Green pasture - here we come!

Today was the culmination of some month's work.  I have been collecting paca poo using the bike and trailer and distributing it in front of the house for many months waiting for the wet season to arrive.  Rain had been forecast - finally - for the next week, so today my grass seeds were sown.  First I sprinkled around superphosphate and then mixed the four autumn pasture seeds and sprinkled them. Then I raked over the whole area to try to get the seeds under the paca poo.

And guess what - I am just about to go to bed and the rain has arrived.  Rain has been forecast for the next four days and if that actually happens, I should have lots of green shoots in a week or two.  I took photos today of the bare earth and hopefully I can take some in two weeks and post the dramatic difference I am dreaming about.

The rain will also help keeps the birds away.  As soon as they know seed is down they appear from nowhere to collect it.  It is very common to see huge flocks, particularly of white cockatoos all over the paddocks when the farmers have seeded for the next hay or wheat crop.

Puds snuggling up in cool weather

Autumn has also brought some welcome cool weather and the puds have adapted appropriately.  In summer I posted an image of Vijay spreading out on cool white sheets.  This has now changed to snuggling up in the pillows.  Sveta was trying to cool down in the back of a cupboard and now snuggles into her winter basket.  I'll soon have to light the fireplace and that's where the 3 of us will be found every night - within 2 metres of the radiant heat.

Autumn planting in the raised garden beds

On 23 January I wrote about the raised garden beds and how they were coping with the extremely hot summer.  About a month ago, I prepared them for autumn planting (digging them in the cool of the night under spot lights).  The large lavenders have been transplanted into the ground over near the shed.  The tomato plants went into the compost heap and lots of paca poo, compost and sulphate of ammonia was added to the beds.  The strawberries had taken over half of one bed, so I pulled almost all of them out and put about 10 plants into the second bed.    I left 2, just in case the ones I transplanted did not like their new home and the other 30 plants I gave to my spinning friends.  Eight little lettuce plants have replaced the strawberries in the first tank and I am already using leaves for lunch most days.  I mentioned in January that I let a couple of self seeding pumpkin vines do their thing.  They really struggled growing over the gravel and although the abundance of flowers turned to little pumpkins, they all fell off.  But once on the pavers, a couple of the flowers turned to pumpkins.  The vines were very unsightly, so I pruned them back to 2 vines and put them back up into the tank.  They produced 2 little pumpkins which you can see here.  The eggplants are still growing strongly, but they may not like the cold nights, so we will see what happens to them.  I planted an asparagus crown and it also looking very happy now and hanging over the side.  I let the large fennel plants go to seed before cutting them down and as well as a couple of bottles of seed to use for cooking, I also have about 50 little fennel plants coming up all over the place.  The shallots look just as healthy as they did in summer and on the other side of the tank capsicum, sage, thyme and oregano are growing rampant.

The second bed where the strawberries went now also has celery, beans, English spinach and parsley.  Last year I planted garlic in with the strawberries and I had absolutely no trouble with pests, so this year I did the same. The great thing was that this year I used the garlic I grew last year and already it has sprouted to about 10cm high. Some of the beans have flowers and I am already picking the spinach to put in my morning vegetable juice.

The third bed still has the 2 chillie plants - one edible and the other beautiful with plump yellow chillies, but supposedly inedible.  I tried to plant some petunias around the edge, but  little bugs keep nibbling them at night, so I don't like their chances.  I may have to put them back into pots to keep them above the soil level.   I wanted snow peas here, but couldn't find any, so in the middle I have planted some snap peas.

I still have the sweet potato sprouting in the pantry, so may cut it up and see what happens if I plant it in the third garden bed.  Luckily in the nearby garden under the clothes line, there are two rosemary bushes madly flowering and the bees are going crazy and hopefully they will stick around to help me with my veges.

Picasso' felted and Alun's knitted



Laying out before felting

On 2 May I wrote about dying the fleeces of Picasso (suri) and Alun (huacaya) pink.  Most of this has now been transformed - Picasso's into a felt scarf/belt and Alun's into a knitted square which has been chain stitched to a felt square.

Picasso's suri fleece was not carded - rather I just pulled the curls apart and in the felting process the little curls come back.  If the fleece is carded, you lose most of the curl.  First I put down a very fine layer of white merino as this helps the suri to felt  more easily.  Then I randomly laid down the pink and brown/pink curls and finally put a couple of white merino halos.  I was very happy with the result and had to wear it the following day.

I had 2 shades of pink using Alun's rose brown fleece, so I spun both the then plied them together to get a multi coloured 2ply.  I chose a square out of my book of squares and after finishing it, felted some of Alun's natural fibre and dropped some of the 2 ply wool into the felt during the process.  Finally I used chain stitch to attach the knitted piece in an offset style. This square is part of a much larger project, hopefully which will be completed later this year!

