Mighty Thor

The Norse gods decide to have a big party, no expense spared – wine, food, maidens – the lot. After three days it finally comes to an end after much drunkenness and even more debauchery. The God of Thunder, Thor, awakes to find himself lying next to a beautiful young maiden, with absolutely no recollection as to what has happened, although he has a fairly good idea. He decides that a formal introduction is in order so he leans over and says grandly “I am mighty Thor”, to which she replies “You’re thore? I can’t even pith!” As a dad I have a right, actually a duty to tell bad jokes and I tell this one because tonight I too am mighty Thor.


I started the day with Em in the garden, mounding potatoes and planning where to plant our summer veggies. We’re convinced the frosts have finally finished and we probably could have started sooner but you know how it is. Em then spent the rest of the day being very impressive – lots of planting, mulching and carting compost. My favourite bit was when I looked over and saw her pushing the wheelbarrow through the horse paddock, loaded up with horse poo. What a woman.


I spent the day with Rob lifting seventeen poles into their holes, with a little help from Emma and more help from our neighbour Steve and his tractor. Lots of digging and tamping and some very heavy lifting, broken up by a delicious morning tea of baklava muffins that Em had made the other day – cinnamon and sugar and walnuts, mmmmm. Did I mention I love my wife?


“I’m grateful that Morrow came over for a sleepover and we got a dozen poles up.”
(Confused? Look)

One more notch

I’m not sure I want the magpies to win. No, I’m not talking about Saturday’s AFL Grand Final but rather the battle of the birds that is going on outside. Swallows have moved in recently and have become a cute addition to our avian wildlife, arcing fast and low over the veggie patch and up under the eaves of the Dairy. For some reason the magpies aren’t so keen on them being here and this morning there was an all out birdie brawl with a pair of magpies chasing about four swallows across the paddock, intent on causing them harm, diving and swooping, getting close before the smaller more manoeuvrable birds would sharply turn, evading a snapping beak.

My days are being gobbled up by the time-hungry orchard, the site now looking like a forest felled by a bomb blast with poles lying every which way on the ground. I spent over ten hours the other day exhausting myself felling trees and dragging logs out from the back of the block with our snarling little tractor, sitting astride it as it strained like a bulldog on a leash. We now have over two dozen poles ready to go, which all need to be treated first then stood up and braced before Tuesday when our friend Mountain Ryan is coming over to help stand up the four big, six metre centre poles. It’s funny that we’re doing so much work in preparation for our garden club next Saturday. The idea is our friends come around and help us knock off a big project but we almost need a garden club to help prepare for garden club. At least when it is done we will have clicked up one more notch in the ratchet, one more project will be behind us, our future proofing will be that one little bit more advanced.

We had a blackout last night, coincidently the same day Emma has started reading Choosing Eden, a book about a middle-aged couple that moved to Bellingen from Sydney and started future proofing in response to their fears about peak oil. After a day thinking again about how we would live without cheap oil it was suddenly brought into reality when the lights didn’t work, we couldn’t watch our River Cottage DVD, and we couldn’t even have a warm shower as the gas hot water system has an electric starter. In the spirit of local production I cooked a green curry with asparagus, broccoli and kaffir lime leaves from our garden, snow peas from Sue’s garden and local Kindee beef. Then we went to bed.


I hope the Freo Dockers can win a premiership before peak oil hits hard. Perhaps they have started stockpiling aviation fuel to keep their premiership window open.

“I’m grateful that I goed for a sleepover.”
(Confused? Look)

Butter is better

As Ryan said yesterday I am pretty exited about something, namely the making of butter. For a while now I have been getting milk from our local organic dairy, skimming the cream off the top and making butter. Now I am getting ready to upscale. The owner of the dairy is willing to give me milk for free if I can provide butter for them and us. They have a big old hand cranked milk separator that they found at an antique sale, which will have to be cleaned up but I think it should work fine. It separates using centrifugal force and apparently goes like the clappers once you get it whirring. And now I am looking around for a churn. I'm thinking electric, 8 litres and like everything round here not too expensive. Our friend Pete is dreaming up a bicycle powered device with multiple attachment options that I really like the sound of but until then I think we need something more conventional. Not that there is really anything conventional in the home butter churn, not many people doing it. But I will be producing the best butter in the world. It will also be good to be more involved with the dairy and maybe even learn a thing or two about cows, milking etc, for when our girls come on line. I am looking forward to experimenting and perfecting the art of butter making. Hopefully it will become one of my special skills I can offer up to our community of like minded, food producing friends that for the time being I refer to as PLAGGA Produce.
Next step cheese.

Tonight I was grateful that I was eating Brian's beautiful, grass fed, local, beef. Very tender and delicious, cooked rare and full of nutrients. Best meat I've had over here.



