Good Shit / Bad Shit

26 May 2011

This week is my week at home, although I have 2 days at the office while my colleague attends a training course.

Monday, Tuesday were just stunning weather-wise; Clear blue skies and mid 20s temperatures. All very pleasant!

Both days I tackled our vege gardens. They’ve become overrun with weeds, yet again, and so I laboriously trowelled every piece of dirt, removing every weed and weed seedling I could find.

The Sussex chickens absolutely loved my presence in the vege gardens out the back, with a couple of the girls following me closely, darting in to retrieve any bug or caterpillar I might dislodge, not to mention the occasional worm.

Those garden beds are in fact full of worms and I put this down to both the composting we do on these gardens with fruit and veg waste, leaf litter and woodchip, and also to the chickens who spend many happy hours scratching and pecking amongst it all, at the same time depositing their own manure.  We did introduce a few worms to these beds initially but they have clearly multiplied several times over.

It was an experiment to let the chickens free-range the entire back orchard and vege garden and for the most part it’s been a great success. They do all the turning of the compost for us, they gobble up random bugs and they shit in lots of useful places. The only part that’s not yet working is our ability to protect the veges we do grow.

I had a bumper harvest of aubergines this summer and I lost them all to the chickens. They also pecked their way through the capsicums and strawberries and then to my annoyance gorged themselves on half the low hanging peaches.  

I have planted about 25 comfrey plants around one of the vege gardens and these have not only grown well but have provided much fodder for the chickens. They look terribly pecked but this is not an issue. The plants do not suffer, and if anything, thrive from the constant harassment. I only planted them last spring after digging up and dividing part of a big mother plant that grows on the other side of the stream. They’ve done so well that I suspect I may actually be able to divide these new plants come this spring.

I removed some of the big, older leaves from these comfrey plants and threw these into our 2 compost piles. Comfrey supposedly does wonders for compost and so far it seems to do well in ours.

The compost we originally bought in for these gardens was nutrient poor and so we have slowly added stuff too it. The fact that the worms are thriving suggests we’re getting something right. However, there’s always more we can do and once again I am challenging myself to collect more pig and cow manure to add to the mix.

Having weeded those gardens I then started on the original raised vege gardens. These are so far our most productive but also the most in need of TLC.

It took a long time to weed these. The larger of the 2 beds was overgrown with Stinging Nettles and Strawberry plants.

The former is of course an absolute pain in the butt to eradicate and in fact, despite several previous attempts, I haven’t managed to yet. It grows so unbelievably fast and can’t be weeded with anything less than thick rubber gloves and a fully clothed body. The roots travel the length of the beds, throwing up random plants all over the place. I dig deep, and pull and heave the long runners but I know I miss the odd one and then the process of garden domination takes off once more.

Still, it’s not all bad. Every leaf, branch and root I remove from the beds goes straight into the liquid compost barrels and it does a wonderful job of creating something special for my gardens. I would also use it for the fabulous Stinging Nettle Ale but this particular patch is often shat on by roosting chickens so I use a completely different pest patch of nettles for my ale.

With nettles seemingly removed I started on the strawberry patch. We had at the start of the summer, if I’m correct, 6-8 strawberry plants. These grew beautifully but are now directly below another chicken roosting spot and so were thickly matted with shit. They looked a little sad once weeded around and cleaned up, however, perhaps in a desperate attempt to save themselves from dying out, they sent out numerous runners and created an estimated 120 new plantlets.

I dug all these up and kept about 100 of the plantlets. After completely weeding that bed I was running out of daylight and so I quickly popped them back in the soil until I have another day in which to properly prepare the bed.

The soil looks lovely but is almost devoid of worms and probably nutrients. My plan now is to dump buckets of cow and pig shit onto the bed, sprinkle over Rok Solid and then to dig it all in and plant out my baby strawberry plants.

Pretty much most of the bed will be planted in strawberries, these juicy red ones, plus about 10 Alpine strawberry plants. In amongst these will be about 10 Welsh Bunching Onion plants I managed to unearth, a couple of celery and half a dozen big, bushy Society Garlic plants.

Hopefully the worms will also move back in.

As for the chickens eating all my strawberries again, it’s not going to happen. These beds will all be encased within a new glasshouse structure come spring.

