And on the Cloud farm today...

The weather is absolutely beautiful at the moment on the cloud farm. The rain and associated sogginess has passed and the days are starting crisp and turning warm later, beautiful blue cloudless skies. Great weather for doing the hard yakka jobs that I have been avoiding all summer.


Bartle Frere at dusk from the top paddock.

We have spent the day cutting up firewood from the timber I had previously stacked in the orchard to dry. I also took the opportunity to level several tree stumps flat with the ground so I can mow over them. The littlest Cloud Farmer supervised the operation and gave a running critique at all times.

About one tonne ready to be unloaded to the wood racks at the house.

Mid morning I saw a flash of something red and blue out in the bottom paddock. As I watched a large male cassowary emerged over the hill before turning and stalking back to the rain forest. I tried to get a photo but cassowaries have very good vision and I was unable to get any where near him.

This is a file photo but it is pretty much what I saw.

 We have seen several recently. A month ago a female and two half grown youngsters were sighted by the child bride in the same paddock. The bottom third of our property is native rain forest and it will remain so for as long as we are here. A bit of space for all to live in.
Still waiting for the next batch of piglets and the pig pens are thoroughly overgrown. This is quite intentional as the overgrowth supplies a considerable portion of the food for the next pigs to come. In amongst the weeds and grass I have sown all sorts of grains and tubers as well as pumpkins and it is all fertilized by the last batch of piggies free of charge.

 I have put a pair of goat wethers (castrated bucks) in there to fatten in the meanwhile. They are Boer goats and an excellent meat breed. I lived on goat meat for years when I was younger and I consider it to be one of the best meats of all. If you have never eaten good chevon (goat meat), it is like prime lamb but without all the fat. It is absolutely superb!

The goats were supplied by a friend who could not house them any longer, I fatten them, we will slaughter them together and each party gets half the meat.

Bah humbug.

I've been mooching about the house for three weeks now. Home from work with a broken rib. The holiday has been nice granted, but the inability to use the time on many of the waiting projects galls me. On the plus side all of the small jobs that have been ignored for ages are now done. At the time of writing I think the rib is finally coming good and I am slowly getting into the heavier jobs I have been longing to do.

I have finally admitted that I will not have the hot house up for winter. As we can wait no longer I have turned the veggie garden over and will be planting out the winter crops soon. I have about three tonnes of compost, carefully hoarded, to enrich the areas that the excavator has denuded of good topsoil. Digging still causes me some difficulty - the pushing action in using a shovel, so I have yet to work out how to move all of the compost to where I need it. I might be able to cadge the use of a small loader from a neighbour. Otherwise the child bride and I will move it one barrow at a time in small doses.
Yesterday I placed my seed order for the winter planting. Mostly brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli), peas, carrots, kale, lettuce, shallots, radish, leeks and some swedes. We don't bother growing onions or potatoes as they are grown in abundance in this region and can be obtained cheap or free most years. If somehow we are suddenly able to move ahead on the hothouse then a few plants will just have to get squashed in the process.

We are now milking twice each day as it is time to wean Timmy-the-little-bastard from his mother. I think his mother Anna is actually quite relieved. Meanwhile Timmy-I-vote-for-veal made his displeasure known by bellowing day and night for a week. He was probably quite overdue to be weaned. Anna's milk yield has been up and down for months but it levelled off at ten litres per day as soon as he was away from her. This indicates he was drinking erratically and was already getting most of his sustenance from the grass.
With all of this extra milk and the time on my hands I have been madly making cheese over the last couple of weeks. Cheddar, Farmhouse, Haloumi, Quarg, Ricotta, Blue, Camembert and I am trying a Stilton which is pretty much touch and go at the moment. Not an easy cheese. I have also managed to finally track down an aftermarket thermostat for the cheese fridge so I can age the cheeses at 12 degrees Celsius. The warmest the fridge would do before was 8 degrees.

When we are not making cheese we have taken to giving ducks a cuddle. Actually I am checking them so see how well they are fattening (and they are growing nice and plump too). The ducks have not yet guessed at my motives and probably think I am just the local friendly pervert. Probably better if they don't work it out.

Boo!

Ok so I know it is only a python and not even a very big one at that but coming face to face (literally) with this character first thing in the morning is still not good for the heart!

Annabelle thought it was hilarious! I swear she chuckled all the way through the milking afterwards.



In other news, the littlest cloud farmer is most pleased with his new bed. It was a very kind donation from our most wonderful neighbours. Repainted now and with a pair of hand print smudges from the little feller on the end board. I wanted a pair of neat hand prints but the young artist had other ideas.

 

Chook pen is done

Well it is done, sort of, nearly, with just a few bits to go, near enough. Sure I still have to build the nesting boxes and only one of the three pens actually has a water drinker installed and I still need to fill the floors in with gravel, but we could wait no longer and so we have moved the chooks in. Rather than avoid much flapping squawking and swearing, the child bride and I staged a covert night time raid on the feed shed and the old chook pen where the chooks roosted for the night. I had wanted to do it in the proper style for all covert night ops - black clothes, cool military webbing, night-vision goggles, tazers and handcuffs but the wife would have none of it. I had to settle for humming the tune from mission impossible as I dazzled each bird in turn with a torch as the missus crept within range and seized the unfortunate fowl before tucking it under my arm, giving me a clout behind the ear and a whispered warning to knock off the bloody noise. Then with each of us fully loaded with a cargo of indignant poultry we transported them to their new home where they will remain incarcerated for the next fortnight to get used to the new pen.
We also rounded up all of the excess ducks and the spare turkey to be fattened on a mash of milk or whey with cracked corn and millrun. In a few weeks time they will "come inside" for dinner.

