Creepy Crawlies

 

As you can see from the above picture of my late-lamented basil plant, we are having a problem with bugs here at the farm. The drought continues to linger and the bugs are thriving while the plants, trees, etc. are dying in record numbers.

So I am not an insect fan. In fact, there are a number of insects I actively dislike, even hate. I hate white tail spiders (I almost lost my left leg as a result of being bitten), I hate flies, and I actively dislike most creepy crawlies. But why? When I get right down to it, why such a visceral reaction?

Part of the reason is that all my adult life I lived in air conditioning, with screens separating me from the wicked outdoors and the exterminator coming with his monthly sprayings inside and out. I never actually experienced the real world. I never was bitten by mosquitoes, spiders, assorted multi-legged creatures or harassed by swarms of flies.

The farm is way out of my comfort zone and with the increased insect level this summer, I have red lined on several occasions. We all have had huge welts from mosquito bites. I have captured spiders trying to nest in my hair and we have watched the cataclysmic failure of our garden.

But philosophically what’s changed? Nothing actually. We had a mini invasion of locusts, overwhelming numbers of flies, etc. but that is normal throughout history. I am the oddity. I am the one that is trying to become acclimated to nature in my old age. It strikes me that my grandchildren are having the privileged upbringing that I was denied. They have the farm and are face to face with reality with every bee sting. Unpleasant but certainly preferable to living in an sterile environment where you have no connection with the world that surrounds you, nurtures you, and sustains you.

Until next time.

Autumn

 

It is Fall. Or as they say here, Autumn. This season has always been one of my favorites and here is no exception. I have to get used to the fact that very few trees change color with the dramatic intensity of New England, or change at all for that matter. There are lots of ferns and palms here.

But, Fall/Autumn usually signals the end of the summer drought. Usually does not mean always. And in this case, we are still waiting. We had the remnants of a cyclone over the weekend. High, high winds and some rain but nowhere near enough. Smudge (my cat) and I huddled indoors and I cheered myself with the mental image of a lush vegetable garden revitalized with all that rain. Turned out there was little rain; it just sounded like a lot when it was being hurled at my windows at 120km.

That’s too bad because I really needed cheering. We were without power for more than a day. That means no water (the pump runs by electricity), no computer, no computer games, no internet, no email, no tv, and no cooking. I got pretty tired of peanut butter sandwiches. I also ran out of bread but didn’t dare open the freezer to get another loaf. Why? No electricity to run the freezer and I couldn’t risk letting what cold air there was out. I also couldn't read because there was no light. I did doze a lot.

I had plenty of time to prepare for this cyclone. The weather alert system in New Zealand is very sophisticated. It would have to be since this is still an agrarian society. So I moved the sheep to paddock #3 which has the gully and lots of willow trees to protect them. Luckily the temperature didn’t drop because they had been shorn only a week before and so didn’t have their usual protective wool.

The steers were already in the paddock in front of the new barn, which is the perfect one for them since it too has a gully and a protective ring of trees. I have to say, though, they didn’t seem to need it. On the rare times when the winds died down enough for me to see out my windows, I glimpsed those steers standing oblivious to the elements and eating.

The chickens were safe in their coop. When it was all over, I noticed that my egg numbers were up. Puzzled I watched as several chickens marched determinedly into the horse stalls. There, under my bemused eyes, they took turns laying their eggs in a haystack. So now I check the hay every morning as well as the coop.

One side benefit is that I finally found that can of shellac I had lost 3 years ago when I fell off the hay stack while painting the inside roof. We had finally used enough hay to get down to ground level. And there it was not 2 feet from the new eggs. The worry had been that it had spilled and tainted the hay. It hadn’t and it didn’t.

Until next time.

It Better Be Butter

Now that we have switched to raw milk, a whole new world has opened up for us - led, of course, by the ever questing Dan. It was he who noticed that Yael and I (and by extension, the kids), were skimming off a lot of the cream for a less robust milk. For those of you who asked, and I was amazed at how many there were, Yes! I am still drinking only raw milk, and No, I have had no side affects whatsoever. But I can't accustom myself to all that cream. So I take a lot of it out and so does Yael.

Dan, who gets up in the wee hours to head to the dairy to get the milk as it emerges from the cow and drives 45+ minutes each way to do it, was a tad upset. Then, naturally, he settled into finding a solution that would work for all of us. He drinks a ton of the stuff, replete with cream, and is still losing weight. Go figure.

Anyway, he researched butter. Yes, that is a picture of butter that he made from our rejected cream. He gave me a the ramiken full that you see and hauled the vast majority back to the family in Auckland.

It astonishes me at how far down the road to self-sufficiency we've travelled and how far we still have to go. If, indeed, we decide to do so. The milk is great and I promise I will keep you updated on any health improvements I might have.

