Yesterday we woke up to find 4 new arrivals on the farm - 4 little wild duckings swimming on our dam. I quickly grabbed the camera and went down to see if I could snap some photos. As I approached, both mum and dad and the 4 ducklings flattened themselves down in the grass and were very still.
When I approached a little closer, mother and ducklings scrambled to their feet and ran into the dam, while the drake ran off in the opposite direction quacking loudly with his wings hanging on the ground like he was injured. But I wasn't fooled, and stayed with the duck and her ducklings. After the drake realised I wasn't fooled, he also joined the family on the dam.
Many changes have taken place in the last couple of weeks. Spring has made a noticeable appearance and the change in seasons is much more profound here than in suburbia. I doubt that's because of any major geographical anomalies, but rather the lack of distractions to the obvious signs. The buds beginning to open on deciduous trees, the increasing number of birds and songs, the increasing number of insects banging at the windows of an evening, the growing grass and much to my dismay, the appearance of the odd mozzie.
Understandably, the abrupt appearance of spring has also sent me into garden overdrive. Last weekend alone my wife and I planted another 13 fruit trees taking our total to 30. We have also planted some lavenders, carrots, 125 strawberries, 3 varieties of potatoes, some tomatoes and raspberries. And that's just the beginning.
Below is an illustration (my design) of what our food forest currently looks like. In our haste to plant some trees we neglected to record the species and variety. We have also mastered the art of tree planing, taking it from a 30 minute contained catastrophe to a 5 minute highly optimised and precision operation.
The project for this weekend is to fence off the food forest from the rest of the pasture so that we can get some cows in to graze on the fast-growing grass. Then, the weekend after that I am going to hire a trench digger and put some poly-pipe in the ground so I can pump water from the dam up to a header tank and then gravity feed to an irrigation system in the food forest and later to watering troughs for livestock.
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