Soon to be hatching.

This coming Saturday is the due date. (If only human's due dates were so certain, lol!). I was meant to be working my last morning shift that day and managed to swap it so I could supervise (be nosy really, I've never seen chicks hatch in an incubator yet).

I'm getting a little nervous - have I kept the temperature right? Have I kept the humidity right? What if I've stuffed it all up? I candled them on day 7 and on day 9 and ended up throwing away four that I was certain were infertile. I cracked them open gingerly to confirm and I had got it right for all four. That makes me a little (just a little) more confident. So much easier with a broody chook, you can blame it all on her if it goes wrong!

Speaking of broody's, I have two hens sitting on clutches now. The neighbour's hen (her one and only surviving) and Fidget, my lavender Araucana. We wait with bated breath.

I have two little turkey poults in my brooder box. My hubby whipped a large one up out of plywood the other day in preperation for the chicks, but it's getting a trial by turkey first. I had trouble getting these guys to eat at first (they were wild poults) but give them a moving target and they're on to it! That's a slater going down the hatch I think.

And it pays not to get too engrossed in other people's blogs. All was quiet, too quiet. No more sticky labels left. "Stripey!" She said.

Work in Progress Wednesday

I know that it's Friday, I do, I'm just annoyed that yet again I've missed WIP Wednesday. I always have good intentions. I think about it, sometimes I even snap what I'm doing, and then before I know it, it's Friday and I've missed WIPW again.

So here is a terrible photo on a Friday instead. This is a little quilt I'm working on for a new baby who I haven't met. Last night I sewed all the blocks together so it's even further on its way to completion.

The other things I'm working on can't be shown here because they are Christmas gifts or swaps for fellow bloggers - can't spoil a surprise!

Morning moosings.

Rumpelsteakskin. He's finished his milk and now nibbling on a little meal, but he'd rather have more milk please.

Henrietta Hereford Hamburger, who has always shunned my attentions. She's really only hanging around because her mates think I'm alright. Oh, and there's calf meal on the offing.

And this little beauty came to visit today. Both my kidlets have butterfly nets, given to them by I can't remember who. I don't really like the idea of them, chasing down innocent little beasties just for fun. (Says me who was earlier scrabbling around on hands and knees catching slaters to feed to my two new turkey poults.) But if they hadn't had one, I had no way of stopping this little guy from buzzing himself to death on my ceiling. And actually, the kids have only ever used the nets to catch each other...

Goals.

I’ve spent this afternoon thinking. In an abstract, distracted kinda way. Whilst aimlessly wandering around doing a little tidying, a little cooking, a little rejoicing that my daughter seems to be coming right after the last few days of vomiting.

How did I sleep through this?

It’s probably been brought on by the massive earthmoving endeavors of yesterday. They represented a major step forward in the development of this piece of land. It got me reflecting on what I actually want, where I want to head with my life, which, of course, has a lot to do with what I want to do with this block of land.

My husband owns one business and ½ owns another. The first business he bought as a one-man band operation and has built it up over the last six years to the point where he has put in a manager and stepped away. He now works in the other business and they are slowly building that one up. He periodically contemplates selling the first business, but vacillates because it gives him a decent drawing every week though it still causes him stress (admittedly a whole lot less now he has a manager). Now he is thinking about selling it again and using the profit towards a property of some description.

Stainless steel work my husband has done.

I am hesitant because it is the drawing that really has allowed me to resign from work myself. And I resigned in part to spend time on THIS property, planting an orchard, tending a large vege garden, raising animals and homemaking. Yet his plans for another block of land could either mean uprooting us from here, renting it out and starting again somewhere else, or running some sort of stock raising system that would see our weekends taken up with visiting and overseeing the other block.

However, new challenges always excite me. I think I’m very good at starting things, getting enthusiastic about things, but not necessarily following them through to the nitty gritty end. And I guess I’m a bit at that stage here. I have big plans for this place but the next few steps are hard work and I won’t really start to see rewards from here for a while. So it would be easy (in a way, because uprooting is never very easy) to be diverted by starting a new project.

I think just writing this is making me see it a whole lot clearer. I need to convince my husband that whether or not he sells his business, we need to get this place up and running before we move on or consider more challenges.

They're gorgeous when they're happy.

I was just having a little run back through some of my early posts when I began this blog. It seems like forever but I have only been blogging for seven months. And back then when I started, we weren’t even living out here. In seven months we have:

Converted a dirt-floored shed into a three bedroom house,
Finished renovating our old house and rented it out,
Moved 4 people, 2 dogs and 11 chooks from one house to the other,
Got used to using a long-drop for a loo,
Built a very large chicken run and figured out new systems of managing the chooks,
Built the fence foundations for a large vegetable garden,
Designed and organised for the building of a large shed extension and verandah,
Built a retaining wall for said shed foundation,
Bought 5 milk-fed calves and learned how to managed them (still learning!)
Sent a little boy off to school,
Planted trees, mowed paddocks, battled gorse, lugged horse poop around,
Made the decision for me to resign from paid work,
Had major earthworks done for the shed, vege garden and had a dam dug,
And all the while, done the other things that you do, like work, sleep, quilt, plan birthday parties, cook, nurse sick kids, walk dogs etc.

Hamilton Botanic Gardens. One day my place might look like this...

I guess what I’m trying to say to myself is, hey! Go easy, you’ve actually done quite a bit and even though you spend a bit of time wandering round aimlessly, you are still achieving things. Whilst you still have plenty to do to get this place to ‘dream lifestyle’ stage, packing it in and starting somewhere else is just going to put you back at square one, don’t give up now!

With that sorted out, I guess I need to look more closely at what I (or we!) want to achieve out here in the next wee while and do some step-by-step goal setting to help us get there. But I think I’ll save that for another post…..

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?