Try pushing this out!

Hmmm, Hayley mentioned there was a big egg in the carton… I would have hated being the hen who pushed this out… may need to find gigantic egg cartons!

Gambling with the Frost

I got home a little early today and after checking the long range forecast for my area, I decided to take the risk and start planting out seeds. Well kind of a risk. I just started with a small batch of corn and will do some more tomorrow. The Variety is Balinese Sweet Corn and it is not a F1 cross so we should be able to seed save so long as I get my planting scheme right. Direct sowing corn seeds won’t be too much of a risk with the frost if we do get another one (the reality is we will I must say) as they will take about 2 weeks to germinate in this temperature anyway and by that stage, the frost risk will drop significantly.

In the meantime, I will rig up a rope light heat mat and get some more seeds started this way and hopefully when I get back from overseas, I will have a whole bunch of seedlings ready to plant out!

Here is a picture of my ever helpful helper sowing the corn seeds!

Apprehension

In 5 days time, I will be on a plane on the way to Vietnam for a 12 day stay. Don’t get me wrong, I am excited by this, but my emotions are much more apprehensive than they are excited. I will be going with my school, helping to supervise 15 students in Grade 6 and Year 7. The trip itself sounds awesome and I am so incredibly lucky to be able to go with the group, albeit as their “interpreter”. My Vietnamese is not too bad and will well and truely pass for most things, but this is not why I have a sense of apprehension.

Since moving to this property of ours, I have totally lost my desire to travel. I still wish to visit the beautiful places around the world and see all the ancient wonders, but the pull that once had on me is no longer as strong. The travelling can wait, there are more important things in life to do and travelling, to me, is an extreme luxury. Instead, the more time I spend here with my beautiful (and often crazy 🙂 ) family, the more I connect with the land, and the life we are forging for ourselves. The dream, as difficult and rediculously far fetched as it may seem to some, is something that drives me to do what I do, for the sake of the land, the environment and ultimately my children.

It is not that our famliy was not happy before we moved here, we were, very happy infact and doing what we loved on a small scale. But the move to the countryside, the open space, the fresh air, the farmyard animals, the orchard, the veggie garden, the peace and the quiet, has all enhanced our lives so much more. Sure we still have our disagreements, and dinner time is almost always trying, but there just seems to be a sense of calm that was not there before.

So am I apprehensive? Yes, but only because I will miss my family and miss my home.

Hint: When moving cows, shut the gate!

Well I guess the title says it all! It was cow moving time again and this time I thought to myself, “I’ll let the cows into the winter paddock to have a good old run around while I set the next two cells up ready for grazing.” And a good ol’ run they had! They wandered down to the front fence and ate mouthfuls of lush green grass and kept wandering the fence line. Mean while, I was up setting the electric fence and knew that Lightning would easily and eagerly help me move the girls and boy back to the cells. Busy as I was, I forgot to shut the double gates to the winter paddock and the cows made their way to the orchard! As soon as I saw them I dumped my stuff and bolted up there to get them back in. Lightning made short work of them, but they got damn close to having a nibble on the apple trees!

So the moral of this story… shut the bloody gate!

Window Sill Seedling and Potato Popping

About a week ago, our seed stock arrived from Eden Seeds and I was itching to get them into some seedling raising mix. As mentioned in a previous post, we are still getting pretty significant frost, so severe in fact that the greenhouse seedlings have either stalled, or got frost burn… So once the seeds arrived, I decided to raise the seedling inside on the woodheater as my heat mat. As much as I would like to get myself a large heat mat, that will have to wait until next year. For now, it is the wood heater, the greenhouse and the window sill.

It has been pretty amazing to see the results I have to say! After only a few days, we had some tomato seeds germinate as well as some lettuce seeds! So as they germinate I will transfer them out into the greenhouse and the sunlight. I could keep them inside, but the seedlings wil then get leggy and weak, so out they go.

A month ago I put in the first batch of the bulk potatoes. Well I am happy to report that they are starting to pop through the ground and will soon be ready for mounding.