So that was my hot, sunny Tuesday.

Today was quite a different day. It was by no means cold but damn it was wet. There was 24 ml in the rain gauge at 7:30 this morning and another 45ml by 5:30 this evening. Needless to say I wasn’t that keen on being outside today. Apart from feeding out and taking the dogs for a walk I kept myself busy inside.

And oh how busy I was!

I hate housework at the best of times but to be honest I’ve well and truly had enough of seeing shit on every surface inside the house. What kind of shit? Fly shit. This last summer New Zealand was plagued by flies and the interior of our house was no exception. On any one evening there might be 100 flies hanging upside down on our livingroom ceiling. I went through several cans of fly spray and hung natural fly traps outside from the verandah posts and yet still they came.

Quite frankly there’s only so much fly spray you can spray before you wonder what kind of toxic affect it’s having on your own body. I did spend a few evenings with an electric fly swat and then normal fly swats but this was a laborious task and resulted in the dogs going absolutely mental outside the French doors. They absolutely cannot tolerate the slapping noise of a fly swat and no amount of yelling, admonishing or even reassuring would placate them so eventually I had to give it up.

The end result was the flies won. They outbred my killing sprees and plastered every surface in my house with those horrid, round, brown fly dirts. It’s gross, really gross to see so many fly dirts on fly dirts that eventually some of them just start merging into one big dirt.

Today it was shit outside and shit inside and I’d had enough.  Over the morning muesli and coffee I consulted a couple of ‘green’ cleaning guides. I didn’t have most of the ingredients but I did have a litre of white vinegar in a spray bottle.

I grabbed myself an old cloth and the step ladder and started in one corner of the kitchen and cleaned every surface I could reach, from ceiling to floor. It was a mammoth task. Every surface needs to rubbed over with vinegar, left for about 20 seconds and then rubbed over again, and then several times again to remove the really stubborn shit.

The 2.7m stud height and my short stature means that once I’m on top of the ladder I can clean an area of ceiling in a maybe 50cm x 50cm square. Then it’s down the ladder, move the ladder, up the ladder and repeat the process. I also cleaned every groove in the moulded architraves, scotias and skirting board, the grooves in the moulded doors and the windows themselves. I cleaned the cupboards and the glass frames of my paintings. By 5:15 this evening my neck was sore and I’ve only managed to clean the kitchen and 2/3 of the livingroom.

I used a good litre of white vinegar and now I’m out of vinegar and my throat is feeling somewhat irritated, which certainly hasn’t helped the nagging cough that I’ve had for the last 3 weeks.

But still, where I have cleaned looks fantastic. It really, really looks clean and it occurs to me the house the kitchen and livingroom may not have looked this good for at least a couple of years.

The only thing letting the room down now is the cream curtains. The top 1/3 of my curtains are thick with fly shit and I really don’t know what the solution is.

The last set of curtains I sent away for cleaning came back complete with a verbal tirade from some woman who said they were worst curtains she had ever had to clean and she would never, ever clean them for me again.

Not that the curtains were more dirty than the average curtains but because the black-out lining sewn onto them is of a completely different material to the curtains. They need to be cleaned with 2 completely different methods but it is impossible to separate them without undoing all the hemming. I could see the woman’s point but it wasn’t me that made the curtains. I may have chosen the fabrics but at no point did anyone point out to me that putting the 2 fabrics together would mean I could never clean them.

I’m tempted to fill my bath with cold water and some gentle fabric cleaner and just throw them in but I may of course ruin them. Still, they’re pretty rank as they are so maybe I don’t really have any choice.

I have to wonder if maybe next time I get curtains made I should make sure the fabric is fly dirt brown. Curtains that colour might look like shit but I guess that’s the point!

Don’t Fence Me In

24 May 2011

In case anyone didn’t notice, the world didn’t end at 10am on Sunday. A bizarre prediction by some religious weirdo in America I think.

It’s not like any of us thought it would but it’s an interesting thing to think about. What would happen if the entire human race just suddenly dropped dead? What would happen to our animals?

The animals on this block would be sweet because they can pretty much escape whenever the fancy takes them.

