Silent but not quiet

Things have been conspicuously silent on both the RLH and TA blogs but I can assure you, life has been anything but quiet. In fact, it’s been all systems go for some weeks now, particularly this last week.

Backing up about 6 weeks, we had our confidence rocked by the severe weather that swept through the southern states of Australia. South Australia faced almost total electricity loss and much of Victoria saw black outs too, some for over a week! Wild and woolly weather brought down many trees, roots challenged by years of less-than-average rain were suddenly inundated by far too much. Soft saturated soil and strong winds equals trees down.

This tree simply snapped half way up the trunk!

We saw only a few tree losses, although nothing causing any damage but the wind sadly made short work of our newly erected polytunnel which was doing double duty as an extension of our bus as well as to be used for seed starting etc. It has been dismantled but I doubt there is a single pole left 100% undamaged. We renamed it the polypretzel.

The polytunnel was set up as an extended living space for the bus.

Thrown right over the top of the bus by the strong winds.

Moving on from that, we have been working hard to finish marking all the contour lines across the block as well as learning just how fast and far our grass can grow. I tell you no word of a lie and not an ounce of exaggeration when I say that some of our pasture is beyond waist high on me and I’m pretty tall. Given the warmer weather and the venom levels of the local snakes I am NOT posing for a photograph to prove what I say. You will have to take my word for it!

As deep as I am willing to go into snake territory on a warm spring morning. And this is the short grass!

Stewart our Dexter steer has been joined by Hewie and Dewy, our Dexter X Lowline steer and heifer. The 3 of them are having a lovely time eating off the top of this tuft then the top of the next. Following the teeth marks of these spoiled bovines is quite amusing. We also have 8 sheep on our block now, 7 Merino X Corriedale and 1 suspected Katahdin sheep called Dirty Harry. Harry needed company after Jean Claude van Lamb, his companion, passed away so he is keeping our girls company for now and will later likely keep Charlie and Lola company too. It looks like we may have another sheep coming to join us in a week or so too.

From left to right, Dewy, Hewie and Stewie.

Charlie and Lola are our 2 Wiltshire Horn poddy lambs. Lola we hope will be the beginning of our future flock but only time will tell there. Charlie is, or will soon be, a wether (desexed male sheep).

Lola on the left and Charlie on the right. The kids feed them a bottle morning and evening although we are about to start weaning that down.

So, with all the animals out at Twinny Acres, you might think the grass would be managed, but I can assure you, not even close! Hence we have been working hard to get our swales marked out so as to get them dug in. This helps us to set up cell grazing and it also removes some of the grass.

Thanks to a friend C, the last of the swales were marked out the last Thursday of October. A whole day before deadline. The timing was great as I was able to leave for my wonderful weekend away knowing that a break from our farm wasn’t putting us behind schedule. We then spent last week chasing up excavators and options. Just a word of advice, if you want to hire an excavator, organise it in advance! But more on that later.

Our lovely lush pasture.

One of our many rocks. Those that are in the swales will be relocated to garden edges.