inner pickle

some days are just more exciting than others

 

 

Just to remind us what total amateurs we are, Adam went this morning to build a farrowing nest for our girl pig who we suspected might be pregnant, and discovered we had piglets. Eleven of them. 

Of course it happened the first morning Dad was home. Not yesterday. Not two days ago. The first morning. Of course it did. Because we desperately need at least one person in the paddock who knows what they are doing. We were grateful he was here. He and Adam quickly built a safe cage around her and undertook some emergency fencing. Dad kept an eye on the circling crows, who apparently go for the wee little eyes, nasty buggers. 

I'm also grateful to my eleven-year-old friend Emily for the last photo here of her Mum, my dear friend Linda, holding one of our new charges. 

Fiasco farming at its best, Adam said.

PIGLETS! Hooray!

xxx

 

 

Mother's Day

My beloved Mum and Dad have been away for about two and a half months. We moved to the farm, into a loft next to their house, then they left on a big trip, four days later.

We've been doing our own thing but using their lovely big kitchen. And kind of house sitting. 

They came home today, due home for a Mother's Day afternoon tea. 

Can you imagine how we were? Just a little bit of running around sweeping floors, moving great piles of baking tubs out of the kitchen and into the garage, picking up the chaos of three smallies, with them circling us dropping more things (or in Tilly's case, creating some massive piece of welcome-home installation art on the front doorstep with six metre long pieces of bamboo. Thanks Tilds.)

And they arrived early. Just as we were jumping on top of the garbage bin and wiping the texta off the coffee table. 

We made tea. We're so truly happy to have them home. Dad did a round of the sheds and animals with Adam before he even sat down.

While I made a few confessions to Mum...

I'm sorry about the microfibre cloth. I, er, grabbed it to pick up a hot saucepan. I'm also sorry about the saucepan. Which still has pink microfibre cloth permanently stuck to it. 

 

Ah yes, the massive blackboard which has been installed on your back verandah. Hope that's OK. The school was giving them away for free. Not too obvious?

 

I've kind of stuck a whole lot of herb pots out there too. I'm sure we won't fall over them?

 

Oh that? Your loungeroom doubled as a Bikkie packaging room. It was perfect, thanks. 

 

I know that this planter box, right on your front doorstep, was full of green loveliness before you left. Somehow, we managed to almost kill it before we noticed and started tending it with worm water and care. Might just take longer than the four days we've tended it to come good again. I'm sure it'll come good again.

 

I seem to have undertaken a colonisation of your pantry. Hope that's OK.

 

And I believe I may have killed or permanently maimed the majority of your houseplants. 

Love you, Mum.

So glad you're home. 

And that you have a wonderful sense of humour.

P.S Some kid, not actually mine, apparently swung on the clothesline and it's a bit buggered. Adam's going to fix it. Love you.

xxx

 

P.P.S For my sisters: I did not, for the record, leave either the loungeroom or the pantry like that. For the record. They were tidy. Love you. 

 

 

playtime

 

 

Hello!

In my first guest post ever, a little bit about our playtime over at Childhood 101!

xxx

 

Slice of Wednesday: Lemon slice (part three)

Another lemon slice?! Perhaps we need to ask: can you have too many lemon slices in your life?For me it's a bit like the Brownie, I just have to KEEP MAKING versions of it, till I get the perfect one. I think I'm close, but I have one more in me (after this one.)

This one is pretty close to the first one I blogged, but with the distinct advantage of being on a lemon shortbread base. I was pretty happy with that. I also didn't add zest to the top, the base was zesty enough and the top was so prettily lemony I didn't want the bitterness of zest. 

I've never made condensed milk, although Rhonda does and it looks straight forward. I'm always making a slice at 9am on a Wednesday and I need to be out the door with it at 10. I'm all about speed. One week I'll make condensed milk the night before in a fit of pre-planning and without a doubt my head will explode with the co-ordinated from-scratch perky puritan-ness of it all and that could be messy. 

 

Meanwhile, we have another lemon slice. Not quite perfect, but sweet and ideally balanced on a saucer next to a pretty cup of tea.

INGREDIENTS:
Shortbread base:

165g butter (cold)

⅔ cup icing sugar

1 cup plain flour

⅔ cup rice flour

1 egg yolk

Zest of one lemon

Ideally in a food processor (it'll take less than a minute), put in all your ingredients and whizz till combined. Otherwise rub the butter into the sugar and flours then make a well in the centre and add the egg yolk. Knead till combined. And put a food processor on your Christmas list. Roll out and press into base of a standard size slice tin (approx 20cm x 30cm). Bake in moderate oven (180deg) for approx 15 mins or until golden. Allow to cool.

Lemon top: 

395g tin condensed milk

1 egg

¼ cup lemon juice

2 tbsp self-raising flour

Mix all ingredients well in a bowl, then pour over base. Bake in moderate oven (180deg) for approx 15 mins or until set.

 

 

YUM!

xxx

eggs on

 

Finally, at some ripe old age approaching 28 weeks, our hens are laying. 

Not all at once, which gives us time to figure out the market, and iron out the logistics of egg collection (plastic trays which hold thirty eggs, stacked in a crate) and washing and weighing. 

And right on cue our orders are going up and up. 

Lucky. That's a lot of quiche.

 

 

Really, if you had this view, I'm sure you'd lay delicious eggs too. 

 

 

Hope your chickens are laying and if they're not we will have our little farm stall up soon!

Happy Tuesday, lovely folk.

xxx

working away

 

 

I'm a little bit absent from this space at the moment because I'm madly working away on this website! Back soon with an online Bikkie giveaway...

 

 

xxx

chips

A bock bock, if you're Ivy and not quite two, is a chicken.

A chip is a day old cornish cross broiler chicken, one of 150 that arrived by courier today. 

