The shed

There's been one thing missing on the farm for a long while now - a shed. The old shed had almost completely disappeared - all that was remaining was a single wall with a window. The previous owners attempted to build some kind of structure directly off that one wall.. but it was a long way off being a shed!

The "view" from the house

Side of the old shed

Not exactly a useful structure

The wood had since rotted, and taking it down was not difficult at all. More surprising was the fact that it was standing at all! It was big, ugly and in the wrong place - disrupting an otherwise nice view. Well, it will be a nice view again once we clean it up!

What's left of the old shed - what a mess!

Initially, we wanted to simply take it down, re-use the materials, and put it up over by the peppercorn trees. When taking the shed down, we quickly realised that the wood was just hugelkultur in the wrong place. :)

Convinced by a friend in town, we have decided to try a more solid structure made of RHS and C purlins. He's going to show us how to weld it together and even lend us his welder and a neighbour's generator to boot! It all sounds pretty impressive and perhaps a bit scary too.. but we're in good hands.

So begins the task of digging holes for the square RHS posts.
This took quite a while. The soil is quite heavy clay all over the property, and behind the peppercorn trees is no exception.

The future shed

 The spot was chosen for a number of reasons. Ideally it will provide for some shade in the harsh summer heat. We've noticed that the blowflies don't like peppercorn trees at all, and tend to stay away. Plus, you might notice from the above photo, we tend to store junk under there anyway! May as well formalise it.

The shed will mean a great deal for us, having somewhere to work on things (everything from bat and bird boxes, to chook houses, to kitchen cupboards), and it will get the tools out of the house and into an organised space where they can be used at last. We can't wait!! I look forward to updating further on the progress. :)

Adventures in Electronet Poultry Fencing

Protected by Kencove

We've been using the electric chook fences for the last 3 months, and we're starting to get quite proficient in their use - even if we do say so ourselves. :)

Initially, there was plenty of frustration and anger, I can tell you! Hopefully our experience can help others avoid the same frustrations.

We have quite long grass due to the lack of herbivores grazing on the green winter pastures. The electric fence requires the grass to be short or the strands of wire woven into the nylon will short out and cause the battery in our solar energizer to go flat. To solve this, the grass needs to be very short under the fence, and we use our ride-on mower to achieve this. Initially, the trouble is figuring out where to mow exactly, just the once please!

The Kencove fences we purchased were infuriating, since you could not make them square because each side was a different length. The second one we sent back (due to major manufacturing errors) and we would have returned both if not for the fact that the chooks would have been left without any protection at all without one. So, we looked at how to make the Kencove work for us.

Firstly, the fences were shipped to us with feet that were manufactured incorrectly. The supplier kindly shipped us new feet and we replaced all the mis-shapen feet with the new ones. A tedious job.

Then, Marty came up with a brilliant idea how to make the fence a square. We set the fence up straight out in one line, measured the entire distance of the fence, and divided it by the number of posts it came with, which makes an even number of sections. Moving each post into the correct position, a square is now made possible by measuring out 12.17 metres each side. Oh the mathmatical bliss. :)

Now we can make a nice square in the field, mow, set up the fence and move the chooks in and we're done. Although, the Kencove fence still needs to be pegged down with tent-pegs around the posts as it has large gaps - we think we can solve this by cutting the posts a little shorter. We will give this a try in the near future.

Wanting a second fence to make moving the chooks easier, (we really didn't want another KenCove) Premier One had recently became available in Australia, so we jumped at the chance to get one and see what the differences were and if they are any better.

We feel the Premier One is a better quality product, especially the foot design and sturdiness. It just seems a more simple and practical. Oddly enough though it too came with vastly different side lengths and making a square out of it was impossible! So again, back to setting it up in a long line and moving the post to where they should be and even taking one out because there were too many! Bonus Post!

Now we have two working fences, but the bonus of the Premiere One is that no tent pegs are required to keep it on the ground - saving us quite a bit of time and effort when setting it up.

As for the chooks - they seem to love their new lifestyle. They are moved roughly once a week at this stage, since right now there are only 8 of them. One day they will be part of a leader-follower system where the chooks will follow the cows in rotation, but until then, they're happily scratching away at the grass and weeds.

So, we've moved in!!

My wife and I bought this place nearly 2 years ago and moved in about 3 months ago.

We bought our little farm with the intention of providing as nice a home as we could for our chickens! Nah, really we moved here to create an awesome permaculture oasis. Manda would like to call it our early retirement plan. I call it learning lots of new things and hoping it all works out for the best in the end. Ultimately we would like to not have to work, vastly reduce our expenses, become more self reliant and eat and produce our own organic, biodynamic and super good food. If we have enough extra we'll sell it, if we have too much money, we'll give it away! HHAHAHHAHAA!! and now for a cup of tea...

