Back in December I was planning out a new book. I wasn’t sure when I was going to write it, because I was thinking about taking twelve months off from writing. This book I was planning, called Indigo Storm, had a very tricky storyline and required a fair bit of research and I knew I…
This is where we spent most of our Sunday and it’s ‘that’ time of the year again. I guess there is a few ‘that’ times of the year on a farm, but this particular ‘that’, is lamb marking. This year, we have about 10,000 lambs to mark. No small number and it will take weeks,…
Are you a New Years Resolution maker? How do you go with keeping them? I’m not so crash hot. I always come up with the normal ones; ‘must lose weight, going to be more organised, get fit…’ Hahahaha. What a laugh. It never happens. This may seem slightly off-topic but it’s not, I promise! This…
Last post was all about meeting my family. Time to meet the animals. This was Weasel as a pup – he was the quietest and least mischievous pup we’d ever had… This is Weasel now – he love to run, works best in the paddock and licks anything that moves. This includes lambs!…
A few weeks ago, you might remember I posted a ‘Beware, rant ahead‘ blog. I need to tell you all again, I don’t usually rant and I don’t usually get so uptight and upset. To sum it up quickly, buying a house in town, so the kids could be educated was turning out to be…
Special events always have to be fitted in around the main jobs in farming. We jokingly said our kids had to be born in between the heifers starting to calve and lamb marking – that way, I was available to help at both times and The boss was able to help me out, if things…
Getting out of bed at 4am is not hard, when I can walk outside, sipping coffee and see this view. There wasn’t long to admire the sunrise, though, as we had 700 ewes to walk ‘up the road’. A cool ten kilometres. We’d shifted another 700 the previous day. Knowing it was going to be…
Christmas this year, will be different for us. Like so many families across the world, we will have an empty chair at our table. This, in itself, brings thoughts and feelings I’m unable to express – I haven’t worked out how yet. It will be a quiet one for us too – just the four…
Last Christmas, I had my first Christmas back on ‘home soil’ in more than 18 years. My husband took me ‘back home’ as a thank you for caring for his mum. I guess I should explain that, for farmers in Australia, Christmas is held at the wrong time of the year! It’s really difficult for…
So it’s been about three weeks since the header or tractor or chaser bin turned a wheel. It’s also been that amount of time since the auger has gone. For those of you who aren’t sure what that means, it equates to NO HARVEST! Can’t begin to tell you how frustrating that is! *run around…
View from the top of the header We’re still harvesting. This must be one of the most frustrating harvests we’ve had in years! The wind has howled from the east – cool, moist gale-forced winds, which doesn’t let the moisture come down in the grain enough, so we can get it into the silos. A…
The one thing about cropping, is as hard as you try, there is always likely to be something that isn’t quite perfect about the grain. It might rain, and it get stained or worse, begin to sprout. This decreases the quality. Sometimes you might find that the boomspray has had a blocked jet and there’s…
Harvest is always looked forward to with a mixture of anticipation and dread – well it is by me anyway. Anticipation because it’s our money making time. We get to see what we’ve achieved over the year, reward for the hard work, so on and so forth. Dread, because it’s dry and hot. Long hours…
Some times there is nothing more I love than editing. After all, the hard work has been done, hasn’t it? The words are on the page and all I have to do is rearrange them, or make them better. Yes? *cough, cough* Perhaps there is a little more to do than that. Some times there…
It’s not often you get to see a full rainbow, let alone have the camera handy to catch them before they disappear. This beauty hung around for about ten minutes, while I fiddled with my lens and managed to get these shots. The above photo, though, really doesn’t do it justice. It was such a…
As I type this, I’m sitting at my office desk, looking out over green pastures. Just a few metres into the paddock, there is a mob of sheep and their marked lambs all camped up, which is unusual for this time of the day. The clouds are low and grey and the gentle breeze has…
Today we’re going to be drafting off a heap of lambs to go to market. Last week we weighed them all up, so we knew how many we had to send and our stock agent could organise a truck. Prime lambs are one of the main enterprises in our business. Both Anthony and I love…
Have you ever had event in your life that makes you stand up and say; ‘That’s it. I’m changing.’ Or have you ever got yourself into a rut that is so hard to pull yourself out from? Well, that’s me. On both accounts. For those who follow me through Facebook, Twitter, or this blog, you’ll…
Every so often an opportunity arrives, that you just can’t pass up, no matter the circumstances. Harvest and Hay making are extremely important in farming world. Hay means there is food for the stock during the dry times and harvest is the money making part of the year. This year, canola harvest and hay making…
I love winter. It’s my season. I love the way the wind bites at my cheeks and the sound of rain on a tin roof/window/shearing shed/ground. It’s like music to me. And rain it did last night! The deluge woke me at 12:15am and I was still listening to it drum steadily on the roof at…
It’s a bit chilly in our neck of the woods! Over the weekend, our temps dropped well below 15 degrees – in fact there was one time I looked at the weather station and I saw 13c. Winter is well on it’s way. Autumn is lambing and these girls below, have had their lambs, they’re…
