What we missed

 

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Have you been on the farm this last week or so? Yeah me either. Been bakin' my little head off. Turns out people love our Bikkies. How awesome! Busy! 

Here's what we missed. 

The Chicken Caravan arrived. It is a thing of utter beauty and deserves it's own post if this one can prove I haven't entirely forgotten how to blog.

And the pigs got loaded. Almost effortlessly (the second time) so I hear. Dad turned up with a couple of planks and they trotted straight up Adam's ramp and onto the trailer. 

So, eventually, we have made our first free range pork and sage sausage. It's deliriously delicious, thank you pigs. 

Here below is the Large White (not Great White apparently, yes that is a shark), who we're hoping to breed with a new local boar. These girls have eaten out this paddock on the left, as you can see, and it's just about ready to be dug up and become our market garden. Exciting times. (For them too – they get lots of fresh green pasture finally, having tractored for the last couple of months.)

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Our house vegie garden is going gangbusters. The spinach and rhubarb are coming along nicely. That does look suspiciously like a burial mound in the background but it's woodchip from a tree we had to have felled. So I hear. And as far as I know we're not missing any family members. We'll build (I say 'we', I mean 'Adam') more house garden beds in the next few weeks. 

In amongst baking I really must get some seeds into seed trays… or maybe I'll just go have a rest on top of that sweet smelling pile of woodchip. I keep finding the dog on it. Smartest dog in town. 

 

 

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I made a meat pie that I was so proud of, I turned off all the ovens in the commerical kitchen and went home for lunch the day it was being eaten (I made it the night before). It may have ruined me for bought meat pies forever. Just good local beef mince from a happy cow and a simple onion gravy. Mmmm.

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On Friday last week, Adam went and picked up the bees.

It was an exciting day. This is something he's wanted to get set up for ages. He did a two day course a few months ago and has been reading up. 

He called me on the way home (he picked up the hives the week before) with two boxes of approximately 3,000 bees each. He'd assumed the boxes would be sealed. They weren't. The beekeeping guy suggested Adam put them in his boot. We have a station wagon. Another guy also picking up bees offered Adam some potato sacks to cover them, but as I spoke to him driving home Adam estimated a hundred or so bees were cruising around inside the car and he was fine with that, really pretty much fine with that, might get off the phone, don't really want to swallow one.

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Bees are so great.

Our apple trees are shooting. Which is also great as I suspected they were dead, they looked very much like inert twigs.

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And our meat birds are growing which is great as orders are rolling in. 

We love chickens who grow up in paddocks. 

 

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Speaking of chickens, a friend of my Dad's dropped in two surplus roosters last week, for our disposal. I wasn't there, but Dad told me that Adam despatched them like a champion. Champion apart from a short period of time when one enormous rooster was racing to safety around the hayshed with Adam after him and Holly (the dog) after Adam. Dad said (from his vantage point of fence-leaning), that Adam stretched out an arm and as he hurled himself over a hay bale, caught the unlucky rooster by the neck and took it down in an almighty hullaballo. 

So that's what we missed. 

Hope you're all very well. I missed you lovely folk. Tell me what you've been up to!

xxx

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