Even amongst the drought, fires and smoke, life still goes on and we’ve been blessed with some new little ducklings. Our ducks decided to make their nests in the garlic patch this year. We’ve just started harvesting the garlic so we’ve moved these littles ducklings into the garden patch…this should be a little duck heaven for them. Hopefully they’ll eat all the slugs, aphids and grasshoppers!
Indian Runner Ducks
We were also blessed with over 20mms of rain over the weekend and after just a couple of days we started seeing a tinge of green growing back in the grass…it’s such a lovely sight. Hopefully we’ll continue to get some more rain over summer. Here’s a picture of the green tinge coming back in fields, and the before and after photos.
Grass is turning green again
Dead grass
After a few days of rain
We’ve still been managing to water the gardens throughout the drought and when you see things blooming it makes it all worth while. I’ve never seen “all yellow” sunflowers before…that was a surprise. It’s a race with the bugs to get to the strawberries first. The apricot tree is producing even though the leaves are looking a bit wilted. The kale is hanging in there despite the hot weather. We have quite a few baby feijoa trees growing which are still standing strong (can’t wait to have feijoas!!).
My family up in Queensland thought the fire situation here in the Clarence Valley had settled down since they weren’t hearing anything on the news any more. I can tell you that it hasn’t!!! While some communities are onto the clean up and rebuild phase, others are evacuating or cut off by fires. This was the situation early Wednesday morning (27th Nov)
A number of fires merged into one big fire and now that fire is spreading in opposite directions. It’s gone right out to the coast on one side and further inland on the other. All the main roads north and south have been cut off now and again, depending on the state of the fires and sometimes the only way through is to take an extra 3 1/2 hour detour inland. Yamba, on the Coast is completely cut off. They were told to evacuate a couple of days ago and now they’re cut off from the fires to the north, the river to the south/west and ocean to the east. Other communities have been encircled with fires but were saved thanks to fire fighters, but they can’t get in and out to buy food because the roads are still dangerous with falling trees and sections still burning.
Our nephew Pearce works on our friends farm. They have been preparing their property for weeks for the fires that have been burning close to them. The fire reached them over a week ago. They thought they had it contained, but after a scorching 37 degree day on Tuesday the fire intensified again. The fires are right down the back of their property, not close to their house thank goodness. But because of that, their fire isn’t a priority for the fire brigade when there are other communities in the path of fires. They did get help from the national parks and services people though. They came with all their equipment to back burn the mountain next to them. This was to stop the fire from spreading closer to their house and to stop it from spreading closer to other communities closer to Grafton. Karl went to help and got to see it all in action. These pictures are of the back burns of the mountain.
Here are the current fire maps where you can see how much fire has ripped through the North Coast of NSW.
Map 1: NSW North Coast, Map 2: Close up of Grafton, we’re at the Binoculars
NSW North Coast
Grafton Close up, we’re at the binoculars
What can we do? We need RAIN and lots of it! We had 1.5mls Tuesday night which was welcomed but it was just enough to dampen the ground. Other parts of NSW have gotten a good drenching which is great…but we’re still waiting for our turn.
So the First Nation People of Australia are holding a special dance on the 1st December where all the Aboriginal groups around Australia will dance at the same time in their various locations to heal the Country.
We don’t know their dances but our contribution will be to hold a special fast and prayer on the same day. Sunday 1st December, the first day of Summer and the first Sunday of the month. All the congregations of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in NSW have been asked to hold a special fast on that day and pray for the drought to break. Please feel free to join in and partition our Father in Heaven to break our drought and give us relief from all these fires. We do have rain forecast for Sunday, but we need some good consistent rain to break the drought!
I can’t wait to write a post about our raging creek!
The past year and half we’ve had record breaking droughts and high temperatures which are now causing record breaking fires! This was the view from our front door last Friday as the fires intensified in the Clarence Valley
Smokey
Red sky
And this was the view from space! We live at the red dot.
