Traditionally autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering and preserving and stockpiling. Here are some of the stockpiles and harvests happening on Oaklands ...

This is the feed shed, where I am stockpiling small squares of lucerne

hay and all the grain, chaff and mixes for the coming winter. 

It's also a nice warm place for Tenchi to hang out and 

pretend he's harvesting rats.

This is the beginning of a round bale stockpile. I was lucky enough to find a source of grass/lucerne blend and I'm aiming for 18 bales to last three months. There are seven here so I'll be collecting for a while.

The borlotti beans that burned off in summer are doing better in the cooler weather. I may get a decent harvest before the first frost. If you click on the picture to enlarge it you can see the green and scarlet bean pods.

Part of the water stockpile, this is the lower dam. The boat at the close edge (which doesn't float) 

is a handy level. When this dam is full the boat is completely covered.

 An unexpected stockpile, the contractors removing the old poles are happy

to drop them off at our place for using as fence posts. The day after this
picture was taken they dropped off another six and there are four more to come shortly.

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Another visitor shot, the kangaroo family that shares this place and next door. Male on the left, female and joey on the right. Remember that you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

I suspect they are doing it tough and would not object to them sneaking in to share the sheep's round bale. It might be too close to the house for them, though.

We had a few more visitors, there is obviously a sign at the front gate that only animals can see !

I was down at the dams talking to the sheep before bringing them up for supper and lo and behold a ram appeared at next door's fence ! He seemed very interested in my ewes, and Boof marched them all off up the hill away from the stranger as fast as his stumpy legs would go.

By the time we walked up the hill and over to the round bale near the feed shed the strange ram had raced down the driveway next door, made his way along the road to our driveway and was walking in our gate ! I shut the sheep paddock gate fast and then the front gate so he couldn't get back out onto the road and called the LHPA ranger to come and check his tag.

Igor the White Suffolk Ram

We managed to get him into the race and took his PIC number from his ear tag. As the ranger was leaving to go back to the office to run the ID, three ewes appeared at the front gate from the other direction ! I rushed them into our paddock to keep them off the road, much to Igor's delight as first he found food and water and then the patron saint of sheep delivered him a harem !

Visiting Ewes 

The ewes looked familiar, and once the ram from next door appeared at the fence with the remainder of his flock the suspicion was confirmed, these ewes had escaped from next door. I called the Council ranger, who deals with stray stock, and the neighbours to let them know I had some of their ewes, and went out to check on everyone. Next door's ram and Igor were discussing Igor's advances on the three straying ewes. I can't say it made much impression on him !

Igor and next door's White Dorper having words about the ewe situation

The ranger and the neighbour arrived at the same time and we were able to separate Igor from the ewes by stealth and locked him in the lambing pen with some food. Then we cut the boundary fence and returned the ewes to their flock. At that point I realised the back gate of the lambing pen was open and my flock had gone in to be stickybeaks. Igor started making sweet eyes at Boof's ewes and it was on for young and old !

We rushed over to separate the two rams and stopped short as they crashed head on. All three of us looked at each other in amazement, the impact had been nothing short of devastating, but the two rams just sat back on their heels for a second. Knowing Boof already had a back injury from previous silly buggers, there was no time to waste.

Grabbing some pieces of metal pipe we all ran in, banging the pipes together, distracting the rams from each other and chasing the whole herd into the yards. Once all were there we did some rapid fire drafting and sorted my lot from Igor (and I have never been so glad of a relaxed flock and an obliging flock ram as I was right then) and parked him in the properly secured lambing pen for the night.

The ranger and her co-worker came back next morning with the ute and a large dog cage on the back. One good look at Igor told them that he wasn't going to fit in that cage willingly or unwillingly so they went away and came back with the cattle trailer. Igor loaded like a pro, probably glad to get away from the madhouse and the detective work of tracking down his owner commenced.

Turns out the people who owned the PIC that was on his ear tag sold a batch of older rams in Dubbo in March, they came from a couple of hundred kilometers away. The only batch that didn't go to slaughter were sold to an agent, who only bought rams for one farmer that day. He lives on the other side of town so we have no idea how Igor got over here ! As of today I am waiting on news from the ranger as to whether the owner came to claim him and whether they can put together the story of his walkabout.

He's actually a good natured ram, he consistently ran around us rather than at us, and did everything we asked with no fuss. I hope there is a harem for him to go to.

The weather has just turned cold. We're using the new reverse cycle air conditioner on heat for the first time tonight, the signal for warming the house was when Ryo Okhi and Asante (two of the cats) were cold enough to touch backs for the heat when curled up. Normally they hold each other in contempt.

