Tir Tairngire

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.

I’ve been making these reasonably frequently lately to try to get DD eating more healthy snacks.  Not that they’re guilty of being totally healthy, probably not any better than the store bought ones, but at least I know what goes into these!

Ingredients:
2.5 cups of dry ingredients
3 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon of honey
1/2 cup of sugar
Choc chips for topping (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl.  I use 1.5 cups of rolled oats, half a cup of puffed rice, and another half a cup of nuts/coconut/seeds.  These ingredients are totally flexible.  Use crushed up weet-bix, or corn or rice flakes for a gluten free alternative.  I’m going to experiment with wheat germ and quinoa flakes next time.

Heat butter, sugar and honey in a saucepan on the stove until they boil.  Let them boil for about a minute, then pour into the dry ingredients until all are mixed well. 

Pat flat in a pan.  I use a lamington tray lined with greaseproof paper, and this makes a nice, thin muesli bar.  Use the back of the tablespoon to flatten it.  Let it cool for a while before adding the choc chips, and press into the bar so they stick.  They do melt a bit, but that only enhances their appeal.

Put it in the fridge for about 10 minutes to cool, the cut.  I keep mine in the fridge, but they’d probably be fine in the cupboard too.

Hope you enjoy them!

It’s that time of year again.  NaNoWriMo starts on the first of November.  This will be my forth year participating, and hopefully my forth year winning.

Except I am have so much more on my plate this year than in previous years.  Sure, I’ve won with a two year old child, but she was having day naps, and going to bed at 6pm(ish).  Now she’s five, and busy busy all day.  DH is home this year, which will help, but I’m also trying to work.  Of course, many people do NaNo while working, but the trouble is that my photography uses up a lot of creative energy, which is exactly what I use for writing!

None the less, I am determined to give it a go.  Wish me luck!

As you may remember, we’ve had a broody chook, and on the 6th, these beautiful eggs arrived for her to hatch.  A mixture of breeds, because I just couldn’t decide on one!  They went under our chook, now affectionately known as ‘Broody’, and she’s been diligently sitting on them since.  (In case you’re wondering why our chooks don’t have more permanent names, I must confess to not being able to tell them apart.  We have 5 rhode island reds, and seriously, they all look exactly alike.)

Unfortunately, the story is not an entirely happy one.  We went up one morning to find broken egg in the nest, and several eggs missing.  A search revealed some of them hidden under the paper, but 2 had been broken, and we think, eaten.  We’ve been having some problems with a chook/chooks eating eggs lately, and we think they must have been sneaking in and breaking and eating them when broody got up to stretch her legs.  Yes, I know, I should have kept her separate, but we didn’t have a separate pen, and I naively thought it would be OK, since the chooks have been laying in a separate nest and all.  And truth be told, it probably would have if it weren’t for this egg eating issue.

Yesterday, we lost two more eggs, so today it was time to take action.

Behold, our new broody pen!  Made from the a-frame of DD’s old swing, some yellow support thingys found behind a shed at my mum’s, some wire we had left over from old projects, and some corflute left over from building the bathroom in our shed, and this sturdy little construction cost us absolutely nothing.  Took most of the morning to put together, but we are getting far more adept at this.  It’s very sturdy, and can be easily picked up and moved around, though it does take two people.   I foresee this little pen being very useful in the next few years.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently, I’ve been, well, not posting!  I downloaded these pictures though, and found several others that I had taken, but never blogged about, so hopefully I have enough posts for a few days at least!

This lack of rain is really getting past a joke.  We’ve had nothing but clear blue skies for weeks on end, not a hint of a cloud.  And it’s really starting to show.

The grass in all the main areas is pretty much just brown.  No need to worry about mowing lately!

The chooks don’t seem to mind.  Well, they like the extra dust baths, but they get quite hot during the day, and spend all their time on the veranda of the shed, panting.  We’ve put extra water up there for them, and even the wild ducks come down to share it.  And to swim in DD’s paddling pool, which we left water in when we realised they were using it.  We’ve given up locking them in when we go out during the day, as it’s just too hot.

The only place still showing green and growing grass is the orchard, which is watered by our biolytix wastewater system.  It’s pretty green up there, and the water is helping my trees put on some lovely spring growth.  The guinea pigs are living up here at the moment too, as it’s the only place where there is grass for them.

And I’ve been really excited to see a tiny apricot on my apricot tree!  I wasn’t sure if it would fruit, as we are rather far north for apricots, or so I’ve been told.  But looks like we might get lucky.

Even the orchard is struggling in places though.  On the high side, there are quite dry patches in between the irrigation lines, and some of the trees in this area are struggling.  Including the mulberry tree, who’s fruit isn’t as plump and juicy as it was earlier in the season.