Satellite picture
Australia is burning all up the east coast at unprecedented levels…it’s incredible. Friday night was horrific for residents in Nymboida, a rural community about 30kms west of us. Fire ripped through the area so quickly and went so far it caught everyone off guard during the night. A lot of people lost their homes and farms. It was devastating.
These maps show how the fires spread over one day. We live at the binocular symbol. The map on the left was Friday and the other was Saturday. Notice how much the fire on the left of us spread…and it was pretty much overnight!
Friday Evening
Saturday Morning
Tuesday was forecast for another sizzling 39 degree day and after Friday nights fire catastrophe I was getting pretty nervous, so we intensified our preparations along with everyone else. We can’t expect any fire fighters coming down our 5km dead-end dirt road, especially with so many fires going on, so the boys did what the other rural folk do around here. They made their own fire truck with 1000L IBC tanks, a water pump and hose. The fires didn’t come our way thank goodness, but we might get some green grass growing from all the water they hosed around the place.
I have to give credit to all the firefighters and volunteers who have been working around the clock tirelessly. Here’s some pictures that have come up on my FB feed that show the reality of the fires. I hope I’m allowed to share these???
During times of devastation the best comes out of good people, and there’s lots of good people around. So many people have rallied together to help, like my friend Beth who asked some family members for donations to buy drinks for the fire fighters and within a few days she has received well over $6000 (and money is still coming) from people she doesn’t even know. She’s been buying out all the drinks and muesli bars, biscuits etc from the Grafton supermarkets daily and delivering them to the fire fighters to keep them hydrated and fueled up.
The local foodbank and other organisations have received donations of clothes and essential items to give to those that have lost their homes. So many people have been serving and offering help in so many different ways. It’s great to see.
The stories we’re hearing from those that have lost everything are heartbreaking. Here’s an example of 1 family that lost their home and farm. They run the local health food shop and just the other week we were buying Jacaranda smoothies from them at the Jacaranda festival.
It’s Karl’s birthday today… What does Karl do on his birthday? He reaps the rewards of his hard work!
Onions
Zucchini
1st cucumbers of the season
Our first time growing onions and they look pretty good to me. We just started picking the zucchini’s last week. If you don’t keep picking them daily they quickly turn into giants…like the ones Karl’s holding on the left. It looks like we’ll be having zucchini birthday cake to celebrate (I’ll update the post with the cake later). Our first cucumbers of the season are growing quick too. The vine has hardly even grown and it’s producing already.
What Karl really would’ve loved for his birthday would have been rain (yep seriously). The last 2 days were forecast for rain and we got absolutely NOTHING. We keep track of rain on our calendar now since it’s been a rare event over the last year and a half. The last rain we had was 11mm 3 weeks ago. We were happy with that but we are going to need a lot more than that to moisten this dry parched land and to get our creek flowing again. We’re lucky we have a big dam we can still draw water out of for the gardens…but it’s getting pretty low.
Karl’s created all these garden beds to fill with all sorts of goodness and he’s just waiting for some good rain to soak it all…lets hope we get some so I can post an update with all these beds filled and flourishing.
So here’s the zucchini cake update…it was so moist and delicious even Tama loved it (and Tama doesn’t usually eat veges)!
Forget about Halloween, the 31st October was cause for much greater celebrations here in Grafton. For starters, it was Jacaranda festival day where the kids were officially allowed a day off school and everyone comes to enjoy the beautiful lilac coloured Jacaranda trees, lining the streets of Grafton. Jacaranda festival was celebrated over 10 days here in Grafton with all sorts of activities, exhibitions, markets, music, parades, fireworks and more. It really was quite impressive!!!
Janat and Josiah
Jacaranda Trees
Josiah
Photo Time
But the best thing about 31st October now is that it’s our 1st Grandchild’s Birthday!!! Happy 1st Birthday Josiah!!!
