Frogpondsrock...

These are not pretty photos.

Though I also don’t think that they are horrible photos either. I went for a walk this morning and took some photos. I was fascinated by this piece of roadkill. This was a wallaby. Now it is a series of photos.

Confessions of an absentminded poultry keeper

One of the first things we did when we moved here was build a chook house and this had been more or less occupied by chooks, ducks and once even by a free range pig, for the past twenty years. But storage space is at a premium here and the original chookhouse is now full of car engines,gearboxes and assorted mechanical bits and bobs that didn’t have anywhere else to live.

The Spouse absolutely despises poultry and he is always the one to tread in the chook shit thus making his hatred of all things feathered, loudly clear to all within the immediate vicinity. But, “The Spouse” also loves me and I like chickens. I like free range eggs, I like the fact that the girls eat the snails and slaters and I especially like that I have a free range chicken for the pot when I want one.

So to keep the peace, “The Spouse” very, very reluctantly built me a small portable A-Frame shelter for my newest batch of girls, which he didn’t actually know were arriving until the day before we were due to go and pick them up. This A-frame worked wonderfully well until last Christmas when I decided to keep two pigs. Mother hen decided that the pickings were much richer near the pig sty and moved her brood to a native cherry tree next to the pigs sty which only left the old red hen living in the A-frame.

I wasn’t too fussed about Mother hen moving as she wasn’t laying and I thought all her offspring were roosters and as such they were destined for the pot.

Veronica and I were also given some Muscovy ducks and once again I promised The Spouse faithfully that I would remember to lock them up of a night time and as I talked hard and fast about yummy roast duck and golden duck eggs, I could see his eyes glazing over and I knew by the way he noisily stomped off into the distance that everything would be fine.

And so it was, until the ducks squeezed through a tiny space in the fence and took up residence underneath the verandah at the back of the  house.

Nothing is ever easy when you are a scatterbrained keeper of totally free range animals.

Six months down the track and the fine batch of roosters have turned into a fine batch of hens. David and I went out one night and by torchlight captured the only rooster and one of the hens and gave them to Veronica.

We went out with our torches the next weekend to capture the rest of the hens and bugger me if they hadn’t moved to a different roost. Damn!

This has left me with two young point of lay girls who are totally wild and a mother hen, who has gone broody and is sitting on a hidden nest somewhere deep within the bracken ferns. A broody hen in the middle of July is very strange. Admittedly the weather has been very warm lately but broody in July? It is the middle of winter you stupid bird.

I will need to wait until she comes out to be fed and then after she has pecked around for what feels like hours and hours, I can follow her to the secret nest and replace her eggs, as these eggs are infertile and she will sit for weeks waiting for them to hatch. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as mother hen is very sneaky and I am easily distracted.

I think the ducks might be laying underneath the house which is a a bit of a problem as well because I gave the drake to Veronica and these eggs are also infertile, as well as inaccessible and my glowing promises of golden duck eggs are sounding a bit hollow.

So, I need to convince “The Spouse” to block off access to the underneath of the back verandah, to keep the ducks out from under the house. This will entail all manner of recriminations from “The Spouse” involving lots of swearing, angry glaring in my general direction, lots and lots of grumbling and threats of dire consequences to all poultry that cross his path.

Then he will block off access to underneath the house. Yay! Or that is the plan as I am sitting here writing and hoping.

Dragon’s eggs and eagles.

Two dragon eggs are out of the electric kiln and I have been staring at them and thinking about them for a week now.

Today I took them outside to play.

I was concentrating on photographing the eggs and nearly missed these two beauties soaring high above me in the winter sky.

Today was a good day.

At least I have stopped worrying about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Not that I was worried really, I was more sort of concerned in an abstract kind of way.

I have had a feeling of impending doom for well over twenty years now. It has never been strong enough to actively make me think about it analytically, it has always just been there whispering to me to be prepared, you never know what’s just around the corner.

Maybe I was a boy scout in a former life, who knows?

So I would like to thank Jessica from La Fin DuMond Farm for telling me that her friend is South American and they honestly dont know what all the fuss is about regarding the end of the Mayan calenadar in 2012 as they have no idea what we are on about at all.