Noah was grateful that
"we dug some holes for those poles"

Great friends

We have some great friends. One lent us his excavator; the other came around, greased its nipples and then dug a long trench to connect the water to the orchard.


Does it get any better than this? I know Emma thinks so – she’s even more excited than me, but not about excavators…

“I’m grateful that we got the pipe in.”
(Confused? Look)

Holes for the Poles

There’s fifteen millimetres of rain in the gauge tonight after twenty seven fell last night, most of it in a big electrical storm that boomed and lit up the sky. Somehow Emma managed to sleep right through it, waking later when the sky was clear but still being illuminated almost constantly by distant sheet lightning. Whenever it rains like that I imagine it coming down in the forest up the valley in the national parks, how the forest soaks it up, dark and wet, how the rainforest and rivers are replenished. And I contrast it with the paddocks that we humans have cleared and in which we live – wide expanses, little vegetation, mud.


I was supposed to head off at eight this morning to go and help some friends with a verandah but it was still raining so I got to laze around for a change, battling valiantly against gravity from the couch. The call did come through eventually so I headed off, excited to be exploring a part of the valley I haven’t seen before, Magic Mountain. I’m not sure what part is the magic part but for me it was the sheds - knocked together with recycled material, keeping big stacks of timber dry. Dirt floor and lots of building tools. Having spent so much of the last eighteen months building the Dairy I love checking out other people’s projects and how they go about it, the materials they use.

It was also nice to have a look around at their garden, seeing what is growing and the solutions they’ve come up with to the same problems we have – birds, grass, water. Their veggie garden is netted, something I think we’ll do at some stage, and I loved the use of bamboo poles for props – cheap, easy, available – challenging my kneejerk thoughts that instantly head toward big timbers.


Not long after I got home Jim turned up with the little excavator we are borrowing from a friend to dig holes for the poles for our new orchard. Very exciting.

A Quick Tinkle

Meet Morna Flower. Until recently Morna had a nursery down the road in Pembrooke where she also sold chickens. Lots of chickens. Almost enough to qualify her as a crazy chook lady. She has sold her business now and has got rid of a lot of her chooks in preparation for a trip around Australia with her husband, a piano, her little dog and some of her chooks. The trailer she is standing in front of is the one she had built especially for the trip, with the chooks housed on one side, a camp kitchen on the other and the piano between the two. For a quick tinkle of the ivories you just have to lower the tailgate and the piano slides right out – just the thing for the dancing dog and chicken double act she’s working on. I love it. Gold. Think of all the prioritising that goes on when thinking of how to spend your money and yet their list for what a trailer had to have for their trip around Australia settled on chook accommodation and a slide out piano. Thank goodness for people like Morna in the world, following their dreams and letting their bright light shine.

We went to see Morna today to buy some fertilised Araucana eggs to slip under Gladys. Em has been coveting Araucana eggs, which are a very pale blue, for some time now so we’ve bought six in the hope we’ll get about three new hens to keep up a regular supply. Tonight we substituted six of the eggs Gladys has just started sitting on for our new pale blue beauties, slipping them under her while she was half asleep.

Cacophony of clucking

I quite like the little noises roosters make. The crowing - iconic, climactic and slightly silly, but I like the other sounds as well. Like the gentle “took took” when they have found a tasty treat for their hens and then step back so the girls can gobble it up. Then there’s the slightly more urgent warning “took took took” causing all the girls to stop what they’re doing and look up to see what’s going on. Today all the chooks erupted into a cacophony of clucking and squawking so Emma went to see what was going on. Then she saw Gladys was off her nest.

Gladys is our good sitter. She gets broody regularly and will go the distance looking after her eggs. I moved her into the chook tractor this morning so she could sit on her eggs in peace without being bothered by the other hens wanting to have a turn in the nest, adding to her collection. She is sitting on ten eggs. Ten eggs! About two of them are her own, about three or four belong to her daughters and the rest are from the other girls. She isn’t a big hen so she only just gets them all under her, bulging and flattening out, covering them all with her soft warm breast feathers.


The reason she was off the nest was because there was a young lace monitor lizard in there, about two and a half feet long, eating her eggs. It took off when Emma arrived, slipping straight through the chicken wire and bolting off across the paddock towards the forest. Gladys was beside herself and very distressed, clucking away, not going near her nest, unsure if the lizard was still there in the long grass in the chook tractor. We were really worried that she wouldn’t sit again so we quickly cleaned up the broken eggs, moved the tractor onto some short grass and left her alone. And thankfully she went straight back on to the nest.


Later we replaced the wider gauge chicken wire with some stronger dog wire that has a smaller hole, hopefully too small to let the lizard through. Even though we had to be right in the tractor to replace the wire Gladys still stayed on her nest. She is a good sitter. And Emma replaced the two stolen eggs with freshly laid ones from the other chooks.

“I’m grateful that Gladys went back on her eggs.”
(Confused? Look)