Josiah turns one
Gorgeous one year old
Number 1
It was also our wedding anniversary. We had no idea it was Halloween when we got married over 1/4 of a century ago back in New Zealand. It just wasn’t a “thing” back then.
Spring is by far the best season of the year here in the Clarence Valley. Summers are stinking hot, the cold winters are a nice change but the heavy frost limits what we can grow. Autumn is pretty nice, but spring is just the best!
Blossoms popping on the Apricot Tree
A baby bunch of grapes starting to grow
Snacking in the garden
Peas
Asparagus
We didn’t even plant this pea plant, it just came up from last seasons dropped peas. The asparagus are shooting through. We have to pick them daily to keep up with them.
This years garlic crop
The garden
We have to give credit to Karl for the gardens. He’s the main man around the farm. He’s currently studying horticulture and gets to come home and put everything that he learns into practice. From planting, to propagating, pruning, reviving, harvesting, cooking…he does it all!!! So if he’s not in the garden or tending to his animals, you might find him in his nursery with all his seedlings and precious plants.
Here’s an exciting announcement from our neck of the woods. Our daughter Jonell was proposed to last weekend!!! Her boyfriend Jared secretly came down from the Gold Coast with his friends and transformed our little old shack into a romantic looove shack!
Jared’s love shack!
The shack was used by the previous owner as a weekender. We’ve been using it for campers that don’t mind roughing it! It’s a bit primitive, but it’s a great bush setting at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by state forest.
Here’s the transformation…and what a great bunch of friends coming all the way from the Gold Coast to make this moment special!!!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The moment we were all waiting for!
Welcome to the family Jared… Exciting times ahead!!!
Winter time is our dry season here in the Clarence Valley. It’s also the time that a lot of farmers burn off their rubbish. Two weeks ago we had a crazy windy weekend that fueled quite a few bush fires. South East Australia had a wintery blast that brought snow to just 2 1/2 hours away from us…but just left us with crazy windy weather.
Our voluntary fire fighter neighbour was the first to alert us to this close encounter. Another neighbour who is a HAM radio enthusiast gave us a real time update of what the fire fighters were doing in great detail (they could hear all the communication going on between the fire fighters…how cool is that!)
The NSW Fires Near Me app was also a great tool to keep up with what was going on and this was the situation: Out of control fires just 9km away in crazy windy weather and the wind was blowing the fire in our direction!
The app showed the fires just 5kms away at one stage. It must have been a spot fire that the firefighters got onto straightaway. Anyway, for quite a few days we had planes and helicopters with monsoon buckets flying over us constantly. It was kind of reassuring…and kind of freaky at the same time.
So our fire plan is to turn on our water pump which pumps water from our dam to a huge tank at the top of our property. The water is then gravity fed down to over 20 taps around our home and gardens. We would turn on all the taps and have our hoses ready to pump water everywhere. Luckily we have a large cleared area around our house so our neighbour advised us that we should have a line around our property that we would be willing to let the grass burn up to and only fight the fires within that line, otherwise we would be using all our energy and resources fighting fires all over the place.
The water pump
The old water pump
Our precious dam
Here’s our water pump that we just put in a few weeks ago. The top right picture shows the old water pump that we used up until then. We had to attach the old tractor to the old pump to get it going, but the old tractor kept dying on us. We inherited the old tractor and the old water pump from the previous owners. It worked, but the new water pump is way more efficient.
The dam water tank
Dry season
Here’s our water tank at the top of our property…and as you can see we are very much in dry season…hopefully we’ll get some rain soon. We’re almost looking like the outback.
As for the bush fire, it never got to us…thanks to all the firefighters. It’s been over 2 weeks and the fire is still going, but under control and has currently burnt 5738 hectares.
Our first big experiment was growing garlic. It’s garlic growing country here in Grafton so we grew heaps of it.
First step was creating the garden beds. We don’t have any machinery yet so we dug out the grass and flipped it over on itself to create mounds and then covered them with compost. A truck load of compost doesn’t look like much on a big back yard
Digging out the grass
Kids enjoying work!???
