Skip to main content

Farm update January 2014

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you had a good break.  We haven't had the best start to the year with the weather so far, two weeks of heat wave and very little rain is not ideal, but I keep thinking the rain will come eventually.

Irrespective of the heat wave, Pete wanted to get some work done on our house at Eight Acres and that involved me having to climb on the roof, so I thought I'd take a few photos from up there, as its a perspective that you don't get very often!

looking out to the round yard and the chicken tractors
looking up the driveway and the hugelkulture on the right
looking across to our water tanks and the garden is a little shady oasis in the brown grass

Apart from the horrible heat, there are some good things about summer:

mango season
Going to the beach
kangaroos at the beach
gum tree blossom
Back at the farm, did I mention it as hot?  We are feeding the Brafords molasses, copra meal, minerals and countless bales of hay.  We don't have much for them except dry grass, and not even much of that left... but they are at least not as skinny as last year.
Brafords enjoying their molasses ration
The place to be in the heat of the day is under the veranda


And I wrote about the poor dry Garden here.

And the best news for last, we got a puppy!  In no way does this little one replace Chime, we still think of her a lot, but it is lovely have a new little puppy to distract us.

She is called "Taz" because I said she looked a little bit like a tasmanian devil with her little white nose.  She is a kelpie/short-haired border collie cross, 11 weeks old, $100 from the Nanango markets last Saturday, apparently from working parents, so we are hoping she will work cattle one day herself.  She seems to have figured out toilet training, chasing ball and rounding up the chickens already, and she's running old Cheryl ragged!  It is interesting watching the dynamic between the puppy and the old dog, at 11, maybe Cheryl is too old to put up with puppy shinanagans!  We are going to need to do some puppy training in a few months, so that will be interesting... any tips for keeping an energetic puppy occupied and not annoying her grumpy old friend?

Cheryl meets her new friend
Taz sleeping after a long day of running around like a crazy dog!

A few interesting blogs that found me in the last few months:

http://ontheningnangnong.com

http://littledragonhomestead.blogspot.ca/

http://darkcreekfarm.com/

How was you December and New Year?  Any plans for the rest of January?

Comments

  1. The heat hasn't been kind to our vege garden every thing is so dry...Its hard keeping the feed up to the cows isn't it? Have a great week. Mandy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking at those mangoes was a bit like rubbing salt into a wound for me today. It's definitely a sore point in my neck of the woods at the moment!

    ReplyDelete
  3. A heat wave? How hot is it there?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. a week in the high 30degC with a couple of days above 40degC.... its finally cooled down again now, phew!

      Delete
  4. What a lovely puppy! I wish we could do a bit of swapping - not of dogs, I hasten to add - I adore my two goofballs - but with the weather. We are craving some sustained sunshine and a bit of heat - and I'm thinking we've had more than enough rain (things were VERY mucky down in the hog pens today). Thanks for the shout out!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would gladly swap if I could! I hope your weather has improved.

      Delete
  5. NOthing like a new puppy to make life wonderful!
    We have experienced a heat wave too, but we are lucky we still have areas of grass and luckily the lucerne drought proofs the property to a certain extent. I am really feeling for you guys seeing how much grass you have at the moment, hope it rains at your place very soon. xx

    ReplyDelete
  6. Your block looks good Liz, love the shot of the chooks and dog under the verandah, cute !We are all dry arn't we. We heard our place got 10 mm last night, so heres hopin' there will be more for ALL of us.!!!
    Jane.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It looks a lot drier with you guys! We've had nothing but rain here and I've been trying to fence our land - the trouble is I can see every inch of where the tractor has been and probably will for months now! Your's looks so tidy! I wish mine did in the middle of summer.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We usually keep the grass short to deter snakes, but this year its just t growing anyway...

      Delete
  8. Thanks for the mention!
    We're about to have a horribly hot week here, but I'm suddenly just very glad that it won't be as bad as your ongoing heat waves!
    Hope all your animals and plants pull through ok!

    - Christine

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thanks for the comments everyone, funny that where-ever we are, we are all fixated on the weather at the moment!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to