I have high hopes for this year but at the same time not great expectations.
There’s an awful sense of dread lingering at the back of my mind, wondering if we really have ditched the ‘If anything can go wrong it will’ problems of the previous 12 months.
So far it seems not.
Lucky?? I just wanted to collapse on the ground and cry.
Only an hour before we’d sat down and worked out our budget for 2011 and discovered we anticipate spending more than we earn this year. So now, after struggling to figure out how to cut back our costs for this year we suddenly have to find another $500.
We went for a walk while the septic tank man drained our tank. My head was spinning with the thought of the $500 repair bill and then Aaron tells me he’d got a fine in December for not having a CoF. “Oh my God, another $200” I was thinking.
Wrong.
Make it $600!
Last year we spent roughly $24,000 on our vehicles alone. That included over $12,000 in fuel and over $9000 in purchase and repair. That amount equals more than my current salary. Just the thought of that much money being spent on vehicles makes me want to vomit.
My going part-time will reduce costs somewhat but with petrol prices climbing and the recent news that Peak Oil was reached in 2006, there’s little hope that our car expenses will improve.
And of course, the Caldina decided to get terminal everything just before Christmas so I’ve just had to buy another car! We paid $1750 for it 2 days ago.
The Caldina is still struggling on and at this stage we anticipate it will be our farm vehicle. However, we may need to consider selling it, just for the possible $1000 we may get for it.
Then there’s our holiday in April. We’re going to blow our budget severely this year.
I had hoped we could travel cheap around the UK via campsites with a 2 person tent but then one of our British guests advised us that unlike NZ camping sites, British camping sites do not offer extras like kitchen and laundry facilities.
I’m actually thinking that we’re going to end up just sleeping in our hire car most of the time. God knows what we’re going to eat but I suspect muesli every morning and pasta with tomato sauce every evening.
If we were financially responsible we would cancel the trip but it’s not as simple as that. Dad’s already paid for my air ticket and Jay & Bex have booked their flights over here. If we cancelled it it wouldn’t be just us who would be inconvenienced.
We both so desperately need a holiday but how are we going to manage it?
CouchSurfing is an option but I’m really struggling to be a nice person at the moment.
I worry that we will argue constantly about money while we’re away. Every penny will need to be spent wisely but my idea of wise is often different from Aaron’s.
The Glamourous Farmer
There’s just been too much doom and gloom in my world in the last year. My whole world has seemed ugly and tired. Despite the fact that we have so much to be grateful for, that thought is pushed so far to the back of my mind, that I am struggling to view life in anything but muted, grey tones.
Something has to change. I am not about to give up everything we’ve worked so hard for for the last 5 years, but I cannot carry on as we are. And so, I am taking inspiration from our ex HelpXer Clare, who last year arrived on our property fresh and enthusiastic to learn about farming while wearing a dress and wellies. A dress???
For 5 years I have farmed in track pants, sometimes shorts, and a variety of old tops. My farming wardrobe consists of virtually all black, grey and white, old, cotton items. I often feel ugly and frumpy and envious of female guests who turn up looking clean and colourful in their ‘I’m just visiting’ outfits.
This year that’s going to change. Mum gifted me $300 for Christmas. “Spend it on yourself” she said, and damnit, I will!
Already I’ve bought 6 dresses but I realize now that I’ve spent the first $100 unwisely.
I’ve been so desperately unhappy over these Christmas holidays that I have made the fatal mistake of trying to buy happiness. I allowed myself to spend up to $20 per outfit but this has defeated the purpose of what I’m trying to achieve. I want 30-40 evening dresses I can choose from but instead I may only now end up with a dozen.
I also want to break away from dull black and boring white and wear only colours. So what did I do? Buy 2 dresses of grey and black! Idiot. Idiot…
I’ve got a whole year to buy dresses and I have tried to buy them all in the first week.
There really is only one thing for it; I need to clean out my own wardrobe and try sell stuff on Trade Me to fund my new lifestyle.
My wardrobe is in desperate need of a clean out so I just need to bite the bullet and do it.
