Making the most of the good weather.

When you employ someone, (especially if they are your hard-working neighbour who knows a thing or two about building), things get done.

From a stack of timber to a fully fenced and gated dam in a week.  Wow. 

Hubby has spent the day fencing the top paddock, using the dam fence as the starting point.  He's now lying on the couch groaning about how much he aches!  I've been chopping and stump-swabbing gorse, planting trees, cleaning out rabbit hutches and feeding the bottomless stomachs of my children.

And admiring the baby bunnies.

Amazing how fast they are growing.  Not even a week old and they are furring up and have the fattest tummies.  Fluffy is obviously feeding them well.  She's also uber-protective.  Ever heard a rabbit growl?  Well, they do.  They also bite!

The interrelated to-do list.

Unexpected arrival but I'm grateful nonetheless!  This is the wood for fencing our waterhole.  And it was meant to arrive next week, but hey, I'm not going to complain because...

Once the waterhole is fenced, I can plant all around it.

Once the waterhole is fenced, I  Hubby can build a duckpen using the fence as one side.

Once the waterhole is fenced, we can continue from it and fence the top paddock.

Once the waterhole is fenced, I can use the electranet for it's original purpose - a movable run for the chickens.

Once the chickens are in their movable run and houses, we can demolish their current house, affectionately known as 'the abomination'.

Once the chickens are in their movable run and houses, I can plant WHEREVER I like and not have the cheeky sods dig it all out/eat it.

Look at him!  Sneaking under my chook deterrent wire netting!  Grrrrrr!

And here is one of my rabbits.  She looks very relaxed doesn't she.  She shouldn't!!  She's meant to have had babies today.  Ah well, maybe I'll get up in the morning and be pleasantly surprised.

Water, water everywhere, and lots and lots to drink.

Well the drought has well and truly broken.  We've had three days of rain.  My 25 000 litre water tank is overflowing and our dam is finally filling.

Which brings us to an urgent problem.  The dam needs fencing.  I guess it's not really a dam as we haven't dammed anything except a swale.  It's more a waterhole.  But whatever it is, when it's full it will be well over my five-year-old's head and a perfect drowning hole, being only about 30 metres from the house.

November 2009 when the waterhole was dug and now, May 2010, it's finally filling.  I have lots of planting to do around it.

We knew we'd have to fence it, of course.  We just put it off until it's desperate!  The netting you can see in the photo is Electranet and I purchased it to make a movable run for my chooks in an effort to have them more confined but still ranging on fresh grass.  The chooks haven't got to use it yet, we had to put it straight around the waterhole.  Unfortunately, my two-year-old showed us how clever she was and demonstrated to her big brother how to turn it off.  We've NEVER showed her this - the little minx picked it up all on her own.  (Never underestimate those children - they're quick!)

So, Hubby and I decided to sit down and do a budget and priority list.  You either love budgets or hate them - I hate the stark reality of them, but I do appreciate their necessity.  We listed everything we want to do out here in the immediate future (bar building the house - we would have to borrow big time for that and so far we're enjoying the shed that much, who needs a house?!) and then an estimated cost next to each one. 

Gulp.  The grand total:  $100,000.

We have a little bit of money put aside in the bank from when I was working, we've committed ourselves to some projects already and some are must-do's and by the time we'd married all this together we knew exactly what we can afford to do over the few months.  And it certainly wasn't the whole list!

It looks like I won't be getting a milking shed or a movable pig house, or a deck or a new car.  But we will have the subdivision completed, safe children and lots of trees planted.

A roll in the hay.

Yesterday I made my own hay. "Why not?" I thought. Surely you don't need a ginormous tractor, baler and scores of hefty young men?

Recipe for haymaking:
Cut the overgrown kikuyu with the ride-on lawnmower.
For a few days, kick it around every time you visit the chickens.
Once it's dry, rake it into sweet little piles.
Stuff it into old feed sacks, smash it down as hard as you can, that stuff takes up a lot of room.
Itch like CRAZY.
Run to have a shower before you scratch yourself to ribbons!

I'm going to use it for bedding for the rabbits I'll get soon and nesting material for the chickens. And because of the drought, hay bales are about $18 when they are usually about $5-$7. Mind you, I probably only picked up about two haybales worth...but hey, every bit counts, huh?

And then today, it rained.

So I was very glad - it was RAINING, which it hasn't done for about four months, and I'd already brought in the hay harvest (tongue firmly in cheek!).

The dam we had dug needs sealing before it will hold water. Apparently you do this by running a mob of cattle through it for a day when it's wet or driving round and round in it in your tractor. We don't have a mob of cattle and Dear Hubby didn't want to drive his tractor in in case he got stuck. So we used the children!

They didn't complain. Lets hope it works or we might have to coerce our calves into dam duty.

Just a little footnote. If you click on the top photo to make it big, you can see the block of land that's for sale. It's the big paddock behind the wheelbarrow and includes the half round barn and the big woolshed, plus lots more that you can't see. In fact, 180 acres or 72 hectares. We want it. In fact I want it so bad, I'm pretending not to so I don't get disappointed. It's too expensive for us so we are putting it out there to the universe to help us find a way. I'll keep you posted.

Earthworks.

The big yellow machine finally arrived. This has been a much anticipated step towards getting ourselves sorted out here on 'the land'.




This is the new shed site. Dear Hubby built the retaining wall........





And the digger flattened it all out. They scraped off the topsoil first and put it on top of my garden site. Then they flattened it all off, filling it up with subsoil from the duck pond.




This is a 'before' shot of where I wanted a duck pond. There is a drain or swale that runs across the hillside here and so it will now run off naturally into the 'pond'. I think pond doesn't quite encompass the scale of this thing, really it's a dam.

Here is an after shot taken from about the same spot, which doesn't even really show it properly. The edges are all tidied up now and I can see I'm going to have to do some serious planting around it and, of course, some sort of fencing.

I didn't intend a dam. I wanted a little pond that I could build a duck pen around with a house in the middle and another pen on the other side. Then I could use one pen at a time so that they didn't get completely bogged or bare. But now instead I have a huge dam. And it's ok, because now we have an extra water storage facility for summer. We can use it for the stock water troughs and it will still service the ducks, I'll just have to find a different way to utilise it.





This is actually where he started. Hubby built the framework of logs (old wharf posts) so that the fence can be built off them. The digger dug over the topsoil first, mixing in the truck load of horse manure I had dumped on top. Then I went to bed for a few hours ( I worked a night shift last night) and when I woke up, there was this:

The soil level is now about three feet higher than it was. THREE FEET!!! It's all lovely topsoil and loosened by the big yellw digger. The loosening goes down below for another couple of feet too. What would have taken me about 30 hours of hard double digging and then another 40 hours to shift all the topsoil from the shed site, was accomplished in about 30 minutes. It made me gulp to think about the fossil fuels that that beast consumes, but I can rationalise it when I think of the human hours this would have taken.

And now the digger has moved over to the neighbours to do some work over there. So we saved a bit of fuel by combining the transport costs of trucking the digger out here too.

So now I have lots of things to do. I have to find out how to care for dams, what to plant around them, and how to keep them healthy. I also have to fence the garden and start PLANTING!! I'm kinda overwhelmed with the thought of the garden because things have just taken such a giant leap forward, brain has to catch up.

So that is it for now. I have the night off tonight but will be caring for a vomity little girl instead.

And I will be admiring this:

My darling sister, Just This Side of Chaos, sent me this in a parcel. Isn't it gorgeous?