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The time has also come to dry Big Moo off. The dry weather has continued to pull all the nutrition out of the pasture so she is down to one litre a day, and with the end of daylight saving I'm struggling to get her milked in the gap between work and dark. Drying her off now will enable her to put that extra energy towards staying warm and give me time to start training Flora now that Edo is getting old enough to wean. Flora isn't having any trouble getting enough nutrition, I've never seen any animal stack away the amount of food she fits in ! She looks nine months pregnant with triplets and it's all food ...

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The vege garden is now in autumn mode.Onions, garlic, radishes, spinach/silverbeet, peas and beans are now up and starting to get going. Hoping the beans have enough time to crop before the first frost as summer was too hot. They are predicting a long autumn so you never know. We look like still having sweet potato, potato and artichokes to harvest. Having a full tank of water pumped up from the dam is allowing the winter plantings as there has been no rain.

We are having a small harvest of tomatoes now the extreme heat has passed, next year we might try all of the tomatoes in pots under a shadehouse.

Artichokes in flower, they are related to sunflowers and 

I understand they are called sunchokes in the US.

Asparagus in the first year. They should die off over 

winter and then come back with lots of shoots in spring.

The birdhouse among the grapevines

A couple of new arrivals around at the new home for some of our ewe lambs. Two of the damara cross ewes have lambed, Annie had a little ewe lamb and Boots had twins, one of each. In the dorper camp, Bunny had twin boys but lost one to a fox and Poppy had a ewe lamb but rejected her. Poppy had the really traumatic birth last season and that lamb, Friday, didn't survive past a few days. She clearly isn't going to be a great mum, but she does throw a nice lamb.

 Ginny at left, Anne (holding the bottle) Lilly (Poppy's daughter) and Poppy

Lilly has been raised mainly on raw fresh milk from Big Moo and has been thriving. Apparently she's also slipped into the gap left by Bunny's loss to a fox and is taking her extra milk. This is a twofold bonus, keeping Bunny's udder healthy and supplementing Lilly with sheep milk.

 Thyme, one of Boots' twins

Our chicken flock is stabilising as Frank and Pippi reach maturity. Pippi is laying small pullet eggs nearly every day and Frank is looking to lure some girls off the other two roosters for his harem. I think I will pick up a couple of young hens for him to avoid trouble...

 Pippi

 Frank

Just throwing in a shot of Jimi, the first hen hatched on the place. Jimi is an araucana x wyandotte and exhibits the wyandotte feather pattern and the araucana head feathers. Not a pretty hen, but she lays a pale green egg and is one of the most regular layers.

Jimi

DH has been busy taking photos of some of the scenery. It's good to have a reminder about how lovely it is here despite the dryness and heat sometimes.

 Powerpole at sunset

 Windmill in the afternoon sun

 Full moon at dusk

The windmill in reflection

This is my favourite :-)

Here's a couple of pics of things that are going on around the place, usual or unusual.

Had a visitor this week. A juvenile shingleback lizard stuck in the fence. He spent the day lounging around on a hot water bottle before being released into the afternoon sun.

Essential Energy has been replacing power poles as they prepare to double the line capacity. We've had the wooden pole on our property replaced with a big concrete one already. This setup is where the big line is crossed by a smaller line. When they are ready to work on the big line the net is spread between the two so that if a cable drops it can't short the other one out.

A typical pose for Boof. He likes to sit like this while keeping an eye on his girls. He looks very dog-like when he lifts a hind leg to scratch behind his ear :-)

The last month has held some ups and downs. On the up side we had two inches of rain over a weekend, nice and slow. The pasture is coming on nicely, and if we get some follow up rain we might have some to go into winter with.

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The catheads (caltrops, three corner jacks) went nuts without much grass to crowd them out, so DH has been spraying them as fast as he can. Normally we tend to pull burrs out rather than spray, but we are looking at a carpet of over eight acres, so spraying it is. It's meant that the livestock are confined to unsprayed paddocks for a week, but we were hand feeding anyway and it gives those paddocks another week of uninterrupted growth.

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I am preparing the vege garden for winter veges. We seem to have more luck in winter. Summer has been either too damp and hot and we lose half of the plants to mould or insects, or too dry and hot and the plants just cook. Winter is cool enough to avoid the insects and mould and we can water enough to keep up with evaporation if it doesn't rain.

This year I am putting in spinach and silverbeet, onions and peas, and the frost tolerant salad green varieties, including mescalun and rocket. I am also taking a shot at sufficient growing time before the frost to have another go at borlotti beans, which burned off during summer. We still have a few plants left to harvest. The jerusalem artichokes which yielded nothing in the wet summers have loved the dry heat this year. We have two zucchini just fruiting up, asparagus planted for next year that is doing well under the grape vine, and sweet potatoes, the dark horse of the garden.

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All the chickens that are going to lay are now laying, even Pippi who is delivering little pullet eggs. The three roosters are getting along ok, while Frank is taking whatever opportunities he can with the other hens, Brewster and Shadow only chase him away.

