Farm Update

I received an e-mail today in which the sender enquired as to what was happening on the farm these days. I then realised that many of the things that I see as of no interest, or mundane, others find informative and assists them in keeping in touch with the farm, in general, and myself in particular.

Since my return from my 2008 ROW Lecture Tour, my time has been fully occupied with dealing with the backlog of mail etc., which accumulates to an almost alarming degree over the two months that I am away.The kitchen table is almost swamped by the surface mail, and the e-mails although not being of anywhere near the same volume, certainly are many more than normal. Then we have the phone messages. Fortunately the grass has been well attended to by my good friend Randy - yet at the same time, the garden does require attention, for there are the new seasons vegetables to be planted as quickly as possible, to ensure we take advantage of the cooler weather months, and before it again becomes too hot for them. And to cap it all, there are the clients arriving and requiring attention. So life is not dull.

Our vegetable garden is now thriving. As you can observe, our garden consits of raised beds which are in sections of old water and molasses tanks, which have been filled with soil, and are adjacent to the kitchen for easy access. The other purposes for gardening this way is to overcome the problem with bandicoots, who dig up the plants searching for worms, and wallabies, kangaroos, and such like who would eat them if they were ground level beds, without protective fencing. It also ensures that the plants do not become water-logged in the wet season. Both the celery and the parsley you see here is in its second year. As can be seen, the beds are heavily mulched to conserve moisture. And for those who are unfamiliar with our method of gardening, we do not dig(invert) the soil. We clear of any other plants that are in the way and that we do not want, some of which may be regarded as "weeds", whereas we think of them as a plant out of place. We then mulch, and in the mulch make rows into which we place our compost. And it is in the compost that we plant our seeds, or seedlings.

When transplanting our seedlings, we dip them in a mild seaweed solution which we find enables us to have an almost 100% success rate.

There are many other things which are required to be done, from time to time, on the farm. Keeping it free from accumulated rubbish, and getting rid of equipment which was effected by the fire which devastated the farm six or so years ago, is still an on-going chore. At the time of the fire we had a fuel tank which was almost empty. When the fire reached it, it blew up. It was most fortunate in that no-body was near it at the time, so it did not cause any great harm, except of course, to give us a great fright when it exploded with a loud bang. Today we had the opportunity of disposing of it.

In this photo you can see what remains of the tank being loaded onto the trailer prior to its dispatch to the scrap metal merchants.
To load it upon the trailer we used an old logging method where a chain was passed around the tank and it was winched into position, by the winch on the front of the Landcruiser.