Some Friday randomness for you all…

There is a certain Small Boy who resides in this house who has a magic ability to drive me insane, crack me up and melt my heart all at once. How do they do that?

The end of the school week, yay for that. I don’t have to haul the girls out of bed for a whole two days, though of course they’ll get up at the crack of dawn all on their own over the weekend I bet!

Sunshine is back gracing out part of the world and my washing basket is so relieved! Now I have piles and piles of clean dry clothes to fold and put away…. joy!

We have eggs, three of them today alone!

I spent a lovely hour just swinging in the hammock thinking while the boy child played in the sandpit and chattered away. There are so many other things I could have been doing this afternoon, but I’m so glad I didn’t.

It has been decided…. Dash will meet our dinner table on Wednesday. I wonder if any of us are really ready for this no matter how many books we’ve read?

Happy Weekend everyone.

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We have some new residents at the Pickle Farm.

Two weekends back I took a deep breath and did a brave thing. I bought four young hens from the farmers market.

It might not sound like a very brave thing but since we’ve been loosing chooks to the dreaded chicken plague (aka mereks disease), slowly, one after the other, over the past eighteen months, to begin replacing them is a little scary. We were down to just four laying hens, and between the old age and the broodiness we’ve had long long patches with no eggs at all. So it was time.

We decided on four 10 week old hens from the lovely young girls with their organic chook business, figuring that since their blood line has not been vaccinated for Mereks that they hopefully have some genetic resistance. Being young they didn’t cost us much either, so if they do succumb, while it will be frustrating, we won’t be throwing away piles of money.

Naming rights were shared around… one for Zoe, one for Izzy, one for Muski and one for me. Which seemed fair until the girl’s began to slowly but surely work at influencing all of us to name them what they wanted. They went with Midnight (the black one) and Star (the white one) and then lobbied for two more names that worked with their current night sky theme…. Sparkles and Moon. Not so horrific after all.. though Muski is still calls his ‘Rose Dinosaur’ when the big girls are not around.

So far they are settling in well, at the bottom of the back yard pecking order. They are yet to be introduced to Hamlet the rooster and the two old layers. I think they might need a bit more size on them before running with the big girls. Fingers crossed they grow up to be good strong layers and we can begin to replenish our stock from their fertile eggs.

Plague be gone!

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We can hear the vacuum as we approach the dwelling, but as we enter the natural habitat of the house wife, it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary cleaning task. On closer in inspection we can see that her aim is not simply to clean the floor, she has a more sinister, deadly goal in mind.

The brush attachment for the vacuum is missing and the sucking machine is not merely aimed at the floors but also the walls, ceiling and every corner, nook or cranny she can find. In her eye is the glint of a challenge. She will find her prey and dispatch it swiftly up the sucking tube, every last one of them.

She is not hunting dust, oh no, dust is the least of her problems.

She is on a mission.

A mission to rid her domain of this autumn pest. A monster who invades her home by the hundreds. Who crawls up walls and into cupboards. Who drops from the ceiling into your bed in the middle of the night without warning.

The stinking, many legged millipede!

(image from Mick E Talbot via flickr)

It is the same every year.

Every year she taps out a desperate, somewhat demented blog post about these nasty little beasts. Every year she scours the interwebs looking for an answer, a hint, a clue on how to stop this black plague entering her house. Every year she comes up empty handed and heads back to the twice daily hunt, vacuum in hand, glint in her eye.

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I am a fair weather gardener. I don’t like the cold, and I certainly don’t like to be outside in the garden when it’s cold or wet. But spurred on by reading Animal Vegetable Miracle (finally) and by a little something Jackie French said in her Backyard Sustainability book, for the first time ever, I am looking at seed catalogues and planning an Autumn planting.

I’m only half way through reading Animal Vegetable Miracle, but I am already struck by how short their growing season is. I have always whined about how difficult our climate can be here with crazy late frosts then scorching summers, but that is nothing to the months of snow and frozen earth that this family is coping with. The shear volume of food they seem to be able to grow in such a short period made me feel kind of guilty, and quite a bit inspired.

Our winters are cold, but not so cold that we can’t grow things.

Then there is Jackie French’s idea that just made so much darn sense to me- “When you harvest something, plant something else in it’s place.” Not only does that take care of dealing with weeds that grow on any patch of bare dirt around here, but it also means there will always be something growing and something to eat, hopefully.

So here I am, going through the seeds we already have, and those we have saved, to see what I can plant now. Trying to remember where I put the left over seed raising mix and trying to clear a space on the window sill to start a few seeds.

It seems kind of crazy since at the moment we are finally seeing some abundance from our spring/summer crops. We have tomatoes (no matter how early put them in they never fruit till March!?!?) and zucchinis a plenty, plus spring onions, radishes, potatoes and maybe even our first popping corn!

At the same time I am planting silver beet, spinach, broccoli, peas, carrots, parsnips and some other bits and pieces. It’s not a lot and who knows if they will grow, since I’ve never attempted this in autumn before, but hopefully we’ll get something back for our efforts!

Is anyone else planting an Autumn garden? What are you putting in?
And for those of you on the other side of the world, what are you planning for spring??

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There are moments when I begin to wonder how my life got so bizarre…

Cleaning my desk I discover the following;

1 detached Barbie leg
1 half eaten chocolate cup cake
Art made from several millipedes squashed between two layers of coloured paper.

While I am cleaning my desk I respond to the following incidents;
Muski coming inside covered from head to two in mud.
Izzy getting her belt stuck in the bathroom door.
A Guinea Pig weeing on the bean bag.

The bizarre thing is…. this is pretty normal for a Sunday afternoon.

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