I’m not sure about the practicality of my decision to farm in dresses yet. I’m thinking I may need to add some black tights to give my legs some protection, a wide elasticated belt to keep fabric reigned in, gumboots of course, and maybe plain white or black t-shirts to wear under anything with shoestring straps.
I imagine I’m going to possibly look interesting, definitely eccentric and hopefully just a little glamorous.
It was suggested to me I wear a tiara but I always wear a hat for sun or rain protection so I’m thinking a sparkly costume jewellery necklace of some description will be just the ticket. Again, I will be looking for a $1.00 Trade Me bargain.
Something To Look Forward To
I’m not sure where exactly the idea came from, or how it started, but I know it was pre-Kaiwaka.
Aaron and I checked out a few top of the range Motor Homes at a Home Show in Auckland I think, and we were instantly hooked by the idea of life on the road.
Not that it was feasible back then. We needed jobs and we wanted a house and then a farm.
And so we have a house and a farm and despite our love for this place, it is not forever. It was always a 20-year dream, and 5 years on it still is. This block of land on the side of a mountain is hard work. It’s for the fit and young, and although I am the former, at 40 I’m not really the latter. By the time I’m 55 I know my body will struggle to deal with the physical requirements this block demands.
We have talked often about when we leave here and that our next stage in life should be some travel. First we dreamed of a motorhome but we have slowly drifted away from that idea. As we have become more in tune with farming and more in love with the land our dreams of owning a motorhome have now become dreams of owning a house truck.
Not just any old house truck but something slightly eccentric, with a hint of gypsy to it.
I had thought we would just look for one for sale and buy the right one when we find it. There’s one on Trade Me for sale right now. It’s quite beautifully done and so very close to what we want. At only $65,000 and maybe another $10-15K to get it warrantable, it’s an affordable dream.
“Why not start from scratch?” Aaron proposed
“Are you mad? We don’t know the first thing about building”
“Who says we have to build it?”
We designed a house and had it built for us. Now we’ll design a house truck and have it built for us. We buy the engine and chassis. Get an engineer to build the framework and a builder to build the house.”
It all sounds too easy but then it’s so much smaller than an actual house that surely it can’t be as difficult?
So here’s the plan. From now until 2019 we pay off our mortgage. During that time we design our dream house truck. Once the mortgage is paid we save like mad for 2 years and then buy the engine and chassis. As money allows we get the framing done and then start the building. In 2023 we put the property on the market, giving ourselves 2-3 years to sell it and finish the house truck.
When the property is sold we hit the road and start looking for a 2-acre block of flattish land on which we can create a mini version of what we have here.
I’d like somewhere rural and quiet next time. We’ll need somewhere we can park the housetruck and where we can build a small building. I like the idea of the housetruck being our home and the building being an open plan art studio with a toilet, bathroom and a woodburning stove. A concrete floor, a few rugs and 2 or 3 sofa beds and we’ll be able to entertain and have guests come to stay.
And having the housetruck will mean we can just lock up and leave whenever we feel the urge to explore.
Perhaps with an art studio we may both feel inclined to create wonderful things that we can sell at art fairs around New Zealand, making ourselves a little pocket money along the way.
I don’t know about animals at this point. Aaron likes the idea of a few ducks, chickens and a pig but automatically that ties us to the land again.
I think we’ll be able to keep bees okay and Aaron has decided he’d like to incorporate a small chicken coop on our house truck so maybe a couple of chickens as well.
It’s all pie in the sky stuff at the moment but if we don’t dream it it won’t happen.
Where Have All The Babies Gone?
What a wonderful spring/summer we have had. All our ducks went broody as well as most of our chickens. Before Christmas there were baby ducklings and chicks galore.
Now we are left with just 4 chicks and 1 duckling.
It’s been disastrous. 10 beautiful bantam chicks quickly became 8 when mother bantam left the house after the babies hatched and refused to go back in. The 8 that survived only did so because they went looking for her. Then overnight 8 bantam chicks became none. Aaron and I are fairly confident it was one of the stoats we have seen running across the drive near the chicken run.
No doubt that was one chick for every stoat baby in a nest somewhere close by.
The ducklings were a mission to keep alive. They’re just so young and fragile and despite the amazingly high birth rate, there really is only one mother in the whole lot that actually keeps track oh her babies.
