Tree Hugging.

Another really good weekend. Yesterday we planted the last poplar poles, and started building 2mx2m "compounds" for each of the silver birch, plane and oak trees (so as to stop the goats destroying them). With each tree needing 4 holes (to about 800mm deep), and another 5 holes for the poplars, that's alot of dirt needing moving, about 35 lineal metres! Armed with such a daunting number we hired a post hole borer, and got up really early so that we would have lots of time to do them as we had friends coming around at 2. Amazingly enough we had all the holes dug in less than an hour. There is a good side to having so much rain, but then there is always a down side, most of the holes filled with water by the time we went to ram them. Oh well, a job for another day. The posts are in the holes all ready, just keeping our fingers crossed for a few more days/weeks of pleasant weather (ie spring, albeit just past mid winter at the moment).
After giving up with the post ramming, I decided to finish (well start) the post and rail fence behind the water tanks which I started last september (see http://littlebush.blogspot.com/2005/09/sunday-day-of-rest-yeah-right.html), I don't think it's too bad, a post and rail fence inside a year!

And today, we moved the sheep from one neighbours place, to the others (I say we, I should really say Rex (the local farmer) did it with his dog, ours today were useless. The only other thing of note today was that I did a bit of pruning in the paddocks with the chainsaw, just removing low branches so I don't get hit in the head whilst driving around on the tractor.

Anyway, that's enough for today.. Next weekend we'll hopefully ram a few posts and have more photos of more lambs. Also this week coming I think Hollywood should drop her babies, so fingers crossed.

Enjoy the photos.


 
 
  

Lambs

Lamb update

Just a quicky, we checked the new lamb this morning on the way to work, and he's still alive and with Mum, so things are looking good for him. Obviously photos on the weekend.

And another

It's so much better not having to drag out the modem cable etc...anyway back on to the subject, we got another lamb, no photos yet as it was dark when we got home, but a big boy with black point ears. Only one, and when we got home he was on the road side of the fence and had been away from mum for a while (not sure how long), but Mum took him back OK and hopefully he'll get a feed and be OK, find out tomorrow I guess...

On to tea...

Fash Internet and Lambs

This weekend a fair bit happen, first on Saturday, Steph and I went for a swim at our local pool and I then went and got some timber and the remaining 13 trees.
After getting home we planted the 4 plane trees and 3 of the poplars, despite the surface being like slurry,underneath is quite diggable which made for a slighty more plesant job.



Once lunch was out of the way we mounted a wifi aerial on the outside of the barn, as broadband was going to be installed on sunday.

Sunday morning I got up nice and early and finished building the firewall ready for when the dish was put up, and then I went for a stroll down to the lambing paddock as it was a nice morning and I was hoping that we would have some lambs, which we did...




Then soon after the guy came around to install the dish, and after about two hours we had a dish and a broadband connection:

Anyway, there was more, but I'll write it later..

Hopefully this evening we'll find more lambs.

Lambs on the way

No photos this weekend, all that there is really to photograph is masses of mud, and pregnant ewes. After losing the lamb the other week, we decided to vacinate the lambs with 5-in-1. Since the protection is passed on to new lambs if the mother has been vaccinated within a month, we checked the ewes and wee going to hold out vaccinating them until they bag up and relax in the back quarters (see last years photos!). Two of the big ewes had already bagged up, the black faced girl was looking very "relaxed" and ready. We've moved them all into a paddock we've been keeping aside for lambing, hopefully this year we'll get 7 lambs, 2 from each of the big girls and 1 from devilspawn (who is pregnant to winston, she's also bagged up and is starting to look more ready. We intend putting the lambs and ewes into the newly sown paddock once things dry up a little bit, just to top the grass to make it grow a bit stronger. But before we do that, we're going to need to protect a few trees we planted this weekend. We've put in several scarlet oaks, down either side of the race to make a kind of avenue. also behind the large mound we plant some silver birch (which should shoot away pretty well). Next weekend, hoefully, we'll we planting some plane trees to offset the oaks, and and bunch of poplars to provide shelter.
Then we've got to build the goat proof tree protectors.

It now looks like my trip to the UK has been put off to the end of october, hopefully, things will warm up and dry out in time for me to sow the paddocks before I go.

Yesterday(Tuesday) we had some guys out trying to install broadband for us, we have to go with a satalite system, and it ended up having to go on the end of the barn, so that means 80m of cabling to be dug into the ground! So it's not there yet...

Very Wet

For the last few days, both Steph and I have been working from home. On Wednesday we drove into town (in the honda civic), and several times on the way, we thought "hmm, it's pretty wet, hopefully the roads are open". The roads were open, although several times we encountered police making sure that drivers noticed the big puddles on the road. Once we got into work, we started keeping an eye on the river levels, and it started getting higher and higher, at which point I phoned our local council and found out that things were worse over here, so we both decided that heading home was the best thing. Three hours and a very long route home as we wanted to avoid certain roads, turned out to be the right thing as there were some huge puddles/fordings that I would not have been happy crossing at around 10pm at night.
On Thursday morning, I checked the river levels and the weather warnings, at which point we went back to bed, and then spent the day working from home with the occasional rescue of sheep, fixing drainage issues with Tom on the neighbours place, and making sure all the animals had enough hay to keep them warm.
This morning though, we got up, decided the Safari was the best bet, and started driving to the train station. At the top of our road, we found several big slips, and by the time we got to the other end (all 6Kms away) we discovered that the road there was closed...So we turned around and now working from home.
Around 10am, the clouds parted and blue sky was visible, now (1pm), it's sunny and warm and another weekend is near.

A not quite so farmy weekend.

Another weekend, and unfortunatly another dead sheep. Two of the lambs have now died,
probably due to clostridal disease. We're now going to move the lambs on very promptly
so I'm going to organise that for this weekend hopefully. We'll move on the 10 largest
and then try to fatten the other 8 up a bit more for an extra week or two.
Anyway, the weekend was pretty busy, on Saturday we had a Mid Winter Christmas Party with
Steph's work, it was fancy dress, and the theme was farming. Really easy for us, I threw on
my gum boots,my wax jacket, and my leather hat, and I was set. Steph went as a hunter, all in camo
gear, with a hunting horn I made out of one of Winston's horns, and a big pink unicorn strapped to her back!
That basically took all Saturday, and Sunday was spent doing shopping etc, then we had a visit from one of Steph's
friends through work. Admittedly we didn't get a great deal done, such as measuring out for our tree planting or
installing the shields between the hutches in the rabbit house, but we'll just do that next weekend.
Just before we were going to head out to the pub for dinner, Steph called me on the radio and told me about the
dead ewe, so I quickly dug a hole and threw her in....I'm getting reasonably speedy at digging big holes.

I did manage to take a few photos this weekend, so here they are (none of the dead sheep of course!)