Tir Tairngire

So much for my being back, right?  Life seems to be so busy lately, that I’m finding blogging quite a struggle.  Occasionally, I take photos of something, thinking to put it up on my blog, but somehow it never seems to happen. 

But there are also so many days when I’m struggling to think of anything to post.  While things are busy, they’re busy with everyday, mundane things, not things to post about, and often nothing to even think about taking a photo of! 

I think the problem too is that lately, simple living, or at least, the gardening, sewing and self-sufficiency side of it, is falling by the side of the path lately.  This year I’ve taken on two new, and very time consuming tasks, earning a living for our family, and homeschooing my DD.  Both involve not only a lot of time, but a lot of thinking, planning and research, that often leaves me with little energy to do something else.

I’ve been feeling a little like I will disappoint my readers if I post about things like homeschooling (since I’ve never been a homeschooling blog really) or photography (not that I have any great tips to offer!), but after thinking about it over the last few days, I realised that it’s my blog, so I can blog about whatever I want. 

LOL, what a revelation.

Now, after admitting all that, I’m sure I’ll somehow find a spate of gardening and sewing to post.  Hopefully though, I will post.

Sorry, things have been hectic here (what else is new?), but I’m finally back to show you some pics of the felt we dyed.

I bought just under 2m of 1m wide wool felt from Winterwood, and we cut half of it into 9 pieces. 

The first two pieces we stained with tea.  About 10 tea bags in a medium sized saucepan.  These are both done with the same lot of tea, but the darker one we soaked for about 5 minutes, and the lighter one was just in and out.

Then the really fun bit.  This lot were dyed with food colourings, in the same way we dyed some wool a year or two ago.  Worked out really well, don’t you think?

I’ve had questions about whether the dyes run later if they get wet, and my answer is, definately not.  In fact, I didn’t even get any dye run when I rinse these after setting the dye (in the microwave this time), which is pretty impressive.

I have some plans to try some more dyeing on some other things some time soon, so stay tuned.

Had a lovely holiday with my sister and her family, staying near the beach.  Of course, it pretty much rained the entire time we were there, but it was fun nonetheless.  We visited a cool games shop (Mind Games), and I spent way too much on board games, but it gave us something to do on those rainy days, and helped on the car trip home.

I think three days is just about perfect for holidays.  Long enough to enjoy and pick a few things to do, but not so long that you are wanting to go home before you leave.  Of course, if you’re going somewhere that specifically has some activities to do, you might need longer, but for general holidays, three days seems to work really well.

I’ll hopefully be back tomorrow with some pictures of the felt we’ve been dying, once it is dry.

No insightful post today, as I’ve been running around packing and cleaning in preparation for a trip away tomorrow. Will be gone the whole weekend, so see you all next week.

In case anyone has noticed, I’ve closed comments on older posts in an attempt go combat the spam. If you want to comment on an earlier post, feel free to do it on one of the newer ones.

I posted a while ago (although only two posts back), about our litthe hatchling, Ping.  And, of course, the story has grown since then, but I haven’t found a chance to post it. 

Ping totally recovered from his difficult hatching, and was absolutely adorable.  But being an only duckling, with no parents, Ping wanted to be with someone.  All the time.  It was like having a newborn in the house.  He wanted to be cuddled all day, and he screached all night.  While this was cute for a couple of days, after that, we really needed to start getting other things done.  (The excuse, “I can’t come, I can’t leave my duckling home alone” didn’t seem to cut it with people.  Although my sister was quite happy for us to bring Ping along on visits.) 

So Ping needed some friends.  Of course, what I hadn’t realised was how hard it was to find pekin ducklings in January.  We could easily find Muscovies, but I’m not keen on them.  They just aren’t the same birds as the elegent pekins.  But finally, after much internet searching and phone calls, we managed to locate some week old pekins, and added 3 more ducks to our flock.  DD has named them Beryl, Meryl and Cheryl, after the ducks from one of her story books.  Which is handy, since we can’t tell them apart. 

And despite the difference in ages (the new ducks were almost a week older than Ping), it’s getting really  hard to tell them apart altogether now. 