Edit by Manda: Marty and I may have just lost our minds, but it's a scary time right now!! :)

Wintertime visit

It's been such a long time since we last visited the farm. We've been desperate to go and see if everything is still ok, but circumstances beyond our control kept us away. Now that Marty's cast is off and he's all healed up from his broken wrist - and we got a new ute to replace the one that died on the way up to the farm last time.. we felt that there wasn't much else that could go wrong!

We left fairly early in the morning, but despite that, we still arrived in the dark on Wednesday. First order of business is to light some candles and see if everything is as we left it.

That shot is of inside the kitchen. There isn't any heating yet either, or the first order of business might have been to light a fire! You can see on the left there is our freezer / fridge. It's a 12v DC one! I may have been a bit premature bringing it (or even buying it really) since the power set up yet either, but they're so rare that I couldn't help but get it as soon as I found one. It's a bit big for the kitchen though, so it might end up in another part of the house some day.

The house and everything in it was exactly the same as we left it - a big relief. Being winter, and quite cold, we headed off to bed early.

The next day we went for a walk around the property. 20 acres sure looks small when there's nothing much on it! On the left is a brown bit that is the dam wall, and in the middle is the peppercorn trees and the house is just behind them. Otherwise it's a blank canvas, ready for anything. I do love winter in the country, though.. just look at that blue sky!

 

The only other thing we wanted to do on Thursday was set up the bed. We got it for a bargain, but little did we know just how heavy it was going to be. The ute brought it up without any apparent strain, but we sure did struggle to move it around. I hope we don't have to move it again anytime, ever!

The nights are cold, however. Neither of us slept soundly exactly. We both wore many layers of clothes, including thermals. Next time we'll bring ALL our blankets, a hot water bottle and the sheep-skin too. On the plus side, I wasn't woken by the sound of rats in the ceiling this time. That's because we set rat traps last time. Successfully, too, I might add.

That's Marty checking the traps. Bright pink gloves are too cute on him, don't ya think? Oh, just in-case I hear a cry of sexism here, I put the traps up last time, so it was his turn. Ha!

I think it was Friday when I spent some time digging out some accumulated dirt from above the foundations on the corner there. As with all old houses (and probably new ones I guess), dirt and gardens shouldn't be above the concrete footings or the damp-proof-course if you have one. I doubt this place has that though. When the dirt is above the concrete or DPC, the moisture gets to bypass that protection and go into the walls and cause problems.

Marty worked on a similar but different issue on the opposite side of the house on the left there, making the gutter drop the water further away from the footings of the house. He did a great job, too! I think it'll work, at least until we get the gutters and water tanks sorted later on.

Hopefully the digging will help slow down the damage to that part of the wall. You can see we have a lot of work to do here. The concrete on the side of the house is coming away by itself, so that should make life easier when it comes to taking it off and replacing it with something more natural. The mortar between the bricks in the chimney is missing so badly in places that you can actually see daylight if you stick your head in the fireplace in the kitchen. Still, it doesn't feel overwhelming after what we've been through at the old miners cottage at home.

Marty and I planted some rosemary along the side there, although we may have to move it someday.. if it lives, it lives. It was only cuttings from our main plant - plenty more where they came from, but I'll be happy if we can use a little rosemary on the BBQ sometime in a future visit!

We reluctantly left on Saturday, but we have to go up for another visit soon! The neighbour decided that he'd like to keep Larry the rooster, and we offered him a couple of our girls to keep him company. Hopefully we'll be done with the renovations at the old cottage in Stawell very soon and we can move up there for good!

Latest trip to the farm

We took a trip up to the farm a couple of weeks ago. It's a long long drive only to drop off a fridge/freezer.. but that's exactly what we did.

The farm is otherwise the same as we left it. A bit greener there than it is in Stawell, but otherwise unchanged.

When we stay there, I'm woken at the early hours of the morning by scratching and stomping in the roof. Whatever it is, it sounds HUGE! I climbed into the roof to check it out. It's pretty clean up there, pretty bright and airy. There was a skull, so I brought it down. When back in Stawell I thought for sure it must be a possum, so I researched and built a new possum home. I also ordered a book I've been wanting forever called Tracks, Scats and Other Traces. I took the book and the possum box up to the farm this last trip.

Being woken again early in the morning by thumping and scratching reminded me to look through the book for the skull I found. Sadly the skull looked nothing like the possum skulls in the book. My heart sank as I realised that the rat skull was a much more likely candidate. The next morning as the thumping and scratching started again, Marty grabbed the torch and climbed the long ladder in the kitchen. He peered into the darkness through the manhole and saw them. Yes, rats. Oh So Gross!

Other than dropping off the fridge/freezer, and finding out we have rats in the roof, there wasn't a lot accomplished during this last trip. Sure, we confirmed that we really need some batteries for the solar system, and a header tank and water tanks for water.. and that we all really want to move up there as soon as we can. To do that, we really need to finish renovating our house in Stawell.. so that's what we're concentrating our efforts on lately.