Welcome Miguel

 Last week a new paca was created.  The founding paca was made from Scrumpy's grey fleece and became a female toy because she had a green bikini.  It was time for a male version and this paca was made from a brown cria fleece.  The green bikini had to be changed into a pair of boardshorts, which would fit a rather small waist compared to its chunky legs.  The result was rather pleasing and they now have names - Maya and Miguel - and will remain at EdgeOfHeaven when hopefully all who follow will find new homes.

 

PERENNIAL PASTURES - not so simple

When we designed our home we envisaged it would look like a corrugated shed splonked in the middle of a pasture.  However when the building was finished, we received a corrugated shed plonked in the middle of barren dirt.  Investigation proceeded last year and we ended up at the Department of Agriculture in Northam talking to anyone who knew about perennial pastures.  We bought an amazing book on the topic and it has been carefully filed away for about a year.

The previous blog mentioned the installation of sprinklers in front of the house and I had thought that we would just select some available pasture grasses and spread the seed out and voila! instant pasture - not so simple.  Here in Western Australia both Temperate and Sub-tropical perennial grasses can be planted.  The Temperate grasses are active in Winter and the Sub-tropical appear in Summer.  Then, just to complicate the issue a little more, we are using salty water from a bore, so our grasses must be salt tolerant.  This discovery tour started with a seed produce store, then went to a farming authority, then the Department of Agriculture and finally to another seed produce store.  After taking all advice, I chose Tall Wheat Grass, Tall Fescue and 2 varieties of clover with Alosca innoculant to sow now in Winter.  Then in late August when hopefully it will be still wet, but warming up, I will sow BamBatsi Panic and Rhodes Grass which are Summer active.  I am having 7 kg of seed delivered by Austalia Post and should receive it in a couple of days. 

It would be a great problem to report later in the year that we had so much pasture we had to slash and feed it to 'the boys' - one can only hope.

HAPPY AS A PIG IN MUD

This morning all the earthworks around EdgeOfHeaven were completed.  It has taken Kevin and Jason a week to get through a myriad of tasks.  Today, the second driveway was scaped out to let the gate swing both ways - seemingly a simple job.  However on taking away the surface, a large tree stump emerged.  This was painstakingly extracted and the job completed.  It is amazing that water causes so much erosion as we hardly have any rain.  However because the land is so dry and the grass vegetation is so sparse at this time of year, the water just runs off the land with nothing to hold it back.  When this driveway was repaired, water runoff had to be diverted as well so that it didn't go down the newly finished surface.

Then we tackled the main driveway which was seldom used as no one knew where to go.  A line of large rocks have been placed to divert vehicles either towards the back paddock or over to the shed where we encourage parking to take place.  Thirdly the contour back which takes rainfall towards the dam was scraped out and stacked higher and a little rock waterfall was repaired to slow the volume of water as it enters the dam.  Other jobs which were completed in this last week included hundreds of metres of trenching for irrigation pipes and after laying the pipes, all these trenches had to be backfilled.  Finally, an area was dug up to make yet another group of trees, this time in the dam paddock.

So with all the dirt displaced and then replaced all we needed was.....RAIN.  The sky had been cloudy for 2 days and a tiny amount of rain had fallen late Sunday.  But we have had so little rain, it has become a joke to even mention the word.

This afternoon, in the desperate hope that rain would fall, I took the bike and trailer out to the new area to be planted and started preparing holes, inserting agricultural pipe and popping fertilizing pills in next to the pipes.  Then I took the trailer over to some respectable dirt to be used to backfill my holes and collected enough for my 11 trees and went up to the bore to fill up the water bottles to soak my holes with water before planting.

All preparation was completed and I started my planting.  A large black cloud came over (as has happened many times before) and I kept going.  After finishing my second tree, the sky opened with rain and lightning and there I was in a sea of mud, mud, mud - soaking wet with jeans, shirt, gloves and boots covered.  I had two choices - get out of the rain  - or - be as happy as a pig in mud and continue.  I chose the latter and an hour later well after the rain had finished I jumped back on the bike as the sun was setting, a little chilly but entirely overjoyed to finally see rain - and what timing after all the hard work was done in the last week.  The contour bank which was repaired this morning worked extremely well and a small river ran down to the dam.

However the job isn't quite finished yet.  Next Friday the pump will be installed in the bore (where all the trenching originated) and the following week, Edith will return to connect the pipes and install the irrigation monitor, sprinklers on the impending front pasture grass and drippers on all 40 trees.

