Busy Weekends

Scrappy (left), Mrs Wolowitz (centre) and Howard.

It’s Monday morning and here I sit utterly worn out after another busy weekend.  I have a sunburnt face and neck, a couple of bruises and a few aches and pains. Ah the joys of lifestyle blocks!

Hubby has a full time job in town, which means he’s only available to work on our block in the evenings and weekends.  We were warned when we moved here that this can be problematic for a lot of lifestylers.  You only have the weekends to accomplish anything and if it rains, you’re a week behind.  Next week may have other priorities that need attending to.

I work from home which gives me a lot of flexibility, but there are a lot of things that I either can’t do, or I can’t do alone.

We finished building the chook run on Saturday.  That was definitely a two person job.  In a lot of cases, it required one person to hold something up while the other nailed or fastened in some way.  I’m sure there probably is a one-person way to attach fence strainers, or maybe that will come with experience, but we haven’t got there yet.

Joins in chicken wire.

The chook run required multiple joins in chicken wire - we had numerous pieces of about 3m long, so instead of buying a new roll (at $200 plus depending on where you get it from) we used what we had.  We both have hands covered in nicks, scratches and sensitive fingertips after that.  I’m not sure how others would join chicken wire, but the photo shows how we did it.  That was only one fence.  Putting up 12m of windbreak in a strong Nor’West wind isn’t easy either.  It was raining when we finished it, but Howard, Mrs Wolowitz and Scrappy didn’t seem to mind too much.

Sunday was a very hot, sunny day.  Hubby wanted to cut gorse, so I suggested cleaning up a paddock that we currently had no stock in and was quickly becoming rather overrun.  He suggested that I follow him with the spray pack.  We looked into spraying gorse last summer.  When Hubby sprayed this paddock last summer, it took 2 full spray packs of tordon and there were plenty of bits that he missed.  The big problem last year when we started it was that our local farm supplies store was out of the red dye that you put in the spray pack with the tordon to see where you’ve been.  We could only get blue.  Blue is not a good colour for the gorse, it is really hard to see what you’ve covered and what you haven’t.  Tordon is also very expensive - currently $136 for a litre.  90 mls goes into a 15l spray pack and it doesn’t take much to get through it.  Hubby talked to a few local farmers and gorse contractors and learned that if you want to cut and spray immediately, you’ve got about a 15 second window before the cuts seal themselves off.  It will still work after that, but you will most likely have to wait for new growth and do it again.  This is why he was cutting and I was following with the spray pack.

I have a bad back, some days I’m okay with things, some days I’m fairly useless.  I had to get him to lift the spray pack onto my back, but I was pretty much okay after that.  We got through most of the paddock on the one pack, the remainder will have to wait until next weekend.  I noticed though, that even when the pack was empty, it was still quite painful on my shoulders.  Going by what feels like bruises on my shoulders this morning, I think maybe the straps were too tight for me.  The other big bruise came from either a large piece of wood or a stone that the scrub cutter flicked up to hit me on the thigh.

A break, some lunch and then we were off to plant out the 20 tree lucerne (tagasaste) trees that we’d bought for a shelter belt.  The fenced off shelter belt bits were waist high in grass and so full of tyres that it was a job of several hours.  Hubby would go through and cut the grass with his scrub cutter, throw the excess tyres out, and I’d follow along, planting the little trees, putting a tyre around them, filling the tyre up with the cut grass as a mulch and watering them.

We found that while we’d been told when we bought the place that there was irrigation along these belts, the hose was split and damaged.  That’s going to be interesting.  We still also have to find how to turn it on.

A few of the tyres wound up in the paddock my steers are in.  Seeing them pick one up, roll it down the hill and chase it and play with it was a lot of fun.

As we were on the last stretch, I noticed that one of my cows wasn’t looking well.  I called the neighbour for advice and he came over to have a look.  This neighbour is worth his weight in gold.  Never underestimate the value of a good neighbour.  She’d bounced back from the distress that I’d seen her in by that time (don’t they always) but still seemed off colour.  We moved her to another paddock along with her calf, her sister and her sister’s calf.  I looked at the water trough in there.  It was foul.  The cows weren’t impressed by it either.  I cleaned it and two others at this stage. 

That was about the point when I realised I was rather sunburnt, possibly suffering a little heatstroke as well.  One of these days I’ll think to put a hat on.  My feet hurt, my ankles ached, my leg muscles were tight.  I’d done enough for the day.  I was absolutely exhausted, but it was a good exhausted.  I’d accomplished quite a bit in my weekend.