We have had problems with the big native ravens and currawongs in the past. They are dreadful egg thieves and will attack chicks and ducklings if they can. With that in mind I built these pens to be as raven proof as possible. One idea is the chooks daily access door- a small hatch down low in the door to their pen. I find the ravens dislike having a limited escape route and will usually not go into the pen through such a small door.

Between the rain and the heat the bananas have gone, well, bananas. I counted sixteen bunches this morning. For some reason the local possums and friar birds have not destroyed them so far this year. Last year I had to bag every bunch with old feed bags to try to save something from the local wildlife. Don't get me wrong, I have no objection to sharing as long as we get at least one bunch.

The weather is changing although it feels a little early yet. The nights are beginning to get chilly, blankets on the bed and the days are still warm. We are getting those beautiful blue skies that come with winter. I love this time of year. I am also getting to enjoy it a little more than usual. I am currently nursing a fractured rib due to occupational violence. I know I am a dreadful patient, I find it very hard to just sit about the house and having a sore rib nagging constantly certainly doesn't improve the mood. Oh well.  



Back again

Well it has been over a month since I last posted. Sorry about that.
There were no particular calamities -my computer simply broke down. The replacement part, of course, took weeks to order in.

Life here has continued in its usual cloudy way. Both the trees in the orchard and the littlest cloud farmer have grown. The chook pen is pretty much complete but not much else has advanced and the wet season is finally making a late appearance. The hen duck sat a nest behind the feed trough in the stock yard and managed to make a complete mess of it. The turkey hen is sitting seven eggs behind the compost bin- so far so good. The other turkey "hen" proved to be a gobbler the other day when it put on quite a display and so will be going into the fattening pen along with the excess ducks. The rain and warm weather has given us a good lush crop of grass in both fields and the cows are waxing fat and healthy. Soon I will bring one of our steers back from a neighbours place where he has been keeping the grass under control. The stocks are getting low in the freezer. I really should tan the hide this time as I need a new workshop apron. Last time I did a goat for the freezer I tanned the hide and it worked out well.

Needless to say, I did it in the traditional manner. Salted and dried before getting scraped and bark tanned for a month. Good durable leather was the result. Thin though, won't make a workshop apron but good for drum skins or gloves. I am told cat is the best drum skin though.

The weather has been giving us about an inch of rain per day lately which is about normal for the wet season. Thank god I remembered to replace the weather side roof before the rain hit. Above is a typical Cloud farm day during the wet season. I like it.

The Heeeeeaaaaat.

It is still hot! The sort of heat that drains the energy and leaves you in a big ball of sweat if you try to do anything at all. The sort of heat that will drive man and beast into the shade from mid morning to lie dormant until the afternoon breezes drive the heat away and the shadows grow. The farm becomes silent save the noise of the cicadas and the dark shade beneath each tree holds the still forms of the livestock as they pant through the midday heat. Each breeze is savoured while it lasts. Finally the afternoon sun diminishes as the evening wind comes in and the noise resumes. I have always loved that time of day. It has fond memories of sultry evenings sitting under the stars as they come out, drinking wine into the evenings as the perfume of the night flowers scent the darkness. Good times indeed but gone now.
We have had a good wack of rain since I last wrote, although it is long gone now. The same rain which headed down the coast to deliver storms and flooding to folks down south. All of the water tanks are full now which brings great relief. The newly cemented tank is full of crystal clear water and holding well despite a small weep on the far side. I will be dumping the water several times over the wet season in order to help the cement cure. So when it is next emptied, I will give the inside nearest the weep a wipe of cement paste which should solve the problem. Wipe the weep.
Despite the rain, the wet season is not yet here. Yes I know that is a contradiction but I mean to say that the monsoon trough has not yet formed (despite the opinions of some hysterical weather reporters who really should know better, have a look at the satellite charts folks!). The trough is a thick band of cloud that forms over Papua new Guinea and then descends over the north and north-east coast of Australia between January to March- usually. With global warming screwing things up who knows what will happen in the future.

January.

It's hot! Unusually hot for this part of the world. I know we are in the tropics but our farm is at altitude and we usually experience a very temperate climate. So when we suffer temperatures at 38C (100F for the metrically challenged) we feel it!
Still, we did get a good wash of rain and the grass is growing again. This may not sound like news to some folks but to us grass IS the staff of life. Good grazing is directly responsible for a large portion of our diet. With the grass growth comes the changes in season and the life that it brings. Grass seed attracts the finches to feed and nest each year. I love watching these guys go about their business.

We have also finished off most of the work in the orchard with the felling of the last two trees to go. One pink cedar (also called sarsaparilla) and one black wattle. We now have plenty of firewood for this winter.

The ham is finally ready and I can report it is a success. Although the outside of the hams turned a rather unappetising grey, the inside was firm and pink.
Texture and taste is much like a prosciutto which is what I was aiming for. Fine shaved cured ham with a wedge of farm cheese and good wine. Does it get better than that?

Finally the chook pen is nearing completion after a long wait for time and materials to come together. A very kind gift from my parents allowed us to splash out and by the wire needed to enclose the yards. This is heavy duty chicken mesh and is *quite* expensive but I prefer to use it -because it is cheaper.
Does that sound like a contradiction?
Simply put, if I use the proper materials then I will not need to replace this mesh in my lifetime. Having to replace a cheaper mesh twice would be a lot more expensive in both money and time than doing the job properly in the first place.