The farm. Need, want, dreaming

I can break the farm stuff into three distinct areas that occupy my thoughts. Things that need doing. Things I would like to have. Things I dream about. The last is important because it keeps the creativity going, and some good ideas come from dreaming about what seems impossible. Some dreams are far off but are good to have in the future as something to work to, like turning Lantanaland into a cooking school.

The need is easy, those jobs that sit in my forebrain, kicking me, telling me that I should be doing them instead of writing. The never ending fencing is the main one. The urgency on that is a little less now I know the guy that owns the 100 acre property behind mine where the cows escape to, and that it is full fenced. They come back eventually. Ideally this year I would fence the last third of Lantanaland that contains the dam. That would mean that I could do much better rotations of the paddocks and start to get some diversity into them, like pigeon pea and pintos peanut that take a little while to establish. At the moment I am just chasing my tail and none of the paddocks really get enough time to re establish good grass. The clover seed has been going into the cows feed regularly so that will get going again.

The other big need is Curtis and The Wife. While he is so small I really want to spend good chunks of time with him, so I am! I'm blessed in that I can spend time with him and I'm really enjoying it. I'm getting a fair bit of stuff done during nap time.

The things I want. There are so many! I'd settle for a decent vegetable garden, more fruit trees and a few more chooks. The chooks will be boosted hopefully by the donation of some fertile eggs and maybe some interesting day olds. A few new ducks wouldn't hurt either. I'd love to have enough surplus eggs to give some to the Herdshare and have that wonderful feeling that you have to have eggs for breakfast just to reduce the surplus. I'd have to do a bit of adjusting of the pens so they had a semi secure day area that had some electric fencing protection from opportunistic foxes, but the idea for that and a way to integrate it into my ideal veg garden is already kicking around. The problem, as always, is infrastructure and money for it.

Some peoples ideal vegetable garden is beautiful neat rows of each variety, order out of chaos. I fell in love with the gardens at Northey St City Farm, where years of plants seeding and growing wild has led to this chaotic wonderland of a garden, where things just spring forth. You plant the things missing in the space and once a year you let the chooks in to clear it all up and turn the soil over. To get to that stage I need to actually get something to grow and seed. I planted some snow peas today, secure behind a sturdy metal trellis. I'll try and get more of a seed raising system going as well, so that I'm planting plants not seeds.

Fruit trees is a matter of preparation and foresight to make sure I establish them in a place where they will get water and enough love to get started and not get eaten by cows. Sounds pretty simple hey! At the moment I have an apple, fig, mango, lime, finger lime, pomegranate, native plum, lemon and passion fruit that have survived the cows and my brownish thumbs. I'm thinking about only asking for fruit trees for birthdays from now on.

I dream of solid fences made of hardwood that could contain a few sheep or milking goats, of terraces cut into the hill, seeded with a variety of pasture for the cows, of a mowable path to the dam, of a series of water catchments in the hill to ensure every drop of rain, of a big stainless kitchen that was easy to make cheese in, of not so much bloody lantana, of a my shipping container shed/workshop/cold room. Dreams are bloody easy. I've got lots of them. I've got more jobs than dreams though.

The positives and negatives of electric fencing.

Being relatively poor, all the fences here at Lantanaland are of the electric kind. There was no real cow proof boundary fencing when we got here and to put that sort of fencing in requires serious money. I'd hate to think what sort of money goes into fencing at a proper farm. Proper fencing requires long term vision and planning as well. You have to think of all the possible ways you might want it set up, not just how you want it set up today. Once it is in it is expensive and time consuming to change. Electric fencing is pretty good as long as you stay on top of it and has one real benefit that fits in with my permaculture principles.

Permaculture has a theory that you learn with the land. That is the longer you are on a piece of land, the more you understand the most effective way to work it and make it work for you. Electric fencing is fantastic for this because it is really easy to reconfigure. Just pull out and bash in some star pickets and give that way a try. I think I have reconfigured the 'home paddock' about ten times already to get the best out of the set up. Learning the way the cows behave, building a chook pen and now setting up for a vegetable garden has all influenced how I build the fences.

The latest little permaculture program I have started is the veg patch. I've been watching the River Cottage Veg program and it made me realize that one of the reasons that I don't cook more veg is that the stuff from the supermarkets is fairly uninspiring, flavour wise. When I broke it down, the reason I don't grow more veg is that, well, I suck at it. I forget to water it, or feed it or don't have good enough soil. Hopefully the new patch will solve all these problems.

I have used tyres to build the beds because they are free and modular. That lets me do a bit each day rather than waiting for a whole free weekend to build beds with materials I can't really afford. The beds are just outside the chook pen and right next to where the cows come and wait to be fed, the best source of rich broken down soil. It's also gives me a super enriched fertilizer, the water from the duck pool in the chook house.

I redid the fences so that there is a little buffer between the beds and the paddocks so the cows can't reach those dexterous tongues through and munch on the tasty plants. I walk down past this garden every day to milk and there is always water down there for the cows so there is no chance of neglect. That is probably one of the most important things for me. If it needs daily attention then it had better be somewhere I have to go every day.

The next bit of refencing was around the tree and tank above the house. I have a little paddock there that is too steep for the ride on and I extended it round the big fig and second tank, down to the aquaponics. This little slope is a pain to slash, so getting the cows to do the work for me seems like a smart thing to do. It also means they can come down and say hello when we are on the deck or in the spa, something that Dolores will like. She is a very friendly cow.

All in all for a couple of hours work yesterday and today I have increased my pasture, got a secure vegetable garden in and started, fixed up another fence and moved Laf and Buster the bull into there. All done, until something comes along and gives me an idea and I change it again. All part of the fun.