it is a little scary, but the
gist of the thing is that it must be a natural product. So that means we use chemicals like lime, sulphur,
copper, certain oils and products containing natural bacteria to help us manage
our pest issues. However even naturally-occurring
products can have dire consequences for nature and the soil biology, for
example pyrethrum and boron kills beneficial insects like bees, and copper or
excess sulphur can destroy microorganisms living in healthy soil. This means that even an organic farmer has to
make choices about what substances they are comfortable using, and why. We have less to choose from, but that doesn’t
mean it is simple!
The apple
flowers are out in force now, and so are the bees, and we are hoping for a
much, much better harvest than last year.
So the weekdays
have been getting our apples going, and our weekends have been dedicated to
other “projects”, whether it is getting the sheep shorn or setting up new pig
paddocks.
We had a very
sad Saturday when Matthew, Sadie and Hedley came over to bid farewell to the
old boar Peter Pan. We only had one sow
large enough to handle Peter Pan, the wonderful Tinkerbell. As Tinks is on her last litter and we want to
have more sows, keeping Pan for sentimentality’s sake just didn’t make
sense. We tried to find another home for
him but to no avail. We had a friend
come over with his firearm and do the deed, and fortunately our excavator was
on hand to bury the big lad. It was a
sad occasion. Pan had sired many a
litter and was a really great pig. I
will always laugh at the memory of him curiously following our friend Mark
around his pen, with Mark running away crying “Razorback!”
In case you were
wondering, we didn’t turn Pan into sausages because old boars can develop a
musty smell in their meat, and with Pan you could smell him whenever Tinks was
around, so we knew it wasn’t a starter.
Have you learned anything new today? ;)
Anyway, with the
big fella away Sadie brought over one of his offspring, Tess, who was pregnant
to their new boar (Barry). Just a few
days after Pan “went to Disneyland” Tinkerbell had her litter, followed in short
order by Tess. So we have 13 beautiful
saddleback piglets running about currently.
The seven-month-old weaners are getting to a good size, we will have
five of them for the chop and we are eagerly planning a salami and charcuterie
day with our old WWOOFer host Mandy.
Between that and the fresh pork, we are going to eat well this summer!
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| Say hello to Tess! |
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| ...and her litter! |
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| Tinks is on her last litter at the moment, but is loving her new paddocks |
All the pig
action was an impetus for us to set up new paddocks, and I am quite chuffed
with the new setup. My catch cry while
we were doing it was “a wallow and scratching post in every paddock”, in a real
effort to facilitate the “pigness of the pig”, and to let them do what comes
naturally. It warms the heart to see a
happy pig, when you come visit I am sure you will see what I mean!
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| Love the happy pigs! |
On the sheep
front we have shorn, docked, tagged and clipped so many that my head still
spins. And of course the busy month was
the perfect cue for one of the Wiltshire girls to reject her lamb, meaning that
we have been bottle feeding one of those as well. Normally I wouldn’t have been prepared to do
it (having gone through it with shish kaBob last year!), but at the time Mary
was one of only two female lambs, and we really want to grow our Wiltshire herd
so needed to keep her around. So bottle
feeding every four hours it had to be!
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| Clipping hooves |
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| That's a lot of wool, more than 3 bags full! |
The other baby, little
Julian, is also going well. He is a
happy little guy, pretty content to be at the farm, in his capsule or pram
under a tree while we work. He smiles a
lot, is always looking around for me, and is fascinated by the brilliant quilt
full of farm scenes that our friend Jane made.
I am not sure I am ready for him to be crawling, but hopefully by the
time that happens we will have moved into our house on the farm, which Ernie started
work on just this past Monday. We live
in exciting times.
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| Such a happy lad! |
So there you
have it, a month and a half in review, and I haven’t even told you what we have
planned for this month! I guess you will
just have to wait and see. Of course,
you could come down to Our Mates’ Farm and find out firsthand! Don’t worry, we won’t make you work…. much!
And now a few final pictures for you all...
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| One of Tinkerbell's piglets sneaks a drink while she has breakfast |
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| The runner ducks have started laying... I see omelettes in my future, lots of omelettes! |
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| This guy and a couple of others have been hanging around the pig paddocks |
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| The working men of the family don't make it to bed |
