When Tom and I met, it didn't take long for us to strike some common ground. We had both wanted to live on farms since we were little people. The longer we were together, the more we knew that our future together would involve making that goal a reality. So, some 6 years later, we sold up Tom's house (and our home where we had just experienced our second baby's homebirth) and began our farm change adventure.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Dung Beetles!

Spot the farmer...
Yup, that's the one - excitedly pushing a horse poo into a manure collector and inspecting the exposed ground for holes and jumpy, black beetles. Our summer season dung beetles have come out to play again! We definitely didn't have any beetle activity over the cooler months, so we'll have to look into getting them in, though they're probably not compatible with pugged paddocks and constant rain - we'll find out soon enough.
Spring rain. It's ubiquitous! Which is a nice change from previous years, and if I thought we had lots of grass last year, this year is really taking the cake. And like dessert, the horses are filling themselves with gusto. So much so that we've had to muzzle the small ponies to protect them from explosion. We'll give them a few days' break from the grazing muzzles, because their facial skin is adjusting to them and needs resting. Then back to gastric restraint.
The animals are in more abundance than I thought possible. The frog-song is just sensational at night, which must be giving the snakes plenty to be happy about. We've not noticed a problem with mozzies, so I'm assuming there is a finely tuned balance that I'm happy to work with, there!
The kids and the Big Fella saw an echidna on the train tracks the other day, and the wombats are pottering about, oblivious to our daily goings-on.
Just recently I've been pondering the acquisition of some bird life. Big Fella has been working on learning chooks, and they're not too far off. My own ideas are less immediately useful in terms of food production, but may be useful for house yard safety measures: peacocks. Granted, I've never had to live with one, but I think I would love it. Noisy, yes - we have some very insulated walls and our neighbours have constantly barking dogs and some roosters, but they are all about a kilometre away from us, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. We'd have to figure out how to give them an aversion to roosting on our roof, to keep our water supply clean, but there are plenty of trees around here for roosting we can divert them to. We have a fox population, and we have dogs, too - the dogs easy, the foxes...we're already not seeing eye to eye. On the plus side, peacocks are associated with lowered snake activity - which I'd only appreciate around the house yard, as we all accept that snakes are around and serve a purpose in the bio-habitat. We is cool with snakes. Just don't want to have the kids stumble across them when they're playing where they're supposed to. So. Peacocks. Watch this space...

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