Farm talk - Winter in S.A.

After quite a severe winter and struggling with the many 'veld' fires we get here in South Africa every year (we're very much similar to Australia in that regard, and where do they COME from?) - the first spring rains have arrived - and it really amazes me that, no matter HOW much you water the garden, just 5mm of rain and everything is flowering, towering and spreading with zest and zeal.

The fires are always a mystery to me - part of our smallholding is not situated near a road, so it cannot be from somebody carelessly throwing down a match or cigarette, yet the fires would always start 'somewhere' and then spread ferociously the length and breadth of properties in its path, resulting in every possible helping hand rushing in with wet sacks, branches and whatever is available to try and extinguish the demon and rushing to get animals out of harm's way.

Life on a smallholding or small farm is always very much at the mercy of the rain - too little and you have to supplement from the borehole and in any drought situation, there's always the worry that the borehole might dry up. This is every small farmer's greatest fear, as it's costly and time-consuming drilling a new borehole, or two or three, because no matter how strongly the 'water diviner' insists THIS is the place to drill, there is no guarantee that one will find any water. Too much rain and the potatoes might rot.

During one such drought, the water level in our trusty 20-year old borehole dropped to beyond a depth that was viable to try and retrieve, so we opted for drilling a new hole. Now this takes major organisation, because you must remember that, from the minute that your water tanks run dry, you are in a position of having absolutely NO water - no bathing, no cup of tea, no water to cook with (so you end up frying or grilling everything), not even to wash your hands with!

So while the drilling contractor is busy setting up his equipment, we were busy organising with the next door farmer to get some water pumped into our tanks for daily use - pipes and fittings have to be bought and trenches dug for hundreds of meters to get the water into the tanks 10m high - there are equations to be worked out between the Kilowatt strength of the neighbour's pump, the distance to the tanks and the pressure needed to get the water 10m up ...

Once the water from the neighbour has filled the tanks, utter caution is exercised in the usage of the water - every spare drop is used to full capacity for flushing toilets, watering plants and supplying the animals with enough to drink. And possibly weeks later, when the new borehole is finished, all the equipment is removed from the old borehole and fitted to the newly drilled hole, once again trenches are dug for new electrical connections and then, hopefully, beautiful, sweet cool water once again flows.

I wonder how many town folk ever give this precious commodity a second thought ...

.

Male or Female?

Anatomy of a Hedgehog -




THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SEXES




It is often assumed that large, powerful-looking hedgehogs are male and that smaller, more delicate ones are female. This is not the case.









If your resident hedgehog is co-operative and lets you take a look at its underbelly, sexing it is a straightforward matter.




In adult males, the penis shows as a large projection (similar to dogs) approximately where you would expect the navel to be, about 5cm in front of the base of the tail.




In females, there are two opening close together, near the base of the tail.

Info from "Everything You Want To Know about hedgehogs - Dilys Breese"










.

FARM TALK - Straight from the Cow's Mouth!

Life on a farm or smallholding is certainly exciting and out-of-the-ordinary, to say the least. The thrill of having a big tract of land at one's disposal conjures up images of green fields, herds of cows, goats, sheep or whatever and neat, tidy and sturdy fences keeping everybody organised and in their place, sheds for lots of storage and the farm cat lazily strolling around on the look-out for those pesky rodents. The (old) tractor and trailer is loading and moving bales of food and the sprinklers are gently wetting the earth and getting everything to grow, grow, grow into MONEY!

For the lady of the farm, there are images of a rambling, yet comfortable, old farmhouse with chimneys and wrap-around porches, rolling green lawns and a herb garden close to the kitchen. Home-made butter, full cream Jersey milk, home-made bread and fresh garden vegetables are first on the list of things to do.



And of course, there have to be chickens (for Sunday lunch - except we can't slaughter Kentucky, the rooster, because he's such a character, or his wife Hendrina, because she's so sweet) and eggs for breakfast, to go with the home-made bread. You might have a couple of pigs (for the bacon - just not Miss Piggy because we reared her with a bottle) and then the kids want some rabbits, because there will be lots of carrots to feed them.



So now the vegetable garden has become a priority (after all the pens for chickens, pigs, rabbits, goats and sheep have been erected). And after all the beds have been properly prepared, fertilised and planted, at great expense, the first seedlings start showing their heads. Your next priority is a scarecrow or SOMETHING to keep away all the birds destroying the seedlings (after you have put up bird feeders all over the garden to attract garden birds!).

The vegetables are ready to be harvested and suddenly you find that EVERYTHING is ready at the same time! You now have 20 bags of cabbages, thousands of carrots (the rabbits can't keep up! even though the original two have now become 11), enough beetroot for several restaurants (a business opportunity?), every shelf and drawer of the refrigerator is packed with tomatoes and you have enough green beans and peas for six months. And family and friends can't understand why they have to pay for "free" vegetables from your own garden.