 

 

Our eighty went straight into the cosy brooder room, and seventy temporarily hung out in a washing basket and big black tub until nearby friends came to collect them. 

Check out Adam's pretty ingenius little waterers. Great use for a disposable cup.

 

 

Not that it gets particularly cold down here, but this will be our last batch till spring, because these guys will be our first properly pastured chickens and out on grass from the time they're two weeks old. 

Pastured poultry pen currently TOP of the to do list.

 

 

On my to do list right now: to go make a couple of batches of bikkies! Better get cracking. 

What are you doing?

xxx

 

crazy duck lady

When I was little I kept obsessive lists of what I wanted to be, and be like, when I grew up. It wasn't all "medieval historian" and "have short hair, wear long skirts" although that was a strangely repetitive theme. 

There's a list that describes my perfect house (small, wooden, without a roof so it was nice and light and I could sleep looking at the stars) and it specifies that there is a chicken called Henrietta wandering around on the table. Ever see that movie The Slipper And The Rose? I never, not even as an eight year old, pictured myself as the romantic lead. I was the fruity Fairy Godmother who had a chicken called Henrietta in her kitchen.

My love for chickens has never waned. 

It is now second only to my love of ducks. Of which I have none. Yet. 

 

 

I went with my friend Vanessa to the local poultry auction on Sunday. We have quite a few chickens as you may know (about a hundred and fifteen), our little laying flock, but I was after a few for a new chicken tractor (*cough*, not yet built), out on my new vegie patch. I was dreaming about Orpingtons and Wyandottes and Barnevelders and my favourites: Barred Plymouth Rocks. 

 

 

There were hundreds of people there. Many in fancy gumboots. And from the start it was clear I was going home empty handed, the prices for "pretty" chickens were nuts. Even cross bred layers. Perhaps the place to sell poultry, rather than buy it.

 

Ooooh. Lavender Sussex. Fan-cy!

 

I took a quick, not entirely focussed, photo of this fella before I peered more closely at his comb. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he has a mild case of Fowl Pox. I only recognise it because we had it, briefly, a little while ago. Black warty spots on combs. Sends the girls off the lay. Dry pox isn't fatal, but if it gets into their beaks it can become wet pox, which is. It's spread by mosquitoes and we had a long, very wet summer here. 

We treated our flock with a liquid multivitamin that we ordered through the vet, and we also fed them raw lambs liver. Sound odd? Incredibly high in iron. Boosts their immunity right up. Adam meticulously diced the first liver, then threw the others in the food processor. Worked a treat. 

But enough about chickens. 

Because then I saw the ducks. 

My neighbour last year brought home some white Indian Runners from this very same auction, and I thought they were the duckiest creatures I'd ever seen. Wagging tails, curious necks.

 

 

Oh but THIS guy...
 

A BLUE Indian Runner. What a perfect creature. 

 

 

Ducks watch you in a way chickens wouldn't bother with. 

 

I came home and asked Adam how far down the farm job list, exactly, the duck enclosure was. He looked up the list (it's on his iPhone) and told me it was job seventy two. I'm not sure if he was joking.

 

Which might be a problem because my sense of who I am entirely depends on a flock of Indian Runners at my kitchen door. 

Depends on it. 

xxx

 

permanent

 

 

I'm not a particularly emotional person. 

I don't typically well up at weddings, or around babies, or under crisis. 

But some moments undo the best of us.

I have a very long standing dear friend, Sue (sometimes found over here) who I met when I was fifteen and we've been friends ever since, notwithstanding varying continental distances.  

On Monday, having been in Sydney all day, we came home to a long package on the front doorstep. In that long box lay two apple trees, top and tailed, with root balls moistly sealed, ready to be planted. 

 

Sometimes it's your oldest friends, even if they're in London, who know just the right moment to send the perfect present. 

Adam and I stood the trees up on the dining table after we bundled sleeping children out of the car and into bed, and stared at them. How did she know?

 

How did she know that putting a tree in the ground here on this old, old family farm, right now, was exactly what we needed this week? 

Apples, even. Our first fruit trees. In what will be the orchard. 

Right when we're floundering just a little bit, unsure if we can sustain the luxury of farming full time; will our eggs sales, chicken sales, pork sales, biscuit sales uphold us? 

 

 

And then today after dinner I was watching my two girls in the bath; Tilly was squeezing out the stocking with oats in it to calm her eczema, Ivy was singing in Ivy language, Henry was quietly achieving something extraordinary on his ipod while waiting for his shower - I am amazed at the coding he's figured out already, he's still seven - and I welled up with happy tears. Adam had put on his favourite piece of music, Pachelbel's Canon, and was conducting in the hallway.

There'd been a funeral on Friday for a local lady, not someone I knew, but someone that was a dear friend to friends of ours. Adam had been with the fire brigade at the accident. We reminded each other, just at dinner, how short life might be. 

Grab it. 

Don't miss it.

 

Put a tree in the ground. 

Hold your nerve. 

Find a new market, idea, income stream, and one day we'll have apple pie and preserves and sauce to go with the pork loin chops. 

Really, she'll be apples.

 

Thank you Sue, we love them. And you.

xxx

A Friday Photo

 

Hello! I apologise for not showing up here this week, it was a week that got away from me. 

LOTS going on over here, it was a good week for egg production, a very good week for Bikkies and a great week for ANZAC biscuits! Hope you got one. 

This is my Dad driving the milk, in cans, to the dairy co-op. Circa 1960. What a fine looking vehicle. This photo is not at all representative of Dad's upbeat and cheerful demeanor. But I believe he still has that hat.

Hope you're all awesome and made at least one thing from scratch this week. You should be rehearsing - we're doing A MONTH from scratch very soon! OK? OK!!

xxx