What I saw this morning...

My ducks eating their breakfast.  Ducks are rude and loud and obnoxious, then they shut up as soon as their beaks are full....hmmm, sounds like a few people I know.

Wildpuss, pretending to be a tiger.  He's not a fastidious cat and doesn't mind the dew.

Emma saying good morning to Wildpuss and Wildpuss not looking so amused.  Don't worry, WP, I don't like the wet nose either!

Them's thar turkeys on thar hills!

I love this one.  She looks like she's saying, "We are not amused," in her best posh voice.  As in, we are not amused that you are taking pictures BEFORE you feed us.

Such an enthusiastic, dopey dawg.  Being a labrador, trained as a gun dog, Emma feels she has to carry something in her mouth at all times.  Today she's found a bit of wood.  Usually it's a rock, which is bad.  Check out her blunted tooth.  She will drop them when we tell her too, but as soon as our back is turned...

And another pretty sunrise.  Can't help myself, I've a million shots of pretty sunrises.

Sunday Mumblings

It was frosty this morning.  Only our second frost this winter (and the first was yesterday).

But frosty mornings usually mean sunny days and, sure enough, today was lovely.

Everyone was out enjoying the sunshine.  The boss of the world thought he might herd the ducks.  They were having none of it, and fair enough, they're about twice his size.

The chooks have started laying.  They were hatched on New Year's Day, so bang on six months old.

Floppy (for obvious reasons) is a North Holland Blue, which looks very similar to Barred Rocks.

This girl is unnamed as yet and she's a mix of Light Sussex and Golden Laced Wyandotte.

We put the cows on the lawn to mow the grass.  Grass converting itself to beef, yum, yum.

I tried to work on my swallow quilt but the kids kept annoying me and each other so I got them outside for some sketching.  It worked a treat to get them settled down.

Mine's in the middle, but I think I like my daughter's on the left best.  Although my son's, on the right, might make an interesting quilting pattern!

Hope you had a lovely Sunday too.

Ready for your close up?

I can't show you the quilts I'm working on at the moment.  It's frustrating.  I've never had to do that before, but I guess rules are rules.

I want to enter them into the exhibition at Taupo Symposium and the rules state that they cannot be shown anywhere before.  And that includes blogland because it's public.

I'm new to the 'virgin quilt' rule and I think it's a fairly new rule for New Zealand, but I'm sure it's common practice in big quilt shows overseas.  I guess it makes for a fresh and interesting show because none of the quilts will have been seen before, but it does take away some of the joy of sharing my process.  What do you think about it?

So instead, I'm going to show you random pictures that I've been taking with my NEW camera!

We have a rewards card in NZ called FlyBuys and I redeemed some points for a flash new camera.  It was high-time - my old one was about nine years old and was a 3 megapixel (!).  Now I have 14 megapixels to play with and a much better macro function.  It's still a compact digital camera, but just so much better.  Bliss.

I have to resize them to upload them or they take forever.  But the quality is still fantastic in comparison.  Check out the grain my chicken is picking up from the ground.  They move so fast when pecking that I never could have captured that before.

See?  I can get really, really, really close!  Hmm.  Actually, I don't know if I want you to get that close to my stitching!

Have a great day.  I'm off to do some more playing with my camera quilting to meet my deadline!

Willing Workers

I haven't been in the vege garden for about six months.  I've done no weeding whatsoever.  Nil.  Nada.  Zip. And you could really really tell.  So I had a willing worker in the form of a teenage boy helping me out today.  Eye high weeds and borage and brassicas.  He wasn't much of a conversationalist but together we made a HUGE dent in the work.

You can see all the way through to the chicken pen in the background now.

Then after about five hours it began to rain in a relentless, very wetting kind of way.  So once we had piled up our weeds into two humongous piles I sent him off home with some money burning a hole in his pocket and the promise of more if he comes back tomorrow (if the rain stops).  

Then I got my other willing workers on the job.  I tempted the chickens in by throwing round a few handfuls of cracked corn and shut the gate behind them.  They will pick over and scratch around, finding weed seeds and slugs, snails and bugs, in a much more thorough way than I ever could.  (I'll let them out in a couple hours 'cause there's no shelter in there and they'll be getting all bedraggled.)

And do you like my shiny new gate?  I used to have a piece of plywood just lent up against the posts.  My mother in law jokes about how it took her 25 years to get a proper gate on her garden, so I should get used to my ply.  But Hubby came through after only three years!  (Actually the gate was for between the orchard and the top paddock but it turned out too big so my vege garden became the recipient.  I'm not complaining!)   

So there is hope for summer vegetables now.  Basil and tomatoes, potatoes and beans, mmmmmm!

Farm TV

These are for my sister, who requested pictures of the animals.  I've called it Farm TV, because that is what my hubby and I say to each other when we are going to sit out on the deck and have a cuppa.  "Come and watch Farm TV with me."  The animals never cease to amuse. 

Plus, this post fits in rather nicely with Kit Lang's - What do you see on your way to work?  This is what I see, they are my work (besides the kids of course).

 First up are the ducks.  They are the loudest and so get fed first.  A handful of grain on the grass and for the rest of the day they free roam and keep the slugs down in the orchard.

 Mama bunny is right next to the feed shed so she gets fed quickly too.  Plus she has eight babies with her and they go through a bit of food.  Here she is having a drink.

 And here are her babies munching their breakfast.  Cute huh?

 These two are out in a run on the grass - which is rather lush at the moment being spring and all.  They are part of a group of five boys destined for the pot.  They had five sisters who went to the pet shop. 

