Hi Gord
I enjoyed it!
But I thought I was the only Aussie on the list... do I make too much noise
for one?
Actually, I thought I should also write because while I have found it very
valuable generally subscribing to the list for half a year now, I have found
it especially valuable to read your messages. My wife and I are still living
with two daughters (finishing education) at home in town in Canberra, and
our farm is 220km away. Over the years, indeed most months, we wonder if it
really has much point, trying to go on with the farm.
Reading your messages I get a real impression of folks somewhat like us
trying to get the benefits from life as part of nature. And it has
encouraged me to stick at it. And always, getting to the farm and the first
few minutes in the quiet there is a kind of redemption, a reassurance, a
re-integration to a properly modest place in the environment. We have no TV,
no computer, a little radio, wood, gas and we use about 200 to 500
watt/hours [i.e. a 100 watt bulb for 2 to five hours] a day of electricity
from the solar system.
Having been preoccupied in the last couple of years with house building at
the farm (a small house, easy to clean, easy to heat, encouraging us to get
outside to the max), we have just spent some weeks trying to get the orchard
back on track, pruning with the chainsaw and the mulcher (a big 9hp
industrial machine, weighing 120kg [280lbs], able to reduce prunings to a
good mulch/compost additive). It was also nice that Margaret decided she
wanted to become the expert sharpener of the chainsaw - usually I am too
rattled from wielding the thing to do it properly. Usually our pruning
policy is to have such an exhausting and inconclusive dispute over pruning
that nothing gets pruned, maybe just the occasional UN General Assembly
resolution adopted grudgingly - but we seem to have made a bit of a
breakthrough this winter. We had to make some judgments that would wipe off
a lot of the fruiting from this year's crop, which has worked out OK too, I
think, as suddenly the temperatures are high, in an early hot spring, which
I'm pretty sure will be followed by icy frost in September, likely to kill
new fruit. One year (until a flood took away our little weather station) we
recorded in a September [spring] thirty day period temperatures from -1c
[30F] and 35c [95F], with 8 inches of rain. Extraordinary daily shifts
(makes it great for work and then sleep), wonderful growing opportunity with
deep black alluvial soil but very tough for the early bloomers!
Now we have the distraction from the farm of a second grandchild about to be
born in Melbourne [700km away]. But we are confirmed in the virtue and sheer
enjoyment of bringing the farm deeper into productivity. It is now
essentially a closed system, with the only prospective future imports of
poultry, possibly sheep which will resist fly problems (the kind without
wool around the bottom) to add the essential livestock to the balance. But
that awaits our being there full times, and meanwhile there are a lot of
native species around. We also seem to have a new young wombat
manager-in-residence at the farm, to prune up the bottom of the citrus, take
care of the fallen fruit and [swine!] and eat the bamboo shoots from
underground. In my dotage I have to spare a thought for the old and rusty
walking grey haired wombat who seems to have lost his territory, but the
young fellow looks pretty fit.
take care in Ontario, Lord Hawkes.
Dennis
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