All of them, every last one of them would and could find an escape route if they wanted to. This would be very reassuring if I thought there was a risk that humans might all drop dead on mass. It’s not so reassuring when you live on the edge of the country’s main highway and share a driveway with 2 neighbours with no animals and virtually no fencing.

I mentioned to Aaron yesterday that we have spent 5 years trying to have control over our animals and at this stage they are still pretty much controlling things 50% of the time.

Does anyone else have this issue??

Good fencing, according to various animal husbandry articles I read, is apparently what it’s all about.

This is great if you live on a flat block and can afford to spend thousands of dollars on deer fencing sunk at least ½ a metre into the ground. We’ve got good, 7 wire fencing, we’ve got good post and rail fencing, 1.8 metre tall chicken wire fencing and 1 metre high chicken fencing, we’ve got electric fencing (battery operated and mains), we’ve also got some really dodgy fencing which we weave numerous tree branches into to create impenetrable walls and we’ve got a taranaki gate.

I can tell you right now that despite our best efforts, none of it works 100% of the time.

7-wire fencing just provides a piglet (and even ducks!) all the encouragement they need to dig exit holes beneath the bottom wire.

It may take several days but what’s that to a pig or duck with time on its hands?

It used to be that Aaron and I would spend hours filling in and blocking these doorways but it got to the point that it became more of a joke on us than an effective blocking technique. In some paddocks we put electric wire just inside the fenceline, and although this acts as a deterrent for a while, eventually the pig decides it will start digging further inside the fenceline. This pretty much always results in great big clods of dirt and grass landing on the wire, effectively shorting it, and in no time at all the pig is free (again!).

The 7-wire fence is great for sheep, except the feral breeds it seems. In a panic (and I’ve no doubt if they were desperate) they just jump right over it, and if there’s a convenient pig doorway somewhere, apart from the rams with big horns, they have no issue with wriggling underneath.

Post and rail fencing is good until a pig discovers you dropped a piece of cheese on the other side by mistake, and then 1 or 2 good head butts and pop, the nails release easily from the post and the rail hangs limply to one side.

But it’s not just pigs. A good flood will, as we discovered in January, pop those boards off the posts just as easily as a full grown pig can. At least the pigs leave them where they fall. A flood on the other hand takes them away never to be seen again. Even the cows will show utter contempt for a post and rail fence.

Aaron shut 36 in the stockyard a couple of months ago. As he waited for the butcher to arrive, she flipped out and a well placed kick or two saw not only the boards snap in half but also the mains electric wire on the other side. Note to self – never, ever be on the receiving end of a kicking cow!

Chicken wire, you would think would hold in chickens. For the most part it does, except a) if a possum looking for fresh eggs, or the dogs looking for rats decide to push against it, b) if 2 roosters should meet either side of the wire and develop murderous thoughts toward each other or c) if some of it’s low grade Chinese stuff which turns out disintegrates as soon as a chicken or duck so much pecks at it.

Actually there’s also a d); add a pig to the mix, who decides it’s spoiling his view and well, you have to ask yourself why you even bothered in the first place.

I spent hours fixing chicken wire to the inside of the post and batten fencing in the duck paddock and the adjoining orchard. I attached it to the wire fenceline with fencing staples, laboriously bent into clips with pliers. It was neat, tidy and perfect for keeping ducks in. Or so I thought.

When the grass gets long in the orchard, its extremely hilly contour makes it dangerous to cut with a scrubcutter, so we bring in Arthur the boar for a week or 2. He happily devours the grass down to a manageable level. But what I didn’t realize was that in his spare time, he found what was surely a great pastime; he systematically went from batten to batten, pushing his snout under the chicken wire and then lifting upwards until all the fencing staple clips popped and the wire was neatly scrunched into arches, between every single batten(!), just perfect for a duck to walk through.

The beautiful, huge chicken run we created below the shed was what we thought, the ultimate in paradise for bantams. The 1.8 metre high fence was surely high enough to contain little chickens? Alas no. The bantams had no problems flying over it, doing so every evening so they could roost in the manuka on the other side, and then flying back in every morning.