Truck load of compost
Pearce, Lucky and Karl working hard
Karl got a heap of garlic seed from a farmer down the road. For those that don’t know – a garlic seed is simply a clove of garlic. Here’s Karl and the kids sorting out the seed into big, medium and small seed piles. You plant the big ones so they grow big garlic bulbs and you eat the smaller ones. This is Russian or Elephant garlic. They grow huge bulbs and are quite mild.
Watching the garlic grow
We harvested them about 6 months later and enlisted our older kids friends to come and help. They just so happened to come camping at our place at the right time. Thanks you guys!!!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
After harvesting you need to dry them out. Karl learnt the technique of plaiting bunches of garlic from youtube…and we ended up with a years supply of garlic for our family, friends and neighbours!!! We’ve replanted garlic for this season and we still have a heap of garlic in the shed…anyone want some?
The animals all have a purpose on the farm. Here is our extended family.
Woolahra and Sydney
Mischievous goat
Woolahra the sheep was the little lamb we brought home from the outback. She came from Woowoolahra Station (hence her name). Sydney the goat was given to us by a friend on the Gold Coast. We were told that if you have goats you need to have fences like Fort Knox. That is sooo true! Sydney will get through anything and wreck havoc. Here he is in the ducks shelter. We thought we had put enough wooden posts around it to stop him from getting in and eating their food. We were wrong! Poor Sydney has gotten up to so much mischief around our farm that we are too scared to get him a mate. So he just hangs out with the sheep.
Unfortunately we lost Woolahra during the drought. The grass was so dry and scarce we had to let the animals wonder down the back of the property to eat and she was attacked, maybe by a dingo, fox or wild dog??? That was sad. We had hand raised her. She loved being cuddled and would follow us everywhere. I could go for a bush walk around our property and Woolahra and Sydeny would happily follow me just like dogs. Our other sheep haven’t been hand raised and will run away if you get anywhere close to them.
The Ram
A dorper lamb
Black dorper ewe and it’s lamb
We started with 12 chickens, 7 Indian Runner ducks and 6 Guinea Fowl. We’ve lost some (from predators) and gained some (baby chicks) and swopped some with the neighbours, so I’ve actually lost count of how many we have. Our chickens and ducks free range all over the place and have learnt to hide under cover when hawks and big birds fly over head.
We made a mobile chicken coop out of stuff lying around the farm that the previous owners had left behind. From the old trailer, an old cabinet, old weather boards, old corrugated iron etc, our carpenter son-in-law wacked it together in a weekend.
Enoka building the chicken coop
Karl and Lucky helping out
The outside
The inside
Now we have plenty of eggs of all shapes and sizes. Sometimes we get crazy monster eggs
Various egg sizes
A monster egg
Too many eggs
We currently have 5 heifer cows – 3 milking breeds and 2 angus heifers. We also look after our neighbours 2 young bull calves. One still has all his bits and pieces so hopefully he’ll breed with our cows sometime soon. He’s a bit smaller than the girls, and they bully him, so we might have to just wait until he grows a little more.
The Jersey cow
Eating hay in the winter drought
The little bull calf
My favourite
Meet the piglets! They are the newest addition to the farm. Their job is to dig up the grass so we can turn it into garden. They are doing a great job…I just don’t have an updated photo of how muddy that patch of green grass has turned into. I’ll post a photo soon. Of course our trusty dogs Tux and Jet are very much a part of the family. They’ve also been sowing their seeds around the neighbourhood. Our neighbours just had a litter of 11 puppies…and they looked just like Tux and Jet (Yes female dogs can have a litter from more than 1 dog!)
Tux and Jet looking after the piglets
Last of all our kitten “Hunter”. We got him just after Christmas. His job is to keep the mice population under control…and yes we have seen him catch some. Good job hunter!
Off Grid Maori 