It's been almost 6 months since my last post. That's justifiable I think, given how busy things have been around here.
My baby girls (that's right - there's two of them) were born at 2:00am on 31st December 2009. Madeline Grace and Georgia May came 5 weeks early (which is apparently quite normal for twins) and had to stay in hospital for 2 weeks because they were being tube fed.
The last 3 months have been a bit of a blur. The three hourly feed cycle the girls had when they first came home certainly contributed to that. It's only in the past week that they have started sleeping through the night from 11pm until 6am - which is an absolute blessing! Sleep - it's the new black.
The sleep depravation has been the toughest. For a few weeks there I was averaging between 3 and 4 hours a night. It's not like the 'old days' when you could pull an all-nighter, feel tired, sleep for a couple of days and then wake up feeling vibrant and refreshed. Averaging 3-4 hours a night, night after night, for days and weeks on end seems to slowly chip away at the very fabric of your sanity and worst of all, you don't notice it. That is until someone looks at you like there's something 'wrong' with you, or maybe comments that you are being a bit 'touchy' or tells you that you should 'chill out' and you immediately fall into an uncontrollable rage, throwing things across the room, stomping your feet, assuming the fetal position and crying like a baby. That's when it dawns on you - 'I seriously need to sleep'.
However, I've still managed to keep a few of the farm projects running. Over the summer months I grew some veggies, built a chook pen, got some chooks and have almost finished construction of the new veggie plot - complete with automagic irrigation and feng-shui landscaping.
We've had lots of home grown potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, beetroot, strawberries and raspberries. The wet spring resulted in some blight in the potatoes, so I'll be starting a new potatoe patch this year.
We've been struck by almost every pest known to man, including harlequin bugs, cabbage moth, cherry slug, snails, ground beetles, garden slugs, aphids, birds and Smurf the cat - who seems to think the whole garden is one giant kitty-litter put there for his exclusive use.
My hope for next summer is that the habitat I'm working on creating (rocks, logs, mulch) and the nectar producing natives I'm inter-planting with the veggies will encourage the proliferation of predatory animals like praying mantises, lacewings, shield bugs, lady beetles, lizzards and frogs. The intent being, to create some sort of natural biological eco-system that will help keep the 'pests' under control.
I've almost finished constructing the veggie garden. I've dug out roughly 60m of paths, lined with 3"x8" cyprus sleepers that I managed to source for only $4 each. The paths are filled with 9 cubic meters of road sand which took an estimated 150 wheel barrow loads to move with each wheel barrow taking roughly 20 spades full of sand to fill. That's a total of 3000 spades full of sand. There's a total of 11 raised veggie beds with a drip system and automagic water supply to each. There's also a bridge over the top swale that I can drive my ride-on mower across.
It's looking really good...and I'm looking forward to focusing my efforts on growing things instead of construction and spades full of sand.
The four cows are growing out well and I'm looking forward to...well...you know, in September this year. A few weeks ago I woke up on a Sunday morning to find them missing. I had left the gate between the veggie garden and the paddock open and they had all wandered out, through the veggie garden, past the house, down the drive and into the road. One of the local famers chased them to the end of the adjacent road and into an empty paddock. When I found them, they knew they were in trouble. With the help of our friendly neighbours, we walked them back down the road and back into my paddock. Naughty cows.
The problem I have now is that I only have a small and a large paddock. The large paddock is too much for the 4 cows and they are getting really fat. I'm hoping as winter comes and there will be less fodder around, the cows will lean up a bit. Otherwise, come August, it will be cow diet time.
In the meantime, my winter project will be to divide the main paddock into 6 smaller paddocks with a central laneway. That way I can control how much the cows are eating and can also maintain the pasture in a more controlled manner. Although I once swore I would never do fencing again, I've had a bit of practice now and have become quite proficient and standing them up. The idea of standing up the fences for the six paddocks, while once unimaginable, now seems like a quite satisfying and worthwhile project. I just need to break the news gently to my wife - I think she's expecting that once the veggie garden is finished my weekends will be dedicated to my fatherly duties.