Not only that but rats and stoats took to digging holes underneath the wire, making perfect doorways for bantams to come and go. And let’s not forget escaping piglets, who faced with such a wonderful challenge, would happily rip out the fencing staples pinning the wire to the ground and then push through, creating even bigger doorways for chickens to walk through.

We gave up on the bantams and they now free range in the bush and at mealtimes around the shed and drive

We clipped the wings of our Sussex rooster Laddy and the 2 orpingtons and put them in the bantam rum but still they had no problem flying over the fence!

Electric wire works wonderfully with adult pigs and cows until it shorts. And you never know when it’s shorted until you see an animal where it shouldn’t be.

Some cows, like our boy 40 seem to spend much of their day trying to identifying weak spots in fences or shorted wire.  

40 can’t tolerate short grass if he can see long stuff on the other side of the fence. Twice during our first week back from holiday 40 (we didn’t see him do it but we just know it was him) led the others to freedom, and onto neighbour G’s drive. It just so happened Neighbour G was home for 2 weeks.

Neighbour G has been quite emphatic in the past that if we are to graze his land then we are to keep our cows contained. Rightly so. 40 had other ideas though. 

On this occasion it wasn’t until the dogs were being walked that the escape was discovered and Jay and Bex found themselves running through the bush trying to round up and herd our steers back into their allotted paddock.

2 or 3 days later 40 and Co. repeated their antics. This time the steers had all wandered off in different directions and Aaron, Jay and Bex had to collect them from up neighbour G’s drive and in the bush.

Aaron asked neighbour G if he’d realized the cows had escaped. Apparently so. They’d actually got out the evening before and G had discovered them wandering around his house and in his garden, however G didn’t want to disturb our post-holiday high and so let them be.

It’s fair to say that Aaron, myself, Jay and Bex were all stunned by G’s response. We have State Highway One along the front boundary and acres and acres of Conservation land at the back boundary and both boundaries have non-fenced areas through which curious livestock can exit.

There were numerous possible disasters that could have occurred, including that those free roaming steers were free to munch on anything, including Gary’s plants, trees and shrubs, and that they could easily have disappeared and with it a sizeable financial interest on our part.

Fortunately the steers stayed within G’s boundary and were eventually returned to their paddock, where a freshly charged truck battery was quickly connected up to the wire.

Who’s Your Mummy?

23 May 2011


Arriving home from holiday I was curious to see how much all the animals missed me. Surely the pigs and dogs would come running as soon as I arrived home? I am after all the centre of their world am I not?

Well, if I ever needed a reality check, this was it.

We got home and stepped out of the car and the dogs came running around the side of the house and just stared at me and Aaron in kind of bewilderment and ran straight past us directly to Bex.

Bex had wanted a ‘Love Actually’ moment at the airport and I wanted a ‘Love Actually’ moment when I got home. It was not to be. The scene was the same when we went and visited the pigs.

You know those moments when you actually feel your heart break just a little, just enough to create a lump in your throat and bring just a single tear to the eye? Blink quickly and it’s all gone and you smile and hope no one is any the wiser.

Bex seemed mortified. “Mummy’s home” she kept telling the animals as they all stared up at her with adoration.

“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed

And as much as part of me wanted to cry I was also overwhelmed by the realization that we had been right to completely trust Bex and Jay to look after our animals.

Before leaving on holiday Aaron and I had agreed that if anything happened to us, the people we would most trust to look after our animals and find new homes for them were Jay and Bex. After gaining permission from them we had written this directive into our wills. Just as any parent would want to ensure their child, if orphaned, would be cared for by the most appropriate person, we want the same for our animals. It was clear we had chosen well.

Being ignored by my animals was both heart-breaking and wonderfully reassuring.

Here Piggy, Piggy, Piggy!

Currently our animal menagerie includes 2 sets of piglets.

Phyllis had 7 piglets on the 13^th of April and they are all very healthy and lively. With oodles of attention from Bex these piglets are particularly fearless and spend most of their day sunbathing on the drive or snuggled in a heap on a grassy spot under the trees in the septic tank field. Which sounds disgusting, but the fact is the kikuyu is thick under there and the water that releases into the field is processed, nutrient-rich grey water.