So I can scratch that little doomsday scenario off my list.

Back to my feeling of impending doom though and being prepared. In the midst of the hysteria about the Y2K bug I did hedge my bets a little bit and just in case the doomsayers were correct, I prepared for the end of civilization as we knew it by stocking up on salt for preserving meat, candles for nighttime and matches because they were on special, I figured that I would just play it by ear and that was the end of my preparations.

Six years prior to the Y2K doomsday scenario/hysteria we killed a huge pig, the last of my Wilburs and the day that we killed him the fridge and the freezer died. So The spouse and I and 5 year old Veronica were faced with over 200 pounds of pork and no way to keep it all.

At that time we were living in the bus and a shed, “The Spouse” had recently told social security to go and get well and trulied and so our regular income was zero. I was seven months pregnant and replacing the fridge was akin to flying to the moon.

So I preserved the pork by salting it. I kept it in a brine and we ate an awful lot of pickled pork. Once we had eventually eaten all the pork, it took me a further eighteen months before I could even think about eating any pork products at all. But we did not waste one single piece of Wilbur. Not one bit.

So that is why salt was the top of my list for my Y2k preparations.

Fast forward 16 years, the house is nearly finished and money isn’t as tight as it was back then, I am complacent, overweight and lazy. Now that I am not driven by necessity the main vegetable garden has been neglected in favour of the easier kitchen garden.

The kitchen garden is easier because it is harder for the wallabies to destroy it, I see it every day so I remember to water it when the plants are all droopy and it is of a height that makes weeding easy.

But that boy scout from a previous life is still whispering in my ear be prepared, So I have been slowly restoring the veggie garden.

Even though it doesn’t look like it.

This strip of ground is about ten metres long and two foot wide and has just recently been fenced off at either end as it was the easy access for the wallabies to hop down into the garden. So now the only way I can get into this bit of ground to weed it, is to lean through the fence and reach as far as I can towards the wall. It is a pain and it hurts my back. So I have decided to mass plant in here in the hope that all the herbs and greenery will overtake the stickyweed and the couch grass. Even though it just looks like a green mess there is rosemary, calendula, thyme, oregano, silverbeet, kale and comfrey in here, as well as broad beans and snow peas.

This next photo of the veggie garden shows the red currant canes on the right hand side next to the fence, the remains of the lovage canes, a josta berry and more small broad bean seedlings poking through the earth, mixed in with the chickweed, stickyweed, fumitory and couch grass and a zillion honesty plants as well. There is a self sown apricot tree next to the water tank and a tangle of raspberry canes that need cutting back.

Remember it is the middle of winter here so that is why everything is dead looking.

There is a self sown apple tree in the middle of the garden and this year it grew four apples Yay!  Amy and I had planted broccoli and cauliflowers along with a zillion broad beans but I forgot to shut the garden gate and the wallabies came in and ate them. I am hopeless like that I wander off leaving a trail of half done jobs behind me all the time. I remember looking at the gate when I was busy with something else and thinking I must shut that gate or the wallabies will wreck the garden, and then the next morning I saw the gate was still open and I still forgot to shut it. *sigh* I think it was probably open for about three days and the wallabies were happy with their snack.

This will do me for now as I can hear that one of the chooks has laid an egg and I need to go down into the bracken and see if I can find a secret nest.

Wish me luck.

Sometimes I dream I can fly…

In these dreams I will be walking down the footpath and I will just tuck my feet up under myself a little bit and I will be flying.

I always get the same feeling of joy and I wonder, ” How could I have forgotten how easy this is?”  I hover a few feet above the ground and point my arms in the direction I want to go and then I am off, soaring along, happy and free.

I enjoy photographing birds and lately when “The Spouse” and I have been fishing I try and photograph the seagulls and molly hawks as well as anything else that catches my eye.

Birds in flight are really tricky to photograph but sometimes the shots just work and I feel like I am flying as well.

I also have a nagging feeling that I read something very similar on a blog recently so if that was you leave me a comment and we can compare dreams.