You also have so much milk and butter and cream now, that you decide this is definitely worth the trouble of selling it. You spend your mornings in the 'bakkie' (LDV) delivering milk (which has to be in an utterly bacteria-free bottle otherwise it goes sour within a couple of hours, so you spent the whole of last night sterilising bottles and getting up early was a nightmare) ... and there's still so much to do when you get back ... The chickens and rabbits have to be fed (and there's a hole in the fence so the rabbits are all in the vegetable garden), the milk from the cows that were milked at dawn has to be de-creamed (for the butter), the butter has to be made and bottles sterilised once again - and some of the neighbours never left their bottles out, so you actually have to rush to town as well to buy a dozen more. And the local market where you established a contact for selling some of your vegetables expects their delivery before 7.30am. You suddenly remember that you also have to be back in time for the truck collecting the pigs you sold because everybody at home suddenly had an aversion to bacon and besides, nobody wanted the job of cleaning the pig sties ... besides, the tractor broke down last week, so the trailer couldn't be loaded with all the muck to be taken away - will have to wait a while now ...



You're sitting on your wrap-around porch, exhausted, having a well-deserved cup of tea, admiring your green fields and neat fences and your heart swells with pride and gratitude - this is ALL YOURS! No matter all the hard work and early mornings - you now have a steady income from the vegetable garden, which has grown to three times its size, and the milk and butter, and the kids are enjoying the new pony enormously. You have learnt what to cut down on (like rabbits, for instance) and everybody has fallen into a comfortable routine, knowing exactly what needs to be done and when.

Your thoughts stray to a new idea - how about a strawberry patch? Surely there's a big market for strawberries - and mushrooms, maybe ...?

"Whatever you put your attention on gets energy from you and grows."

Hidden Hedgehog traps

Garden Dangers

You've done everything you can think of to welcome hedgehogs to your garden - you've put out food on the patio, left some leaf litter for them to scrounge in and now you're sitting back to watch your first prickly guests arrive - BUT YOUR GARDEN IS SCATTERED WITH DANGERS!

Hedgehogs will manage to get through amazingly small holes to reach the next garden or feeding area. They can also climb over fences or up walls, or reach roof gutters by squeezing up inside drainpipes, and getting stuck in food and soda cans carelessly left lying around.

Another hazard for the hedgehog is getting tangled up in nets. Unless it is rescued quickly, it will very likely die. Tennis nets should be looped out of the way, off the ground; other garden netting should be kept in the shed or hung on a wall. Netting used to protect soft fruit should be pegged down tightly at the edges, this holds the netting taut and so a hedgehog is far less likely to get tangled up.

But they also fall into things - holes, trenches, rubbish pits and ponds. They are not likely to be injured by falling on hard surfaces, since their spines cushion their landing, but being left in a trench or hole for an extended period of time means certain death.

Falling into a pond is not a big disaster as, like most mammals, they are quit competent swimmers. They will happily cross small streams in this way, but if they fall into a swimming pool or garden pond that has nowhere to climb out, they will certainly drown. Make sure your Koi pond has a gentle slope on one side or some vegetation which will provide an easy exit, but plastic pond-liners and fibreglass ponds, with their slippery sides, can defeat the most agile of hedgehogs.

Take care with pesticides, especially slug pellets. Only use pellets that have an unpleasant-tasting substances added, especially to put off hedgehogs, and conceal them where hedgehogs can't reach them.

But one of the most effective ways of controlling slugs and other garden pests is by using the services of the hedgehog itself! A high proportion of the hedgehog's natural diet - slugs, caterpillars, weevils, crane-fly larvae and many more - consists of creatures gardeners would be glad to be without.
Info from "Everything You Want To Know about Hedgehogs - Dilys Breese"

So why not make the hedgehog feel at home?

Full Moon wonder

“Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.”
- Henri Frederic Amiel

The full moon just holds a special fascination for me. I try to get outside with every full moon to sketch it, but this past winter has been a bit too severe for me. And then the first full moon we have in September 2011, officially Spring here in South Africa, I go and miss! This is a photograph of the full moon in July, mid-winter and freezing cold, peeping through the bare branches of my 20-year old peach tree.

While I was outside with the camera, I took a pic of one of the garden lights which looks a lot like the full moon

and also one of my garden ornaments hanging from one of my White Karee's (Rhus viminalis)

Night time in the garden is also special for me - last summer I was lucky enough to see some fireflies around my Arum lilies (Zantedeschia), they made it look like a veritable fairy-land! Unfortunately they don't photograph well, either they're too small or they switch off just as the camera flashes!

Camera : FujiFinepix 2800Zoom

This was my last sketch of a full moon as seen through my studio window at 5am on the 21st January 2011.