I’ve all but given up gardening.  It’s just too hard to fight the dry.  We still have about half a tank of rainwater in our poly tank, but the stainless steel tank is horridly low, and we’ve had to start transferring water from the poly.  I have managed to get some watermelon seeds up by dint of persistent watering, but now I have to keep up the water until we get some rain.

We were quite excited today, when it became overcast and dark, and I even went out into the garden and threw in some seeds, but alas, no rain.  I hope some comes soon!

But it is finally DONE and FINISHED!  When we started this, we never expected it would take the better part of three days!  Now, we didn’t exactly work from sun up to sun down without stopping (you know how it is when you have kids, a life, and anyway it’s too HOT to be out there all day), but it was three days of not really doing a lot else.  But there it is.  And we built it!  Right from the beginning, all the way to the end.  (With a little help from our wonderful neighbour who lent us post hole diggers, and came over to help us get this thing off the ground and into it’s holes.)

We did most of the design ourselves too, with a little reference to Burke’s Backyard’s swing building factsheet.  Ours is a little different of course, you don’t think I can ever follow a pattern/instructions completely as directed do you?  For starters, no treated timber here.  (I have sworn never to let treated timber on my property!)  We also added in those angled bits, and some right angled brackets in the top corners.  But the basic measurements for the posts and the crossbeam are the same as in the factsheet.

We haven’t hung the swings yet, as we’re waiting for the concrete to dry.  Our neighbour reckons we should give it a week to properly cure, but I’m not completely sure we can wait that long…

While we were out finishing it off today, and DH was drilling holes, I was sitting staring at all that clay, and thinking what a beautiful colour it was…

So of course, you know what ended up happening, don’t you?  I swear, the wool jumped into the carefully prepared and sifted bucket of dissolved clay.  Really, it did…

This wool I just soaked in dissolved clay, wrung it out, and now I’m letting it dry.  I think if I rinsed it now, most of the clay would wash right out (which is really weird considering how hard it is to get it out of your clothes!), but I’m hoping that if I let it dry/cure for a week, some of the colour will remain.

This lot is soaking in clay mixed in soy milk.  Weird idea, but I read it on Prairie Fibres Clay Dyeing page, and figured it was worth a try.  After about an hour, the clay was definitely more suspended in the soy than it was in the water, where it settled to the bottom fairly quickly, so I’m hoping this means it will dye the wool more effectively.  I really hope it works, because it really is such a pretty colour.  I’m letting this soak overnight, then it will go next to the other lot to dry for a week.  I’ll update on how both lots go next week.

And while I was out and dyeing, I had a go at dyeing this lot in tomatoes.  It is unfortunately a bit paler than I had hoped for, perhaps I didn’t let the tomatoes boil for long enough to get much of the colour out?  It does seem to be taking the colour though, so I’ll leave it sit overnight, then rinse it out in the morning.  It is a pretty shade of yellow, if more pastel than I had planned.

I tried boiling up some tomato leaves, but unfortunately none of the beautiful green (which I’ve seen go almost highlighter colour when washing my hands after handling the tomato plants) came out, it was just a dingy brown, so I didn’t even bother putting any wool in it.

I wonder what I can try dyeing with next?  It’s such a highs and lows journey.  Some colours are so successful that you are inspired to try to dye EVERYTHING, and some are so disappointing that it seems impossible.  But for the most part, it isn’t costing me anything but my time, so I think I’ll keep playing.  Of course, I’m nearly out of white wool, so I might have to get spinning…

Not the big one we’ve been working on unfortunately, which is, in fact, a swing, as Melissa guessed.  That one has progressed, until we ran out of concrete, after the hardware store had closed.  Hopefully tomorrow!

I’ve been promising DD a backpack for I don’t know how long.  We even went to Spotlight and choose the fabric, then it sat there, and sat there, and sat there.  About a week ago, I pulled the fabric out, and started cutting.  Then that sat there….  Are you seeing a trend here?

So today, in a spare moment, I pulled the pieces out, and set my timer for 15 minutes, and sewed.  Would you believe in that time it was pretty much finished?  All I had to do then was the casing at the top, and thread the ties/straps though, and it was done.  Now why did I put it off for so long?

It’s based on the Mama Backpack, by Happythings, modified size wise for a child.  Although considering the amount of toys DD has stuffed in there, maybe I should have made the full sized one…

I’m trying at the moment to get through some of my projects.  You know the ones.  You get inspired, rush out and buy material, then… nothing.  I figure I need to work through all those before I start anymore.  That’s the theory anyway…