 Rooster chicks.  Destined for the pot too.  Their seven sisters went to a new home the other day.  There are big bonuses to being a girl if you're a chook.

 Big Red, the rooster.  He originally came from Laura at Our Wee Farm.  He was destined for the pot too, but he got a reprieve and because he is never aggressive, he might stay out of the pot for a good long while.

 Big White, on the other hand, is permanently locked up or he'll attack the children.  He's on the shortlist for the pot.

And here's what the girls give me.  Omelette's anyone?

All in the eye of the beholder.

 I made a flower to applique to a quilt.

 I liked it so much that I made another one.

 Then somebody (in fact, several somebodies) told me they look like chickens.

Chickens?  I thought I was the chicken crazy one.  They are FLOWERS people.  

They are most certainly NOT chickens.

Spring weather makes them wild(er).

My kids have been watching a version of Peter Pan on a DVD.  So naturally they want to prance around half nekkid with bits of fabric (nicked from my stash) draped around them and tucked in strategically.  A bit breezy I would have thought.  The weather is good, but not THAT good.  Still, when you run around chasing an imaginary Captain Hook up and down the woodpile, I guess that keeps you warm.

Hope you had a productive weekend.  I did nothing quilt related, but I did weed, compost and then re-plant a whole garden bed.  I also killed and plucked the chook that kept flying into the garden to dig up the new seedlings and we're having her for dinner tomorrow night. 

Sweet dreams!

Where is the farmlet at?

I thought I'd take you on a little walkabout this morning as I feed the animals.  Just to show you what is happening.

I've moved the chooks into the summer garden.  They've been here for a week or so, weeding, de-bugging, and manuring.  I threw in a bale of old hay for them to de-seed and to add some carbon.  And they are right next to the main garden so I throw them any slugs or snails I find - tasty!

These are chicks who are big enough to graduate from this rabbit hutch to an A-frame chicken run soon.

We had the warmest May on record apparently.  And even now that it's June there have been no frosts, the kikuyu grass is still green and growing.

A new bundle of kits.  There are seven in this batch.  We butchered nine rabbits and four roosters for the freezer last weekend.  For the amount of food the rabbits eat, they produce a good amount of meat, very economical.

I've been motivated in the garden lately after a lag period.  This is a purple broccoli seedling I planted yesterday.  I've planted red russian kale, red cabbage, cauliflower, spring onions, carrot and beetroot seeds and I've been transplanting all my strawberry runners into a new bed.
I need to add that I for some reason I'm having difficulty commenting on any one's blog (including my own).  So apologies, I'm listening and replying, you just can't hear me!

And now it's time for another cup of tea. 

A few rainy day pictures

It's raining here today.  Pouring in fact.  So I'm just sharing a few pictures I've taken over the last little while.  Can you see the cheeky bunny stealing chook food?  We had a bunch of half-wild ones born a while ago and one day they all got out.  We managed to recapture most of them but this wee one has continued to elude us.  But he's semi-friendly.  I think he's living in the chook enclosure because he always seems to be there when it's food time, but I know he can sneak out through the fence too. 

Did you ever read 'My cat likes to hid in boxes' when you were a kid?  Wild Puss crammed himself into this box for a wee cat nap today.  Can't say it looked very comfy!

And these two made me laugh so hard I just had to take a picture!  They are a couple of my chooks done with a recipe my MIL shared.  You rub salt and pepper and turmeric into the skin - I added dried mixed herbs too - and then stand the chook upright and cram a jar of beer/cider/wine up it's bum.  Roast for about 45 mins to an hour depending on the size of your chicken.

I think they look like a couple of old ladies at a show day.  They've taken their little fold up stools and they're sitting down for a wee rest and a gossip about who won the chutney and pickle section!

By the way - they tasted delicious!

This is a fish bin standing in as a wheeless wheelbarrow.  Fish bins are quite big (in case you were wondering about scale).  I could fill this six times over and not make a dent in the wilderness that is my vege garden.  In reality, I filled it once and then tipped that to the chickens and they didn't ask for more.

This is the wilderness that is my vege garden.  Buckwheat and cauliflower in the front, doing a sterling job of hiding the gone-to-seed kale, lettuce, swede.....well, gone-to-seed everything.

At least my slug patrol enjoys the wilderness - better habitat for all things slimy and crawly.

Ahhh!  A much more demure, restrained, orderly garden.  This one was my rooster pen.  They did a fine job of weed killing, fertilising and digging over.  I think I'll re-hire them next season.  They have a much better work ethic then I do.

Windyhill Farm Animals.

 Minty the lamb.  He is slowly being weaned and he has an appointment with a couple of rubber rings shortly.  He is boisterous and bouncy and would dearly love a playmate, but orphan lambs have been a little scarcer this year.

 These are the calves that I bottle-reared last year.  Growing fat and sassy on spring grass.

 This is Gloria - I still have hopes about her becoming my housecow.  I should have de-horned her when she was a baby but I didn't get around to it.  She lets me scratch her butt (and if I have bit of chow with molasses, well, she'll let me touch her anywhere!)

 This was Gloria when we first got her.  Ouch, painfully skinny.

And that's her in the middle.  She'll never be a fat cow after her underfed start, but for her she is nicely rounded around the rump.  Isn't it amazing how much darker she's gotten as she's grown?

And would a post about my animals be complete without a chook photo?  These are some eight week old chicks that I'm going to sell.  Two Light Sussex roosters (they'll probably end up in the pot) and three Light Sussex pullets.  Anyone need an egg factory?  $12 each. Cluck, cluck!