Before I give you my soon-to-be patented recipe for hand care, a little background is required. It is now Spring and the torrential rains have pretty much petered out. So in our never ending attempt to conserve grass, Dan has come up with a complex grazing system. This system includes polytaping (electrified fencing) off parts of the tree sanctuary in front of the house (see above photo). The blue box in the lower right covers the battery.
But the important part of this picture is that round, blue container set in the paddock. It is filled with water. How do I know? Because I filled it just before I took that picture. The down side of this grass conservation system is that the water troughs are often not located where the fencing and cattle are. In comes the intrepid grandma, hose across shoulders, climbing the fence and dodging cow patties on her way to the trough. Still it's better than last week when the hose system failed and I had to haul buckets of water to both the steers and the sheep - twice a day!
That aside, it's time for the first part of my recipe: get splinters in your hands from the rough wood fencing.
The second ingredient comes from my love of flowers; in this case roses. I have planted 5 different rose bushes in containers around the house, wrapped them in chicken wire (possums also eat roses!), and walked out to see if there are any blooms at least twice a day. There aren't any blooms but there are aphids. Not my favorite pest but there they are.
I go to my handy gardening magazine and it tells me to spray with a fish emulsion mixture. I do that. My hands get liberally coated and stink to high heaven for days. I usually sleep with one hand under my pillow but until the mixture wears off, I find myself sleeping as far away from my hands as possible. Not an easy feat.
So fish emulsion is my second ingredient. The splinters have opened up wounds in my hands and wrists and the emulsion is able to penetrate beneath the skin. So far all is working well.
The third ingredient is the aphids themselves. Oh, didn't I mention that the fish emulsion had absolutely no effect on the aphids? So I moved on to Plan B which involves manually crushing the aphids and squooshing them off the buds and leaves. This puts the squashed aphids on my hands. The aphids then enter beneath the skin by sliding in on the fish emulsion.
Dan and Yael have now screened off the whole market garden. It is quite an accomplishment. I am able to walk around in there standing upright. And it is big, really, really big. After an incredible amount of discussion, we decided to locate the garden there in the middle of our fruit orchard. Any number of reasons but there is water nearby, it is flat, it is not taking a grazing paddock out of circulation. An excellent decision but there is one drawback (of course).
The drawback is snails. They are all over the paddock, the grass, and the trees. So the girls and I go out to catch snails. And (this was my idea, I'm thinking of writing it up for some agricultural journal) we take the snails back to the chickens for their weekly protein. Everybody wins! Well, maybe not the snails.
So the girls and I go out and we average about 40 snails a trip. Not bad? Ha! I read this reminiscence from a woman who tells of being hauled out of bed by her father so that they can go snail hunting at night. It seems the little slimeballs are nocturnal. I hadn't known that. So the next morning I go down right after feeding the chickens. The girls are back in Auckland and I bag 412 snails. I'm not kidding: 412. My chickens have erected some kind of golden idol to me and genuflect when I pass. I have not reached that height again but I average way past the old record of 40 snails.
And that brings me to the final incredient. Remember, we have the open splinter wounds, the fish emulsion and the aphids. Now we have snail slime. This coats the hands and keeps them moist. So what do you think? Any takers for investing in my hand lotion company? Well, let me know.