The cattle are all fat and glossy, though they would dearly love to be grazing rather than eating from the round bale. Flora is two and a half months pregnant with her jersey cross calf, Big Moo is yet to be AI'd as I am waiting on the rain ...

I attended the dispersal sale of Allambie Lowlines, the stud that Jack came from. It was a sad day, as the herd had belonged to a lady that had passed away. There were more cattle than buyers, so the prices were quite low for such quality cattle. The lady I attended the sale with and I did bid on a few, but the ones we liked were the most popular and we were outbid every time.

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The sheep have been fine with the exception of Molly, who had pneumonia and ketosis (being off food to the point of starving). She had to be drenched with sugars, have antibiotic and vitamin B complex shots, confined to the lambing pen and supplied with every tempting treat available until she started easting again. Thankfully that took only a week and a half and she is back with the scrum. A sheep is never truly happy on their own. 

I tried an experiment with the hay. If there is no barrier between the sheep and the round bale they pull it all out and walk on it, wasting alot of it. The hay ring is designed to stop that, but the gaps are too big and the sheep can climb in. I tested using fencing mesh with a small bale and that seemed to work well...

So I tried it with a round bale and the sheep merely climbed on the mesh until it formed a skirt around the lower third. Benny was only the first of the mountain goats !

There's been a few developments since the last post. For one, we had the windmill repaired and now we are pumping water from the dam up to the vege garden tank and the "horse tank" which supplies the cattle at the moment. Both were virtually empty.

We've had some reptile excitement, a black snake in the house that escaped back the way he came, a bearded dragon that had been clipped by a car and was taken to the wildlife hospital at the zoo, and a carpet python that has been released into the feed shed to chase rats.

 Bearded Dragon

 Carpet Python being held by the WIRES handler

The cattle are up at the house, the rented pasture having been eaten too low for them to get a belly full. It is an awful lot more convenient for milking, I now have a roof over my head and a shelf for all the doo-dads.

DH fixed up the cattle trough with a float valve and shield so the cattle now have fresh water without me having to fire up the pump twice a day.

This magpie joined the visitors at the birdbath in the heat.

We had a brief downpour of 45mm in an hour that has the grass all excited. If we can get some followup rain we may even have a little pasture going on. We lost power during the storm, and therefore there was no house water pump. The rain was so heavy we took our showers on the front lawn :-)

Have some sad news. Burke and Wills, our pair of geese, were killed by a fox last night. We found them this morning and I am gutted. We tried to keep them safe and I thought being such big birds a safe stableyard would be enough. But they were wandering the paddock in the cool of the night looking for something to eat and probably stood out like big white targets. They can't see to fly at night and the fox separated them. I hope that they are paddling in the perfect dam surrounded by soft green grass now :-(

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Here's a photo that sums up how dorpers feel about food. We had to add extra crossbars to the hay ring to keep the sheep out as it was designed for cattle. As you can see, they are were a limited success.

Medea, flock leader and chief piggy.

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We had a mini tornado on Friday. Lots of downed branches and scattered belongings. 3 mm of rain accompanying it, almost an insult !

 The sheep hoochie picked up and tossed. 

So glad there were no sheep in it !

 Branches off the big ironbark pinning the fence down.

A young kurrajong tree blown over.

While I get the next post sorted out, here are some of the visitors to our bird bath during the extreme heat lately.

White Wing Choughs

Related to crows, but travel in flocks. Differentiated in flight by a flash of white on their wings. These guys spend the day hunting and come back every half hour or so in the heat to freshen up. If you click on the pic to enlarge it you can see the red eyes of the adult birds.

 A Peewee and some of the resident Apostle Birds

 

The Peewee is a magpie relative. An opportunist insectivore he'll have a go at whatever is around. Their signature behaviour is relentless attacking of windows and car mirrors. They probably live their lives with a perpetual headache.

The Apostle Birds are so named because they get around in flocks of a dozen or more. Related to the crows, they are also smart and noisy and have a sense of humour. They squabble like a large italian family and will battle with the chickens, sheep and cows for food.

 A Rosella tests the water

This little guy is part of the parrot family. He's pushier than his size suggests and will take on a gang of Apostle Birds for access to the water. They've been taking the unripe fruit from the orchard and grapevines. I am ok with this, it's a hard year for wildlife and nothing is going to make it to ripe with the drought anyway.

This is his mate sitting in the Wollemi Pine (a dinosaur tree) above the birdbath. She's trying to keep cool by letting air flow under her wings. The micro-climate under the tree where the birdbath is must be pleasant.

 Grey Crowned Babblers and a juvenile Grey Butcherbird

The young Butcherbird is fully fledged and able to fly well, but his parents bring him to the birdbath on the hot days to wait while they hunt. He's a relative of the kookaburra, a carnivore.