They have very quickly learnt that the adult food comes from inside a secret room (the coolstore) at the back of the shed. Once we started trying them on solids it really only took a week for them to realize just how wonderful pears and cheese are. Now when either of us heads down the driveway towards the shed we are often accompanied by a gang of squealing, excited piglets hoping like hell it’s dinner time already.

In fact a couple of times I have arrived home from work and there, sitting on the driveway, are all the bantam chickens and piglets, clearly counting down the minutes until someone arrives home and dinner is served.

I’m terrified I’m going to run over one of them. Last Friday I had to continually beep my horn to keep them moving. So eager were the piglets that they thought their best option to ensure they got fed was to surround the car. 

Sometimes when I walk up the driveway they do that to my feet, just gather on mass, in a circle around me, pushing their snouts into to my ankles, pulling on my shoelaces or trying to bite my toes. All while squealing fit to burst. It can be hard to walk sometimes.

Honestly, piglets at that age are just soooo adorable. Their cute little bodies, their excitement and enthusiasm for life, their tiny little bottoms that wiggle and wobble as they run. I can’t help myself but try to give them all little rump scratches or belly rubs.

Mabel also had a litter on 30 April but things went horribly wrong there. The timing was terrible. She went into labour the morning before we flew back to New Zealand and Bex very quickly found out how cruel nature can be. An unidentified breech birth at the start of the litter left Mabel in distress and saw the death of most of the litter still stuck in the womb. 

Bex, to her credit, eventually figured out something was horribly wrong and was able to save 4, which unfortunately 2 days later became 3.

Had I been home I would have figured out sooner that something was wrong but that’s not to say I would have been able to save all 14. I had not anticipated any major birthing problems and so to save Bex any real stress I had told her just to let nature take its course. This was a mistake on my part. I should have explained the birthing process, told her to observe from a distance, but to intervene if things did not go according to plan.

It was a horrible situation to put Bex in, meant the unnecessary loss of many piglets and it took Mabel a good 2 weeks to lower her stress levels. As it is Mabel is still very pissed off at me and I am quite nervous about being in the paddock with her at the moment.

Why Mabel is pissed off at me I cannot know for sure. Was it my absence? Is it Bex’s absence now? Is it that she only has 3 piglets and she has become ultra-protective? Or is it that it was just a horrible labour for her that she’s making it clear she doesn’t ever want it to happen again?

Whatever it is, I am grateful for a pig’s openness in showing its emotions. A pig, unlike humans, never seeks to hide its feelings. If it feels happiness, anger or depression it just lets it show.

A pig is more than happy to let you know whether you’re welcome or not and that’s a good thing. Pigs are big and strong and no one wants any nasty surprises when they’re in a paddock with one.

Aaron admits he doesn’t see an animal’s state of mind as clearly as me. I watch and observe our animals a lot and I can recognize body language. Instinctually I know when something is not right. It may not be something I can define clearly but I know very quickly when an animal is out of sorts.

I wouldn’t say I have any particular talent with animals, but what I do have is years of observation knowledge stored somewhere in my brain. I’ve subconsciously studied human body language all my life, and although I’m no expert, I have no doubt that I often pick up subtle signals someone else would miss. Animal body language isn’t quite so obvious but it hasn’t taken me long to learn it.

I can meet someone for the first time and the hairs will stand up on the back of neck for no apparent reason.  Rightly or wrongly I make instant judgments about a person when I meet them. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing but that voice inside my head will send out very clear messages about some people.

Warning bells can go off for no apparent reason and it doesn’t matter what a person does or says, if the voice inside my head says “Don’t trust this person”, I never do.

Sometimes I worry that I’m making it all up as I go along and that I am being stupid but really I don’t believe that. The book ‘The Gift of Fear’ describes this sense of intuition perfectly. As adults our instincts are based on years of actual subconscious knowledge. When things or people go wrong in life for us, all those subtle, little events that happened are stored away, so that when these events repeat themselves it makes us uneasy.

Maybe it’s the way someone holds their head, averts their eyes, the way they move, or maybe it’s the language they use. It triggers a memory inside our heads. We’ve seen that before or we’ve heard that before.

Then there’s that feeling that something about a situation isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s the way you placed that notepad on your desk, with the pen on top. The pen and notepad are exactly where you left them but instinctively you know you would never place that pen on that angle, something inside your head tells you that someone has been at your desk since you left.