But I have to say, keeping ducks is an altogether different kettle of fish to keeping chickens.  For one thing, ducks are not as stupid as chooks.  And they really are a delight to watch waddling around the yard, seeming to smile at you when they come up to the door hopefully looking for a piece of bread.  And they LOVE the rain.  Paddling in the puddles is a ducks idea of heaven.

I’d heard, before getting them, that ducks were much messier than chooks.  Well, I have to say, that is the understatement of the year!  Ducks are SO messy.  As soon as they get into any water, they poo in it.  In fact, they just plan poo everywhere.  And it’s messy and wet.  Cleaning out the chook pen now that the ducks are in there too is a shovel job, not a broom job. 

But they’re worth it.  We all love our ducks, and wouldn’t trade them for all the chooks in the world.  (Which is really a very silly statement, as there is no way even a fraction of all the chooks in the world would fit on our property, but you know what I mean.)

And I know, I’m setting a 2010 record, two posts in two days.  Hopefully I can keep it up this time.

Yep, after all my complaining about how dry things have been, it’s now not stopping raining. All our tanks are full to overflowing, the lawn is soggy, the chooks and guinea pigs are NOT happy, but they ducks do love it.

As always, in rainy weather, keeping up with the washing is tricky. We don’t have a dryer, and although we have recently installed an indoor clothes line in the laundry, it will only just hold a full load of laundry, and in this wet weather, it takes nearly 3 days to dry.

Which keeps us in clothes, just.  What it doesn’t do is stop all the other damp or food stained clothes from getting mouldy.  So every now and then, I do a load of laundry, and hang it outside, even though it’s raining.  Yes, it’s getting wet, but at least it isn’t getting mouldy!  And when the sun comes out, it’s in exactly the right place to dry out.

Sorry I have been absent recently.  Life has gotten in th way of blogging.  It is my intention to try to get back to some sort of regular posting, but who knows whether life will agree or not.

Ping!

After our lack of success with our dozen chicken eggs, I decided to give it a go with some duck eggs in the incubator.  A local breeder was kind enough to give us 5 eggs (all he could find that day), saying he wasn’t sure how successful they’d be because of the heat.  I’m pretty sure 4 were infertile, as they didn’t develop at all, but the 5th one, this little one here, just kept growing.  He pipped the shell late Friday night, and I expected to wake up Saturday morning to a duckling, but no, no progress at all.  So we ended up helping him out of the shell.

Apparently duck eggs need a lot more humidity, due to the fact that mumma duck usually goes swimming, and comes back and sits on her eggs with wet feathers.  In the incubator, many people supply this humidity by spraying or misting the eggs once a day, but I stupidly neglected this step (on the grounds that I didn’t have a sprayer, but I should have gone out and bought one!)  So poor little Ping’s shell was just too hard for him to peck through.

We were quite concerned about him for a while, as after we pulled away most of the shell, he lay around for most of the day barely moving.  We left some shell on, the bit that he was still attached to by a cord, and I think that was the important bit.  Late Saturday evening, he pulled himself out of the remaining bit of shell, and began to pick up.

This morning we were still a little concerned, as he was listing to one side, having been lying on that side for most of the previous day.  My mum insisted we take him out on the grass in the sun, and he really picked up.  The rough grass gave him far more purchase than the cloth we had had him on, and soon he was running (and tumbling) around the lawn.  DD was in love, and wanted to feed and cuddle him all day.

Having just one little newborn duck though is a LOT of work.  He thinks we are his family, and if we put him down for long, he’s peeping and crying for us to come back.  He’s so adorable though, that there isn’t much shortage of hands to cuddle him!

This afternoon, he even ventured out to drink from some puddles (once the rain had stopped), and we’re all relived that it looks like he will be fine.   I think we need a couple more ducks though… seems unfair to have one poor lonely little duck!

It is absolutely wonderful to be finally getting some RAIN.  I posted back in October about how dry it has been, and how brown the grass was, and unfortunately the trend continued right up until the last week.  I hadn’t bothered to plant anything, as pretty much everything was just dying.  Even the fruit trees in the irrigated area were wilting, and some in the non-irrigated areas were dying (I have yet to see if they are going to recover, fingers crossed).  Both tanks ran dry, and we had to switch over to town water for the first time in two years!  Thankfully, it rained about a week later, and has been raining on and off for the last week or so.

