Thursday, October 20, 2011

It's been a quiet coupla weeks

Every now and then we get a little bit of a quiet time on the farm, believe it or not. As it happened, once shearing had finished, we could take it easy for a bit. It was an added bonus that it was also school holidays, so I have been able to spend some quality time with the family, and doing a few odd jobs around the house.
The weather has been quite favorable for us too over the past couple of weeks. We have had enough rain to freshen the crops right up, and also some lovely warm days to keep them growing (as well as enjoy ourselves). And just to top it off, it is raining again now! At this time of year, when the heads are all filling, rain is just like gold falling from heaven. Plenty of moisture is needed for the heads to fill properly, giving us nice plump grains, rather then small shrivelled grains (or screenings) which lower the quality of our grain (and hence the price) of our grain considerably.
There is a little of spraying still to be done. As the peas are podding up we need to ensure the grubs don't get to them, so insecticides need to go over them. I'm part way through the grub spraying now, and plan to finish off as soon as the rain eases.
We are also starting to prepare for the upcoming harvest (now just under a month away). There is a bit to do to get all the harvesting equipment ready to go. Vehicle servicing etc. and at the moment I'm in the process of getting the alternator on the old D-series Ford truck fixed up, so she'll be all ready to be used as a fuel carrier.
Well I'd better get back to it.. The rains are easing.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Shearings all done now

shearing's all done and dusted now.  The sheep are back out the paddock and the wool is all baled up ready to go.  The next job on the agenda was to sort all the ewes to select the ones we want to send to the off-shears market. So it's been an extreemly busy weekend (which the cook was not happy about mind you) getting sheep in, draughting them off, mouthing the old ewes, checking the wool and body quality of the young ewes and separating them all off into mobs.  We separate them according to what ewes we want to hang onto for breeding, and the ones we dont - they go to the sale. The sheep were loaded on the truck yesterday and are up for sale at the off-shears as we speak. We also had a couple of young ewes that had some black wool in their fleece, making them inelligable for sale, and also undesireable for breeding, but not a prooblem for eating.  So yesterday afternoons job was to kill and hang those 2 (it is quite a common thing for sheep farmers to kill their own animals to provide meat for their families).  This mornings job was to cut them down and then take them in and do the butchery thing cutting Them up and packing them in the freezer. i wouldn't normally go into so much detail here, but I know that you'd have a bit of a chuckle when I tell ya that I also tried to cut my finger off with the meat saw in the process. Luckily just a bit of a scratch.. and no extra roast fingers in with the loin chops tonight!