And so I trust my instincts completely when I deal with our animals. Each time I look at them, even if it’s only in the minute it takes me to empty a bucket of food into their troughs and say good morning, I’m looking, observing, and somewhere in the background of my mind, every move, every gesture of the animal is being compared to all the other encounters I’ve had with that animal and if anything’s different a warning bell will sound in my mind.

It’s a good skill to have, as well as an odd skill considering I would describe myself as the least observant person I know.

Aaron will tell you that I seem to absorb nothing consciously. A car drives past and I couldn’t tell you what colour it was. A friend drops in and 5 minutes after they leave I couldn’t tell you what clothing they were wearing.

Aaron and I balance each other out well in this respect. He registers the details as they appear in front of him, and consciously remembers these things clearly. Whereas I look but don’t consciously see what is directly in front of me. Instead my subconscious soaks in the whole picture and stores it away for possible future reference, only firing off an alarm if something isn’t quite right. 

Of course, having said all this, a pig or a human is vastly different from a duck.

Do I get our Runner Ducks? Certainly not as well as I would like.

They really only seem to show 2 emotions, excited interest and fear, and to be honest, I’m not even sure excited interest is an emotion. How though do you describe a duck which is convinced you may be about to feed it?

However, there is the occasional odd angle of a head or the desire to be alone that indicates when something is up.

All efforts to control and contain our ducks have so far failed. This is despite their choosing not to fly except in panic. We have a core group of maybe 15 ducks that like their paddock and like the verandah but the other 7 seem to see independence as a right and will do everything they can to find a week spot in the fenceline somewhere.

It is not unusual to see our ducks cavorting down in the stream, digging in the mud in the pig paddocks, sunbathing on the edges of the septic tank field with the piglets and the bantams, or to hear them quacking with abandon in the gully behind the house.

Virtually the only duck eggs we’ve found since coming home have been empty shells discarded by a greedy rat.

I moved their feeding area as soon as we came home. Instead of out the back by the vege garden it is now out the front by the dog kennels where it’s nice and flat. We’ve created a small area for them to swim, drink and eat. So far so good, kind of. They seem to like this area, with its sunny aspect and proximity to the house, and the 15 content ducks very rarely stray far from this area. The only problem really is that this area is right outside the master bedroom and the ducks will stand there on mass at roughly 4:30am and start up the dawn chorus.

And when I say dawn chorus, I don’t mean the happy, little ‘It’s great to be alive’ chirps of birds sitting high in a stand of trees early in the morning. No, what I actually mean is the raucous quacking of 15 – 22 Indian Runner Ducks all trying to reach maximum volume in their bid to get our attention.

“I’m huuungry. Weeee’re waiting. Are you awake? Seriously, we know you’re in there! Resistance is futile! Come out. Come out now and feeeeeed uuuusss!!!”

I’ll lie there in bed telling myself “I’m not listening. I can’t hear them. I do not hear them” until I fall back into a very light, barely asleep state.

The longer we stay there the louder it gets.

Every now and then they fall silent though. That’s what really wakes me. It’s that suspicious silence. Right then I’m listening, really straining to hear and that’s when I notice a few very low, quiet quacks and I know they’re discussing tactics, watching and waiting for a light to go on, a curtain to twitch.

“Okay guys. They’re not moving. Spread out guys. Line yourselves up along the fenceline and surround the master bedroom. You guys outside the fence, get up on the verandah and stand outside those bedroom doors. Right. Ready? Go!!”

“Quack! Quack, quack, quack!! Quack! Quack, quack, quack!!...”

I lie there in the dark, staring at what would be the ceiling if I could see it, trying hard to suppress a giggle. “You sodding little bastards” I whisper quietly, more a heavy breath than anything audible.

The body next to me turns, adjusts position. “Do you think they’re trying to tell us something?”

“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about” I reply

I don’t know why they persist. We never get up to feed them just because. We have our routine. We have our set times on set days but this is of no interest to them.

It’s like they don’t truly believe you’ll feed them unless they remind you they’re there.

