Though the words stunned, amazed, horrified and saddened would have worked equally as well.
What am I babbling on about?
I was watching the telly the other night when up popped Jamie Oliver and I found myself being sucked in to the vortex that was,Jamie Oliver’s food revolution. I was totally horrified to see that a whole classroom full of six or seven year old American children couldn’t identify a potato, a tomato, a cauliflower or any other fresh vegetable you cared to mention.
I was sitting there with my mouth wide open, totally gobsmacked.
Now I knew that some children thought that eggs came from the carton and milk came from the supermarket but to be faced with this scale of food ignorance just blew my mind. It is easy as an Australian to dismiss this as just an American thing but as we all know, where America goes the rest of the world follows.
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 evenby 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.
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 fromLa Fin DuMond Farmfor 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.
On Saturday, The Spouse and I loaded the girls into a borrowed trailer and drove them off to be killed. It felt like I spent more time glancing into the rear vision mirror checking the girls than I did watching the road. I was really quite nervous towing two hundred kilos of pig down the highway, especially when Sweety started to lean on the trailer’s gate.I had visions of one of the girls leaping out of the trailer and I had to stop myself from imagining all kinds of mayhem.
I was relieved when I turned off the highway onto the gravel road and I could just dawdle along at 60 k’s. I had never towed a trailer for any distance before and it really feels like you are driving with the handbrake on and the arse end of the car feels all floaty.
When we arrived at our destination, The Spouse took over and reversed the trailer into position.With a bit of encouragement and a bucket of pellets, the girls just hopped out into a stock crate and started to eat.
‘X’ gave the girls a pat and as I watched him scratching Blue behind the ear, I felt heaps better about letting him kill the girls. He had a nice easy manner about him and I could tell that he genuinely liked pigs.
We discussed how I wanted the girls cut up and all the while he was giving Blue a bit of a scratch behind her ear and I felt so much lighter. I didn’t realise how much the thought of someone else killing my animals had been stressing me out. Because what is the point of raising your own animals if at the end they are going to be killed badly. I left X’s place confident that the girls would be killed quickly, cleanly and efficiently.
As we drove down the long drive way, the top two boards of the trailer fell off. The spouse and I looked at each other and went, “Fuck we’re glad that didn’t happen half an hour ago!”
We go back and pick up the pork next Saturday. Veronica is keen to have a go at making some bacon and pancetta as well as some ham and she is going to be detailing the process she goes through on her food blog.
I mooched around the house all afternoon twittering that I had empty sty syndrome. It is really quiet here without the girls. I will be getting some more pigs soon but we, meaning ‘The Spouse’, will have to do some work to the pig sty and their run before I can have any more piggies.
I have uploaded a short, 90 second clip showing the girls in their pen. You can see how they have eaten nearly all the greenery in this front part of their run. I want to extend the run and make it a bit sturdier with permanent fences so that it is easier to move the girls around.I also want to have a bit of a vegie garden down there as well with raised garden beds made from sheets of corrugated iron.
At the end of the clip when I am giggling and the camera is waving all over the place, it is because Blue came up to me and shook herself like a dog, spraying me with mud. I was trying to hop back over the electric fence before she could rub against me and get me even muddier. Harry the dog was about to leap in and protect me as well and you can hear me telling him to get back, which he did.
How do you like the new look to my blog? Veronicaspent all day working on my new theme yesterday and I am really pleased with it. There are just a few minor tweaks that need to be done, like soften the white background to more of an ivory colour and then frog ponds rock is ready to roll into the year of the tiger. Yay.
It is nearly time to send the pigs off to be killed. This is the first time that we have ever sent animals off the property to be slaughtered and I don’t really like it. So I have been procrastinating about ringing up the slaughterman and the girls just keep on growing.
We could kill the girls here but we dont have anywhere to hang them after they are done. So I have made the hard decision to have a professional slaughterman do the job. I have no idea how we are going to get them into the trailer to transport them there but The Spouse is working on a plan.
I felt a bit foolish asking the slaughterman how he would kill the girls but it was very important for me to know the details, as some people just cut the pigs throats and let them bleed out, in order to collect the blood to make black pudding. He shoots them first and then cuts their throats once they are dead, so I was very relieved. I am still a bit worried that they will be in a pen together when they are killed and I will have to ask if they can be separated. The Spouse thinks I am being silly and says the girls will become more stressed if they are separated.
Ack! It is hard being a carnivore.
Duck season has opened and I am always reminded of the scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy and Bugs are arguing about whether it is duck or rabbit season and Elmer just blasts Daffy anyway.
This long weekend hunters have headed off to shoot ducks and protesters have headed off to protest and disrupt the hunt. A protestor has already been injured.
Police say the rescue helicopter was called about 9:00am (AEST) to retrieve a 35-year-old woman who was part of a campaign to disrupt the hunt at Moulting Lagoon.
The woman, from Battery Point, was thought to have been bitten by a snake but it was later diagnosed as a suspected marine sting to her foot.
I find it interesting that the woman was from an inner city suburb and then I wonder what sort of shoes she was wearing. And all I can think of is ‘silly girl’ and shake my head.
The problem with these sort of emotive issues is that everyone gets all het up about eating poor cute little duckies and furry little wallabies. They ponce about the place waving placards and blowing whistles and then on the way home they go to the supermarket and buy a package of perfectly wrapped and presented pork chops, or skinless chicken breasts. They congratulate themselves on a job well done and don’t even give a thought to how the majority of our food is produced.
Where are the protestors with their placards at the top flight restaurants that serve wagyu beef. I dont see them being all disruptive in the deli section of woolworths protesting the hideous conditions pigs are kept in, to give us cheap bacon. The hypocrisy of it all does my head in.
Now to totally change the subject before I really get worked up. I used the contact form on the bloggies page and got the breakdown of the votes for the Best Australian/ New Zealand category. God had already sent me the breakdown (thanks God) but I went ahead and asked for my own anyway as I have always been a tad suspicious of direct messages from God.
