Around the Farm

Joining Sara over at farmama.typepad.com/farmama/ for Around the Farm every Thursday.

I always look forward to eating oranges during winter. These are very juicy and sweet

My main job on the farm is propagation. I start most of our vegie. seedlings in these punnets.

Then I pot them up into little pots  -40 to a tray. This is inside our propagation house.

Before they are planted out they spend some time in our hardening off area. They are protected from birds by some bird netting.

Here's Mark moving a chook dome onto a new bed. He rests the roost on his shoulders and lifts it up.

Then he walks it onto the next bed. Can you see the chooks ( chickens ) following him. They know that he is moving them onto new green pick. Can you believe it's winter and Mark is in his T shirt? It did get quite cold as the day progressed and we all put our woollies back on.

Here they are happily moved in, in no time at all.

This is a newly planted bed. It has quite a mixture of vegies.  We mix fast growers in with slower growing vegies and by the time things like cabbages mature all the fast growing things have been harvested leaving plenty of room for the slower ones. . In here can be seen cabbage, kale, rocket. tatsoi, bokchoi beetroot, turnip and salad mix.

In this bed all the fast things have been harvested leaving red and green cabbage. You'll see some weeds also. We are not too concerned about weeds at this stage. We find that the cabbage are big enough not to worry and they make great chook food for when the dome comes back around.

This pear tree is in the process of losing it's leaves for winter. In the background you can see the straight beds we have our onions in.

This is one of our peach trees, well and truly in it's winter period.

 Here is Sir Bowie Charles our 4yr old grand daughter's pony. He came with the name Bowie after David Bowie as he has one blue eye and one brown eye like David. But Elizabeth thought he needed a few more names. Sir because he is a boy and Charles,- well just because! He was not being very considerate but I suppose it is a bit much to expect a little pony to pose for a photo when there's dinner to eat.

This is one of our dogs , Aggie. She is the sweetest and gentlest dog I've ever known.She is  laying there because I told her to stay so I could get her in the photo. It's 5pm and the sun is nearly set but I wanted to show you the garden edging that our WWOOFer finished before he left for home today. Not a very good photo I'm sorry but the light had just about gone. For those who don't know about WWOOFing I explained it in a previous post.

The garden was actually too wet to do much work in today so Mark worked more on his Geodesic dome and I spent some much needed time inside. I got the floors Vacuumed and washed, The kitchen windows cleaned and the kitchen window sill sanded and painted. And while there was a break in the rain I cleaned our the guttering on the shed as I'd noticed in the last downpour that the gutters were overflowing. And now I look forward to an evening in front of the fire, knitting.