I had nothing on this weekend. It started off well, a few beers with some mates (for me) to celebrate finding out the sex of my new little farmhand. (it's a boy and I'll write a bit more about that later). Slept in Saturday with the weekend gloriously unencumbered by any appointments, social outings or coaching.
Of course this is Lantanaland and that means the list of things I have to do is as long as a 14 year old girls phone bill. I started off with a coffee, everything should start with a coffee then a little light fencing with the cows. They are not really up to Olympic standard but it was enough to get the sweat going. This paddock is the small one and it had one gap that looked like it was an impenetrable bank of eight foot high lantana. There is a little (native?) pea that was growing over it and they soon smashed that down to a size where they could munch the pea. On the other side of that was a stand of bananas and I might as well have gone to a fashionable club in Sydney and yelled 'free cocaine for everyone' considering the stampede into the garden. So the cows went back into the big paddock till I had fixed the fence.
This is the last of the grass I have in the paddocks. The other two are eaten out and I don't think I'll get time to do the last big one, which has a much higher lantana to grass mix anyway. The good news is that when this rainy season comes there is a LOT more open land and I'll do a bit of pasture improvement with some green manures over summer as well, so I should get a lot further next winter.
In the afternoon I decided to tear the carpet up, as you do after a good lunch. Underneath was lovely floorboards painted green with white and yellow splashed everywhere. Interesting. We haven't decided what to do, but I'm glad we are shot of that carpet.
Sunday I slept in until the cows bellowing got too insistent to ignore. Laf was in the dry paddock watching the others eat the nice grass and wasn't happy. I was waiting for my chippy neighbour to come over and give me some advice on where my new shipping container was going to live. He was off buying several hundred records, so I planted out two mulberry cuttings and gave them a little electric fence enclosure. Mulberries are supposed to be great for a cows health and I love them in smoothies, so I'm trying to propagate them in all the paddocks. I did some citrus pruning, planted a finger lime, chopped out a few weed trees and prepped for some new vegetable beds.
When Eric came over, we completely changed the plan, deciding to run the container east/west and bury half of it into the hill, which I'm very happy about. The only problem was the end we wanted to start at was covered in a nice thicket of farmers friends and lantana. What a surprise! Eric went home to his many projects and I went got out Zombie Defense Tool Number 1 (the brush cutter). I gave the blades a quick sharpen and went at it with abandon. That done we did some quick and dirty measurements to see how much fill and digging there would need to be done and called it a day.
Ahh yes, a nice quiet relaxing weekend.
- Lantanaland from my iPad
Of course this is Lantanaland and that means the list of things I have to do is as long as a 14 year old girls phone bill. I started off with a coffee, everything should start with a coffee then a little light fencing with the cows. They are not really up to Olympic standard but it was enough to get the sweat going. This paddock is the small one and it had one gap that looked like it was an impenetrable bank of eight foot high lantana. There is a little (native?) pea that was growing over it and they soon smashed that down to a size where they could munch the pea. On the other side of that was a stand of bananas and I might as well have gone to a fashionable club in Sydney and yelled 'free cocaine for everyone' considering the stampede into the garden. So the cows went back into the big paddock till I had fixed the fence.
This is the last of the grass I have in the paddocks. The other two are eaten out and I don't think I'll get time to do the last big one, which has a much higher lantana to grass mix anyway. The good news is that when this rainy season comes there is a LOT more open land and I'll do a bit of pasture improvement with some green manures over summer as well, so I should get a lot further next winter.
In the afternoon I decided to tear the carpet up, as you do after a good lunch. Underneath was lovely floorboards painted green with white and yellow splashed everywhere. Interesting. We haven't decided what to do, but I'm glad we are shot of that carpet.
Sunday I slept in until the cows bellowing got too insistent to ignore. Laf was in the dry paddock watching the others eat the nice grass and wasn't happy. I was waiting for my chippy neighbour to come over and give me some advice on where my new shipping container was going to live. He was off buying several hundred records, so I planted out two mulberry cuttings and gave them a little electric fence enclosure. Mulberries are supposed to be great for a cows health and I love them in smoothies, so I'm trying to propagate them in all the paddocks. I did some citrus pruning, planted a finger lime, chopped out a few weed trees and prepped for some new vegetable beds.
When Eric came over, we completely changed the plan, deciding to run the container east/west and bury half of it into the hill, which I'm very happy about. The only problem was the end we wanted to start at was covered in a nice thicket of farmers friends and lantana. What a surprise! Eric went home to his many projects and I went got out Zombie Defense Tool Number 1 (the brush cutter). I gave the blades a quick sharpen and went at it with abandon. That done we did some quick and dirty measurements to see how much fill and digging there would need to be done and called it a day.
Ahh yes, a nice quiet relaxing weekend.
- Lantanaland from my iPad
Location:Lantanaland