Initially with so many mothers and babies we though safety in numbers would do the trick. Wrong.
Several just went missing and we don’t know whether it was rats, cats, stoats or a combination of all 3. Several were abandoned by their mothers and just keeled over with shock.
The dam started to dry up in the drought, and then horror upon horrors, as the mothers walked across the mud to the quickly evaporating pond, the ducklings would get stuck in the mud and quickly succumb to shock and die. One morning I fed the ducks and counted the babies. An hour later I rechecked and 4 babies had disappeared. All of them were dead in the mud.
And so in desperation we caught 2 mothers and their ducklings and put them into the verandah enclosure. One coped wonderfully, raising 5 robust, healthy ducklings to 2 weeks of age. We released them into the duck run and one by one they disappeared. We thought at first it was the dogs, as they had taken to breaking into the run, but now we are fairly certain it’s another wild cat wreaking havoc and that the dogs were after the cat.
Only 1 duckling remains of the 5.
The other mother duck we caught turned on the babies as soon as she was released into the enclosure. She attacked them so viciously that I was left with no option but to grab her and let her go back into the duck paddock. I could only assume I grabbed the wrong mother during the initial capture.
And so, we had 5 orphaned babies in the enclosure and although they were seemingly adopted by the mother left in the enclosure, over the next 4 days each of them keeled over and died.
2 of the Sussex hens went broody again but one of them laid all unfertilized eggs which then rotted in the summer heat. They subsequently exploded over several days and I was forced to remove what I could and bury the rest under a mound of dirt.
The smell of rotten egg is quite something else!
The other Sussex hen had her entire nest raided one night by rats and she lost all 7 eggs.
The wild chicken has disappeared for several weeks now, turning up only twice to share cheese with Mabel and Stanley. I had assumed she was broody and on a nest but I have seen no sign of chicks. Not that I would have any hope of them surviving though after all the disasters we’ve already had.
The bantam Mama Chick also disappeared and I was hopeful she would bring back some babies but she has returned to the chicken run today and there were no chicks with her.
All in all it’s been an absolute bloody disaster and we have no choice but to build a series of pest-proof broody houses in which we can raise chicks or ducklings with their mums until they reach about 4-6 weeks of age.
Trapped
We were incredibly slack last year with trapping. It’s amazing how disheartening trapping can be when you can go days without catching anything. We start off with a hiss and a roar but as the catches dwindle or the traps go off with nothing caught the enthusiasm wanes and suddenly we can’t find the time to set them anymore.
Yesterday we stopped procrastinating though. We walked around the property and gathered up the traps and then we cleaned them, baited them and set them up around the property again.
For now we are going to concentrate on cats, stoats and rats. We have 3 rat traps, 2 stoat traps and 4 cat/possum traps all armed and ready.
I checked them all this morning and there were no hits. I was gutted to say the least. I just wanted one dead cat. That’s all I was asking. One dead wild cat and I would have been happy. I shall blame the drizzly rain but I suspect it’s more to do with the smell of human on the boxes. We should have worn gloves but that’s only just occurred to me now.
I don’t like death or killing things but damnit, I want the pests to die! The birds not just our own but the natives as well are being decimated and it’s got to stop. Why is it so easy for the pests to survive? Why is it that last year all our own animals struggled to survive the chaotic and unpredictable weather but all the other pests seemed to thrive?
The only thing that struggled were the rabbits. We were suddenly finding them lying dead around the property and the timing couldn’t have been worse. It happened just when we seemed to be under attack from locals for our sister-in-law’s continued indiscretions and suddenly we found ourselves paranoid that someone was baiting dead rabbits to kill our dogs.
Fortunately our fears were wrong and we have since heard that a local or locals had released the calici virus in the area.
I am neither for or against this behaviour. I certainly understand it. With 2 summer droughts in a row we aren’t the only farm that has struggled to grow grass. If you make a living off pasture-fed animals and have to watch as rabbits eat your food source it must be more than a little disheartening.
I’m not upset that our rabbit population has dropped but maybe that is why our ducks and chickens are being targeted.