And all that lovely water(along with the neighbour subdividing and developing) has inspired lots of gardening.  This picture is the start of our native tree windbreak/privacy barrier.  I’ve been buying up big at the markets, and with DH home full time, we have a lot more time to actually get them planted.  So far I’d guess we’ve planted about 15 trees/saplings, with lots more to come.

The pumpkins were the one thing that was surviving (just) without the rain.  This patch has doubled in size in the last week though, I swear.  Looking forward to some home grown pumpkins!

We’re also renovating the side garden with some reed fences (again as a privacy screen, and hopefully to block out the poisons if the neighbour is around long enough to spray again.  As you can see, my bamboo has really taken off in the last few years, and today I noticed rosellas and pigeon peas popping up all along the fence line.  Up the back there, you can see the guinea pig cage, we’ve bought them down to try to get some of the grass under control.

I’ve pulled out the dying silverbeet, and this bed has been planted out with flower seedlings.  (I would grow them from seed, but for some reason, while vegies will grow really well for me, I have absolutely NO luck with flowers.)  I have very fond memories of picking all my mum’s flowers as a child, and want DD to be able to do the same.  Funnily enough, I’ve been planting flowers and flowering plants everywhere at the moment, but haven’t planted any vegies at all so far this year. (The pumpkins were self seeded.)

And finally, we put up a garden arch out the front.  There’s a native creeper planted (though it might be hard to see it among the weeds and grass), but maybe I’ll send some beans up the other side until it is a little more established…

Hopefully I’ll get stuck into the vegie gardens in the next few days/weeks!

To apologise yet again for being such a bad blogger.  As you can see below, NaNo just fell apart and didn’t happen this year for the first year since I began doing it.  I just had too much else on.  December has been a pretty non-event month in regards to anything blog-worthy too.  We didn’t even manage a homemade Christmas this year, but it has been very enjoyable nonetheless.

Sadly, much of the reason I’ve been so busy is that my parents have put their house on the market, and may be moving back up north.  The property up there hasn’t sold, and they can’t keep paying for both.  So I’ve been helping with a lot of cleaning, a couple of garage sales, and lots of moral support.

We’re still hoping that someone will come along and buy their property up north before it sells, so I figured I’d plug it on here, just in case anyone is looking for a beautiful 13 acres.  I could say so many wonderful things about it, lots of water, beautiful wildlife, peaceful and away from it all.  In fact, the only real problem with it is it’s too far away from me!  If you want to find out more, check out the webpage here, and the realestate.com advert here (but use the contact details on the webpage, as they’re more direct.)

Please pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested.  I so so SO don’t want my mum to move away again!

I hope to be around more frequently this year, and hopefully I’ll have something more to post about!

I am such a bad blogger!  It has been a long, long time since I posted!

To be honest, I just don’t feel like I have much worthy of posting lately.  I am so busy trying to keep uploading photos, that I have very little time for anything else.  The garden is neglected, I haven’t planted anything at all in all this time, and it’s Spring!  I haven’t sewn anything either, nor cooked much of note.  So I have trouble thinking of anything to write about.

Of course, I should do a post on our new little chick.  Of the dozen eggs, only one hatched.  Pretty poor record, and next time we plan to go with the incubator.  He’s* a little black cutie though (*he used in a general sense, we have no idea if it is a boy or girl), and it’s adorable to watch him wandering around with his mama.  I’ll try to post some pics when I have a chance.

On top of having very little to write about, the amount of editing I’ve been doing on my photos has given me a little RSI in my wrist, so I have been trying to stay away from the computer as much as possible.

Which is NOT going well with my attempt to win NaNoWriMo for my 4th year running.  I am running behind, though not yet at a point where it is impossible to catch up. 

I’m including this little widget, which will keep track of my word count.  If you click on it, you will be taken to my profile page on NaNo, where you can read my story synopsis, a short excerpt, and see a more detailed graph of my progress.  I’m about 3000 words behind where I need to be right now.  Doable, but I need to keep writing. 

Which is what I’m off to do now.  I hope I’ll be around more in December, with the NaNo event over, and lots of Christmas presents to make and plan.