By the way, does anybody know of an old fashioned wood milk churn I could buy - cheap? Dan spent hours at the electric blender and I figure if we are going for self-sufficiency, we should try to eliminate electricity. Right? I'd volunteer to churn but this darned shoulder of me acts up and I'll just have to pass on this one.

Reaping the Harvest

The picture above is my dinner, picked just 15 minutes before cooking. I will add a hamburger made from our steers and have a completely farm-fresh meal. Pretty impressive, hunh? I’m impressed. I’m impressed that anything grew to maturity in the market garden since we are inundated with snails, insects, rats, possums, birds, etc.

All in all, things are going pretty well. I have scattered pictures of my roses here to show that they survived the possum onslaught. I am leery of saying that I’ve cured the problem, but so far netting the bushes at night has kept the possums away. And moving them closer to buildings appears to have deterred the birds.

 

We are still trying to figure out the water leaks but have been very fortunate that we have gotten some rain. Enough, anyway, that I haven’t had to water the vegetables too often. The plants in pots are a different story. The sun is so intense that they need watering at least every other day.

I have been fairly nonchalant about the sun. At least I was until Sunday. Alessia had spotted a sheep acting sickly and when I watched I saw some signs of fly strike so Dan and I herded the flock to the quarantine paddock and I stood around keeping sheep from escaping while Dan checked each one. Luckily there didn’t seem to be any fly strike but my exposure to the sun was too much. I was wearing my hat and sun block but got a bit of a sunburn on my arms. Aloe took care of the burning but I will be more alert in the future.

 

The chickens continue to under produce and over eat. We are going to buy 3 more in a few weeks and the timing is perfect. Next week it is time to clean out the layer of wood shavings and I plan to do a complete housecleaning then. Those chickens are poor tenants. You wouldn’t believe how they trash the place.

I am not sure where the shavings will go; the market garden compost heap makes the most sense. When I first read about leaving the shavings for 6 months, I was sure they were crazy. It would smell to high heaven. But it doesn’t. In fact it doesn’t smell at all. I rake it around the coop every morning and things stay pretty static all day since the hens prefer being out and around. When I let them out in the morning, the shavings are in a totally new configuration and the raking begins again.

Right now all the steers and sheep are gathered in paddock #1. They like each other’s company. I often see one of the lambs grazing peacefully within inches of one of our massive steers. And they are massive. I can’t believe how big they’ve gotten and how quickly. They are the sumo wrestlers of our mountain. All other steers pale in comparison. And they make great hamburgers!

 

Raw Milk

I think I must live in my own universe. I am always the last to know anything. There is this massive food revolution going on and I knew nothing about it. People are turning back to natural foods grown as nature intended. They are eating meat from grass fed cattle and free range everything. And I was oblivious to it all.

But I had a rapid emersion course in organic foods when I first came to New Zealand. Dan and Yael were both very keen that their children (at that time child #1 was on the way) get the most they could out of their food.

Dan, a researcher at heart, had spent literally months familiarizing himself with food. When he got to NZ he began talking to anyone who had something to offer on the subject. This included owners of health food stores, farmers, butchers, etc.

Finally, he bought a farm and stocked it with sheep and steers for our eating pleasure. Then came the chickens and fresh eggs from the most spoiled chickens on the planet. Now, of course, we have branched out to include organically grown veggies. With little success so far!

So I thought I was pretty darned up to speed in the healthy eating department. And then Dan dropped the latest bomb. There is a product called 'raw milk'. I suppose I knew that at some stage milk was raw but I had never thought about it. I had not even connected the word pasteurization to Louis Pasteur. I am lactose intolerant and spent very little of my gray cells on the subject of milk.

But it seems that Dan has researched the raw milk thing up one side and down the other and come to the conclusion that we, as a family, should try it. This would include me. I tried to opt out citing my allergy to milk but he was persuasive. It seems that I might not be allergic to milk itself but to the pasteurization process that kills so much of the good bacteria. Since, as he pointed out, I have a severely inhibited immune system, I should try it.

I was very reluctant but cravenly hoped he would forget about it or not be able to find a raw milk supplier. How little I know my son. He showed up here with raw milk, gave me half a glass and watched me drink it down.

Believe me, I didn't want to. My stomach churned at the thought but it churned more when I looked at my son standing there proudly assured that he was improving my health. I couldn't let him down. Once at mother, always a mother. Anyway, I drank it. It didn't taste like any milk I had ever had. Normally I could have about half a glass of skim milk every other day. This tasted nothing like skim. In the picture you can see the cloudy stuff around the inside of the container. That, folks, is butter fat. And is it good! I mean really, really good.