The Babblers are a rare species, on the watch list for spotters. We have two flocks that come through on a regular basis, and they are a pleasure to have around. They have a bubbling babble call, and are active and curious. They dismantled a shaving mirror that had been left out and moved the two mirror pieces across the yard and out into the paddock one flip at a time. We discovered one in the bottom of a hole which was in the flip-path by following the strange bubble noise and "tic tic" sounds to find a babbler in the hole trying to flip the mirror back out.

Some of our Hens

A rhode island red, australorp and brown barnevelder keeping cool by standing in a tray of water. They really appreciate these trays, evaporation keeps the water relatively cool.

Shadow

This is the younger rooster. He gets a water tray all to himself.  He only shares with his favourite hen.

It's a couple of weeks since the last post and nothing has changed with the weather. We have had a tiny 4 mm of rain and day after day of heat and wind. We have eight weeks left of house water and the vege garden tank ran out yesterday. We have to decide whether to allocate water from stock and house use or let the garden go for this year.

Trees that previously survived ten years of drought are dying this year. Kurrajongs (which are normally drought fodder because they keep their leaves well after everything else is dead) have dropped all their leaves and pods. We've lost all the nectarines and apricots, the olive trees are even dying. The cactus plants have gone yellow. It's been really hard and it's not even January yet...

I am feeding the chickens wholegrain bread soaked in whey twice a day, as there is no green pick and no insects to forage. At least the whey adds some protein, calcium and fats to their diet. Though the scratch mix is supposed to be a complete feed, it does contain mainly carbs.


The sheep are all up in the house paddock. They are essentially being drylotted. The house paddock is a small area to sacrifice while attempting to keep some ground cover on the rest of the farm to hold the soil down. They have a round bale and some supplements and I am essentially hand feeding them now. We need to cut the numbers, sell the ewe lambs etc.

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The neighbour's paddock, that should have carried the cattle all year round with any kind of rain at all, will be exhausted in about a month. Then I'll have to dry lot the cattle too. Other than the cost, it would be an awful lot more convenient to just walk out the back door to milk.

 

This is my current milking "parlour". I have to pasteurise anything that I use for cheese because there is so much dust, carrying all sorts of wild yeast and bacteria. DH bought me some hair nets. At about $5.00 per hundred they are a cheap and easy way to keep some of the flying dust and debris out of the milk. I soak them in sanitiser first and then they just fit over the top of the bucket, kept in place by the elastic.

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This is the most recent equipment investment and I think it's really been worth the money. This little trailer hitches on behind Methusela as if it were made to match. It carries 300 kg and has a tip function as well. The sides can drop down for carrying bigger stuff, but in this configuration will fit more than a full bale of hay.

I use it every second or third day to carry hay or mixed feed down to the cattle. It will also come in handy for collecting firewood and carrying fencing supplies or water.

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The rooster that showed up (photo on the last blog entry) has been found a new home with a flock of hens that had no patriarch. He is very full of himself now, but did think he'd been snatched by a fox when we grabbed him late at night to relocate him. Oh, the noise !!

A sheep walked in the front gate the next day and stayed for a couple of days. No-one nearby had lost any, and she had no eartag. Eventually we sent her next door (the other side to the cattle pasture) with that neighbour's consent, to join her little flock of ewes. She seems quite happy now.

Just posting a few catchup photos and notes.

Frank & Pippi, the light sussex chicks, are reaching teenagehood. I can't wait until they are too big to sneak through the house yard fence and I can rehabilitate my herb garden !

This galah is one of many species of birds that find our birdbath a good place to visit on a hot day. In the peak of summer we can have up to nine different species and fifty individuals all waiting their turn in the "pecking order" for a go at the water.

We've finished the sun break for the central bed, just in time. It cuts down both water usage and leaf burn. The beans in the bed to the left are burning off even though they have shade from 1pm onwards. I may plant some more in this bed.

Jack is now wearing a fly mask too. I didn't think he'd accept something on his face because he's partly blind, but he stands quietly to have it put on and taken off so he's now got fly protection too.

This young rooster showed up from nowhere. He seems to be a crossbred, barred plymouth being one part from the striping he has. The rest is anybody's guess. He has been following the hens around, much to Shadow and Bruce's annoyance, but has yet to have been in a fight. I think we might need to find him a home soon though.

This is Ziggy with his weaning ring. It slides in past the septum and sits like a clip on earring, not piercing the nose. When he tries to nurse the spikes poke mum and she kicks him off. It seems mean, but it lets the calf stay with the cow and she can still mother and lick him. Otherwise you'd have to seperate them, much more traumatic. He's now about nine months old and she'd be weaning him soon anyway.

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Flora went into heat on Thursday morning. There was much reciprocal  mounting and our hard-working vet came out and AI'd her with semen from the jersey bull Hawthorne Grove Zeus at 8.30 pm. He said she was pretty ready so fingers crossed !!