Where We’re At and Where We’re Going

BLOG  22 May 2011

Arriving home from holiday we were immediately struck by the explosion of weeds on our block. The long dry summer was just perfect for nightshade, inkweed and pampas grass to proliferate.

Stanley’s paddock alone seemed to have disappeared under a sea of the stuff.

It took about 5 hours over a couple of weekends to dig and drag the weeds into large compost piles.

Prior to our holiday I had spent many hours in the baking sun trying to dig the stuff out of rock hard dirt and clay in Mabel’s paddock. Now though, the ground is wet and soft and one dig and lever with a thin spade is often enough to lift even some of the biggest plants out of the ground.

In short, it’s fairly easy work and as Aaron says, somewhat therapeutic. The compost piles get satisfyingly big very quickly and the paddock soon takes on more and more of its original grassy look.

I’ve been well impressed by the worm activity in the soil surface. Every large weed seems to yield 2 or 3 worms just around the root ball. I’m not saying the soil’s perfect but it seems to me to be a good indication that overall we’ve been doing things right.

The southern paddock that Stanley is currently in was a grotty little paddock when we first bought the place. There were completely barren patches of rock hard ground and seemingly more clay in places than dirt. But over time, the natural manure of grazing pigs, cows and sheep and the laborious hours we spent hurling buckets of seaweed-rich, liquid compost around, seem to have done wonders for the paddock.

Today, like a couple of Saturdays ago, it was a still morning and so we took buckets of Rok Solid and lime into the paddock and spread it around. 2/3 of the paddock has now been fertilized and perhaps if it is fine and still next weekend we will finish it off.

I have a sneaking suspicion that more barrels of liquid seaweed fertilizer might be even more beneficial but I’m not convinced the time and energy factor is entirely worth it. Next summer I think will be a telling factor. We’ve been spreading the Rok Solid and lime around over the last 9 months or so and I would expect to see some benefits from this in about 6 months time.

Both last weekend and this weekend we have also been up in the bush paddock pulling a similar amount of the same weeds out.  Bit by bit the paddocks are returning to their former glory. There’s still hours of work to do before we have cleared all the paddocks but if we follow Aaron’s suggestion and only spend 1 or 2 hours a weekend tackling it then it won’t feel like the weeds are taking over our life.

I’m happy with this. The idea now is to factor more ‘me’ time into our lives. I now need to see myself as caretaker of the land rather than a slave to it.

It’s amazing how such a simple change in perspective can be so liberating. We’ve done 5 years of hard graft and to carry on as is would clearly be unwise financially and physically.

What we do need to focus on right now is paying off the mortgage. It’s a bit of a bastard really to realize this when I’ve been part-time for the last 6 months. Going part-time was all about making this block pay for itself and giving me a rest from a relentless work schedule here and at the office. Now it’s become apparent that the block is never going to pay for itself anytime soon and if we don’t work so hard on the land then working fulltime at the office is not so bad.

I’d be quite happy to go back fulltime now but of course I gave half my job away to someone else. However, life circumstances have just changed dramatically for my workshare colleague so I suspect (and let’s be honest, hope) the opportunity will arise in the next 12 months for me to take back the other half of my job. The fact is, I can wait and in the meantime I’ll spend my weeks at home concentrating on the vege garden and working on land projects that cost nothing more than time. 

A Different View

21 May 2011

It’s funny what a holiday can do. It refreshes the mind, helps you to either put things into perspective or see things from a different perspective.

Our 5 week break away from the block, and in fact from New Zealand, certainly did that.

I left New Zealand wondering how I was going to get through the next 10 years on the block without it breaking me physically and mentally. I arrived back in New Zealand with the realization that it isn’t necessary to give my entire life to this 10 acres. It can have pieces of me, which I shall willingly and happily give but it can no longer have everything.

This is in part thanks to Jay & Bex. Having decided they would like to move to New Zealand to have a similar lifestyle to ours, and quite possibly somewhere reasonably close by, it got Aaron and I thinking and talking.

If all 4 of us pretty much want the same thing, why don’t we buy a large block of land together, build 2 houses and create a shared paradise and possibly a business? 4 pairs of hands working on a project together is vastly different from 1 and sometimes 2 pairs of hands. It’s like 4 to power of 4. Simply put, you can get a lot of shit done vey quickly.

