PRE- ORDER Fleur's newest novel 'Voices in the Dark'
As part of our farming operation we run a prime lamb feedlot. It’s a management tool that gets the lambs off the paddocks during summer, which in turn helps keeps our soil structure strong and (hopefully) stops paddocks from blowing, when the strong sea breezes come in every afternoon. We become quite friendly with the lambs over…
I love getting the first clean, fresh, pages, back from Allen and Unwin – it looks like a book and is ready to read. It’s like starting again and seeing the book through fresh eyes. This edit was particularly difficult for me. We were going flat chat with harvest and I had a deadline to…
I must say, after a fairly intense three weeks, harvest has finally finished and I, for one, am glad! I love seeing the grain come in and finding out what we’ve produced! But three weeks of 4am starts and after dark finishes, as well as trying to edit Blue Skies, has taken its toll! I was…
This is what my world looked like at 4.15 this morning! Magic isn’t it? We in WA are lucky not to have daylight saving, but it does mean that our sun gets ups up at horrible hours – it kissed the horizon at 4.35am! Anthony and I were up – it is going to be a…
Well, after a week of rumbling and grumbling, lightening and torrential rain, in a few spots, we’re off harvesting again today. We’re down in our far back paddock and this is the view from the chaser bin. I took this one of the hottest days we had this week (about 40 degrees) but you wouldn’t…
Thunderstorms are not only impressive but their power is truly breathtaking. They are a reminder to humans: how we can’t control everything, (even though we try) and how much we are at the mercy of Mother Nature. As farmers during summer, we tend to be a bit wary of storms – especially if they don’t bring any rain.…
Our season has come to an abrupt end. There wasn’t any gradual change in the grass as there can be some years. It went from green to golden in the space of about three days! Now is the time that my love/hate relationship starts with summer. I am not a fan of hot weather –…
Look at all our beautiful hay! The cows will be happy with us this year! I love it when it looks as golden as this (always reminds me of the fairy tale, Rumplestiltskin), but I love it even better when it’s all been carted and stacked in rows, away from the weather. Holly, the pregnant Kelpie, has…
Today was a very exciting day! Our brand new toy, a John Deere tractor, was delivered. Tractors are such a huge part of our farming life – I think, either Anthony, I or our workman, are in one every day! If we’re not feeding hay with it, we’re spraying, seeding, pulling the chaser bin, carting gravel,…
It doesn’t seem like twelve months ago that we hitched up the mower to the tractor and started roaring through our oats crop! Today, that’s exactly what happened. Anthony’s towing a mower conditioner, which is like a huge lawn mower, but inside of it, there’s special rollers that crimp the stems of oats, ‘just right’…
Our annual sale – Tomorrow! For many years now, we’ve held an annual ram sale in Esperance. We gather up the best of our rams, truck them to town, wrestle them into pens and let farmers pass judgement on them! Tomorrow is the big day (18th Sept 09). At the moment, I’m snatching five minutes…
This is why, when you live on a farm, you need a four wheel drive! Often you become a transport company! Ours is called FNA transport – officially Fleur and Anthony Transport, unofficially, a rather rude word starting with F Average Transport! I took some of the extra wool into Esperance, to make the journey to…
Sometimes when the crop gets a bit too high and there’s a disease or fungus in it, we need to call in the plane. If we run over it with the boom spray and tractor, we’ll do more damage to the plant, than good. Cropsdusters are daredevils, I’m sure! They fly so close to the…
This is what our first day of shearing looked like at 6:00am! Sheep all ready and waiting in the yards, clear skies and a wonderful sunrise, sending a message that it was going to be a special day! We tested our new shearing shed well and truly, with 450 ewes being shorn. It worked really…
Radio announcers often talk about how wonderful it is to have beautiful warm weather for weekends, not realising that farmers often need rain. However, the warm sunny weekend, that was sent to us recently, was a welcome relief from the cold, grey days that we’ve been experiencing! As you can see by the clear picture…
Once we finished the building part of the shearing shed, we needed to cement the floor. Three blokes and I mixed and wheeled wheelbarrows full of cement over six hours to finish it! I helped cement the footers in this shed and that was my first real experience of cement and its dust. I knew…
Well the shearing shed that we’ve had put into our machinery shed is now finished! Doesn’t it look great? We can’t wait to use it, so the next photo might be of some crutching here. But we’ve got a bit of work to do before that can happen. All the gravel area will have to…
We were lucky enough to be able to buy the inside of a shearing shed, complete with catching pens, grating, gates… the works. Having two farms 18 kilometres apart and only a shearing shed on one of them, makes life quite difficult at times and involves stock trucks carting sheep backwards and forwards at shearing…
This is the finished version of our new dam! It’s huge isn’t it? All the guys have to do now is to run the grader around the bottom, smooth it all out and viola! It’s finished … And a PS: the dam was finished on Thursday afternoon and on Friday we had 18mm of rain.…
This guy is taking level readings to find the best spot for the new dam to take advantage of the natural fall in the land and maximise water collection. This thing that Graham is peering through, is like a pair of really strong binoculars. What you can’t see is Anthony, way out in the paddock,…
Well, the barley’s up! Its had a lovely couple of drinks from the rain we’ve had over the past week, the insects have been sprayed out, we can’t see any weeds … so this crop has had a good start. Now, it’s got a fair bit more growing to do over the next five months.…