The half glass didn't upset my digestive system. Neither did the full glass I had the next day. Or the glass I had the day after that. I am thinking of increasing to half a glass in the morning with cereal (my muesli suddenly doesn't taste like sawdust any more). Then I might have a whole glass with a cookie for afternoon tea. My food world has just expanded. I think I like this food revolution thing but I am standing firm with Dan on this one. I will NOT get a milk cow and start milking day and night. NO WAY!

Water

 

I decided to give you a visual idea of my garden with pictures of my corn at the top and tomatoes at the end. With the rest of the sandwich,  I’ll catch you up on activities on the farm. Of which there are many!

First, the chickens. For someone who doesn’t eat many eggs, I spend a whole lot of time catering to these fowl. Now that Dan is up here and busily re-piping the entire farm’s water system (more later), I have been busier than ever. Why? Because Dan cannot keep opening and shutting the paddock gates as he tools around toting pipes, etc. They stay open. The result of this is that the chickens are free to resume their old behaviors and wander at will.

This means that I have to chase them down, round them up and return them to home base. I wouldn’t bother normally but the girls are terrified of the chickens (for absolutely no reason) and scream the place down if one of our feathered friends wanders within eyesight.

Last night we got a terrible scare.  I had forgotten about the nomadic birds since over time I had trained them to stay in their own 2 paddocks (until our new open gate policy). So here I am up in my room and hear these piercing shrieks. I race out of there, stumble on my stairs, catch myself with a now wrenched arm and race around the house searching for whichever grandchild was dying horribly.

What I found was 2 girls sitting on tricycles screaming their heads off. I also found two bemused chickens standing some distance away, heads cocked, trying to figure out what was going on. I still haven’t recovered.

All this for chickens who have slacked off on the egg production front. I tried everything. More feed; less feed; different feed. More water, changed twice a day, etc. We finally got smart and called the breeder who said they slacked off when it got hot! Who knew? I burned up the internet trying to discover what was wrong but nowhere did I hear about hot weather slowing production. Cold weather, yes. Hot weather, no. Learn something every day. Or in this case, every few months.

So that’s the chickens. The water system here has left a great deal to be desired. This used to be one large farm which someone quartered into lifestyle blocks (Kiwi for farmettes). So the tanks, piping, etc. has been haphazard to say the least. Dan has been working diligently for 3 years to replace garden hoses with proper piping. He has also been trying to find one stubborn leak but no luck yet. Along the way, he has found numerous other leaks and repaired them.

Now that it is the long vacation and Dan’s first time off since he moved here, he decided that he would rather play with water than go to the beach and be in water. This was triggered by discovering that the pipe to the paddock across our driveway was just a garden hose buried under the gravel. He is now digging it up, retrenching it, and laying proper pipe. He is also putting in new water troughs, new valves, etc.

He found time to refine the market garden watering system for which I am very grateful. And just in time since the drought should be along any time now. But for the time being, I am relishing watering a garden with actual plants. I have a pumpkin, numerous corn, and tomatoes. We will glide lightly over the many vegetables that were sacrificed to the well-being of some rat clan. Yes, Dan found a rat tunnel from outside the garden in and I have played Sherlock and assumed that that is where all my seedlings went. I am only a tad bitter. Make that pretty darn bitter. I hate rats!

Roma Tomatoes

 

To Do List

Since I am going to be showing you some market garden pictures, Alessia wanted you to also see some of our beautiful flowers. So she took my camera and here is the result.

The Friday after Christmas found me being driven to the other side of Auckland to have a tooth extracted. The word 'extracted' means major pain but I had been numbed up the whazoo and Dan and I headed back to the farm in fairly good spirits. And then we hit what turned out to be a 12  1/2 mile backup on the two lane road we HAD to travel. It took us almost a half hour to travel one mile. I was trapped!

In order to keep  my mind off my increasing pain as the numbness receded and the armies of pain marched into my mouth, I made a to-do list. Not for myself, you understand, but for Dan. After all what else did he have to do on his yearly vacation?

I will skip all the little things like being with the kids, tackling the ant infestation, removing vast numbers of spider webs, spiders, and cocooned insects, mowing the lawns, clipping the lawns, etc.

And, of course, there were the unexpected treats like the geyser (hot water tank) in my apartment leaking down through the garage and having to be drained. It is the holiday season and there is literally no one available to come fix the darned thing for 6 days.

But the list grew despite extraneous events. The market garden needed to be weeded. Those are not edible plants you see, those are various weeds that have thrived under our protective netting. The fruit trees needed to be weeded and mulched.  All the soon-to-be produce in the garden needed to be weeded, the dirt loosened, and mulched.

Anyway, you get the idea. I am showing you some of my success stories; cherry tomatoes, corn, and squash. Everything else is dead. I think we are going to be eating a ton of succotash. And I hope to can at least 48 jars of tomato sauce. Haven't got a clue what to do with all that corn (besides eat it fresh). I just can't see myself hulling the kernels and canning them. We are talking major work there.