Of course that’s not all, there’s that instant support network, more people to bounce ideas off, the ability to own a bigger block of land than just 2 people can own, more hands on deck in emergency situations, and perhaps best of all, it means each couple can go on holiday knowing the other couple will be there to look after the place and the animals.

So we shared our thoughts with Jay and Bex. Take your time, we said. Think about it, maybe get back to us in a few weeks and tell us what you think. 24 hours later and they had an answer; they were keen.

And so they departed back to Australia for another year and we’ve thrown a business proposition their way and told them to think about all the pros and cons for the next 3 months before they decide if it’s a definite yes.

In the meantime their initial yes has of course meant our long-term plans for the block have had to be revised. We had a 20-year plan when we bought the place and that changed to a 15-20 year plan last year. All of a sudden it has the possibility of being only 7-8 years. It’s a scary proposition.  50% of me is saying so what, life changes, sell and be happy. The other 50% is saying, are you kidding?! All the blood, sweat and tears and you’re prepared to give it up just like that? No f***ing way!

There are of course pros and cons to both sides of the argument and I’m wise enough to know that I will be happy whatever the outcome.

Straight off there are 2 conditions to our selling this block, a) it has to be financially worth it to sell and b) Jay and Bex have to get residency before we even consider putting our house on the market.

And so first things first, I organized for a real estate agent to visit. We told them the truth, we may want to put our property on the market in 12 months time. We asked - What would we get in today’s market and what should we do to make the place as saleable as possible?

We were right on the money as far as beautification of the property but we were in a completely different ball park as far money goes. This in itself isn’t unusual of course, agents and sellers always have different opinions.

Aaron and I had already sat down and worked out what we have invested in the property since we bought it. And we have only taken into account house, shed, drive, fencing and orchard trees. To make it worth the investment of time we have put into it, the bare minimum we would need sell it for is the amount we have invested plus $50K.

The agent gave us an estimated sale value and it was $150K below the minimum we would accept.

Wow!!!

I was completely floored and it took a good half hour to get my head around what the agent was saying.

In all honesty I wasn’t panicked or upset. After all, it’s a bad market at the moment, the market is flooded with rural properties for sale and the economy is stumbling. We don’t want to sell it right now anyway. However, what we hadn’t realized is just how low the market has dropped. It has made both of us realize that there’s a long way for the market to go before we can even get close to what we want for the property. Selling next year is just not going to be a viable option for us.

This doesn’t kill our plans though, it just makes us reassess and reprioritize. For a start, we now know that any further financial investment in the property would be over-capitalisation.

Apart from a bit of fencing and planting that needs to be done around the stream we had already made the decision to stop spending money on infrastructure. Now we have good reason not to get swayed by ideas of new projects. Thoughts of an extra water tank or more orchard trees have been halted in their tracks.

In our 20-year plan, year 1-5 was all about infrastructure, year 6-10 was all about beautification. It is now year 6 and after this little reality check we are definite in our resolve to concentrate solely on beautification from now on.

We have also decided to cut back on the animals; less pigs, cows and sheep will lighten the burden on our time and on the land. We’ll focus now on making the block more self-sufficient and on creating a more manageable, attractive look.

We’ll get the vege garden fully productive, get bee hives, manage the fruit trees we have and pen those ducks in at night so I can sell the duck eggs.

We’ll still look at buying a block of land with Jay and Bex but it may just be that there will only be 1 house built on it initially and that house will be theirs. At this stage it’s looking highly likely that we’re at least 5 years away from being able to sell. And this is probably an optimistic assumption based on economic predictions that the world could be stuck in an economic downturn until close to 2020.

As I said before, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We both like living here, we both like the house and we’re only just starting to really see the fruits of our labours – heritage fruit trees starting to produce well, soil condition improving, and trees we planted starting to mature. Worst case scenario, we’re here for the full 15 – 20 years. In that case we will have lost nothing except for the opportunity to travel down a different path in life.

The Real Estate agent did give as an insight into current market thinking and for that I’m grateful. It seems the 10-acre dream is now the 5-acre dream and currently people are looking for land to create their own dream, rather than buying into someone else’s dream.

These are things we didn’t know and are good to know as far as planning for the future.