FUN WITH TRENCHING

Trenching - it started as a suggestion from Edith when she put irrigation on the vines - "you know you could easily run a pipe from the dam and irrigate all the trees you are hand watering".  The result is YET another adventure in setting up a new property.

First our pump expert, Steele, thought that it would be better to use the bore near the dam.  We already had power to the bore as it was installed when we brought power 200 mtrs from the road to the house and a pump on the dam could be easily disrupted by the camelids as they love to run around the top of the dam.  In the final washout, I had to get an electrician to install a waterproof double powerpoint near the bore, then Steele would put in the pump, then Kevin would come in and do all the trenching, then Edith would lay all the pipes, sprinklers and drippers and Kevin would come back and fill in all the trenching.

Remnants of an old building

Near the front stairs

Trench to the bore

 Nothing ever runs to plan.  First I asked a local electrician to have a look at the cable near the bore and he told me it was all black and green and had problems.  I waited over a week and still no sign of the electricians who originally installed it, so I thought I would get on with the trenching.  Yesterday and today a couple of hundred metres of trenching have been completed and the front of our house looks like a construction site again.  Trenching is a great adventure (ha, ha, ha) - you find such unexpected things like telephone cables, water pipes and even electricity cables in the most amazing places!  We even found the footings of an old house and had to pull out old bricks and concrete flooring.  But after 13 hours of trenching including repairing water pipes, it is all ready for Edith to come and lay the pipe next Thursday.

We'll need a small truckload of sand to fill in the trenches wherever traffic runs, so that will be delivered tomorrow.  The fourth phone call to the electricians has resulted in a promise for someone to come also on Thursday to resolve that problem.  We'll also end up with a lawn - or rather something green in front of the house as a sprinkler system will be installed there.  The water is salty, so a mix of various grasses will be sown.  The control box will be on the verandah and we will have 3 separate areas to water - 2 lawn areas, trees at the front gate and down the driveway and a new tree area in the dam paddock - still to be planted.

Then, I am pleased to say "planting of the trees" will have come to an end.  We refuse to water anything else.  More pics when we finally see some green.

THE COLOURS OF AUTUMN - NATURAL AND WOMAN-MADE

Well the rain was short lived and there is none in sight at least for the next week.  However the temperature is just delightful - 10 degree mornings and mid twenties during the day.  About 4.00pm the chill returns and this afternoon I took the bike and trailer out to collect the paca poo and distribute it onto the trees in the olive grove.  Once the work was done, I wandered around the grove - just on sunset, cool air, birds settling for the night.  First I visited one of the cabernet vines and pulled off a small bunch of sweet small grapes.  Then I visited all of the trees to see how they were going, delighted to be eating my own produce and spitting out the seeds as I strode around.  The final four figs were ripe and one had to be consumed straight away.  One of the avocado trees has gone berserk and the walnut is ready to drop its leaves.  The macadamia is growing tall and strong and it will be interesting to see how many years we wait for flowers and nuts.  The two apples trees planted in the one hole are extending well outside the netting (which should have been removed when I finished picking the apples) and are waiting for the secateurs.  The 60 odd olive trees are also begging to be pruned and some of the little citrus are producing their first fruit with about 10 oranges, 10 tangellos and 14 grapefruit starting to ripen.  The establised lemon, lime and mandarin trees we planted have produced well with my picking over 3 kg of fruit this afternoon.  I have just finished eating one of the sweet mandarins as I type this.

The beauty of living here is that when it is dark, there is still plenty of activity.  Yesterday I tried to dye some of my alpaca fleece. I only used the neck as the saddle is the choice part of the fleece and as this was an experiment, I didn't want to risk wasting it.   I put the required amount of dye in the pot and boiled up pieces of two fleeces - Picasso and Alun  - for 30 minutes.  See the image of Picasso with mostly white and a little brown on his neck.  Picasso is a suri alpaca - grows his fleece in dreadlocks and so the dye found it hard to penetrate the dreadlocks.  The result was varying levels of colour from white in the middle of the curls through to very bright pink on the outside.  Alun, however is a huacaya and the dye penetrated his open fleece much more evenly.  He is also a rose grey, which means his fleece is naturally brown on the outside, but grey close to the skin.  The resulting colour was wonderful on both and the residual water still had a little colour, so I put in some more of Alun's fleece and some of Camilo's to see if any of the dye would take without adding any more to the water.  After another 30 minutes I took them out and these pieces of fleece just have a hint of colour and although more subtle, will be very interesting to spin or felt.

This is Camilo's fleece - natural colour on the right and slightly pink coloured on the left.  Camilo is also a suri, so the fleece has the lovely curls which create a wonderful effect when felted.