Five Year Anniversary

Last month marked five years on our little block.

I still remember moving in.  It was hectic, filling up a rented small truck several times over, loading up cars and trailers and driving more than an hour in convoy to our little block.

For those who don't know the story, we were living in Wainoni in the Eastern suburbs of Christchurch.  Those Eastern suburbs suffered badly in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Mostly because the land we were on was only soil on the top maybe 40cm and sand underneath that.  The house we'd just spent 7 years gradually renovating needed to be started again from scratch.

In some spots, the foundations had sunk enough that you could pull bricks out of the outside walls without any sort of resistance.  The lino had bunched up in this corner but had a gap in that one.  There were cracks of up to 10mm in some of the internal walls.  Walking across the kitchen floor made you feel seasick but according to EQC we were still officially liveable and I had several arguments about what was existing wear and tear and what was new.  We could probably have coped with that, if it wasn't for the constant wearing on your nerves that goes with this kind of event and the tens of thousands of aftershocks.

We'd have a noticeable aftershock at least 5 times a week.  Cars driving slowly past my house felt like aftershocks and made the house shake and tremble.  Everyone was on edge all the time.  Nerves were frayed and we were all brittle and uptight and irritable.

Hubby came home one day and told me he'd arranged for a mortgage broker to come and see us and find out how much we could borrow.  He didn't want to come home to our place anymore, his daily commute had doubled because of all the road damage and he found himself dreading coming home from work every day.  We found that if we rented out our house, the amount we could easily borrow was much higher than expected and I shortly realised that it was possible for us to finally live our dream of having a lifestyle block.

We looked at a lot of places, some okay and some dreadful.  None quite ticked all our boxes.  Then with the help of friends who were real estate agents, we came to have a look at what became our block and immediately fell in love.  Several times since, those friends have said that they've never seen buyers and a property more suited to each other.

It was a very quick process because the tenants we'd organised needed to be out of their previous place by a particular date.  In five weeks, we had finance sorted, insurance sorted (although that had it's dramas), schools mostly sorted for the kids and an extra moving with us - Miss (then) 15's boyfriend found himself homeless and they had this dependency thing going on. It was easier to have him move with us (with some strict rules of course) and then I knew Miss 15 would come home each day, which had also been a problem.

We moved into an old farm cottage that had been extended a few times and needed some love.  Our block took some months to get our heads around the size of our land.  It felt like I was walking in a public park.

Hubby needs a project, he's a busy relaxer.  The gorse that covered half of our block provided him with that.  I make jokes now and then that he and the gorse are like Jean Valjean and Javert - there are times when there have been more important jobs that need doing, but he'd be cutting and burning gorse.  When we got our first chickens, I picked them up before he'd finished the house so that he had to get it done quickly.

Achievements:

We've fenced the half of the property that hadn't previously been fenced.  Where there was a huge open area, there are now four distinct paddocks.  We've strung them with electric fencing, there is undergate wire to continue the circuits, we've put gates in.  There are still two more fences to put in.

We've planted a small orchard and managed to keep it alive.  Keeping it alive might not sound like a big deal, but given the hot, dry gale force Nor'West winds we get every spring and two years of crippling drought, I find it rather impressive.  We even got fruit this year from some of them.

We have taken out more than half of our grocery bill in foods we provide for ourselves.  I haven't bought meat, dairy or eggs in a year and a half.  I only buy potatoes for a few months of the year (depending on how my crop went) and I have plenty broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  There's usually tomato pastes and pasta sauces frozen to last at least six months too.

The renovations we've done have made the house warmer in winter, more vermin proof, far more pleasant to live in.  The leaks in the roof have been fixed, the rotten floors in two rooms have been ripped out and replaced and we're slowly insulating the external walls.

I handraised a cow that I am now milking.  I am currently taming two heifers (that are the daughters of my older cows) so that I can milk them when they calve.  I can touch them briefly without them bolting now, they just shake their heads and step away and you can almost hear them telling me to go away.

Paddocks that were probably three quarters gorse are now cleared.  There is still and will most likely always be the odd small plant that pops up, but they're easily managed in under an hour.  Compared to the weeks that each paddock took to cut, burn and spray.

Lessons:

Sometimes a visual barrier works as well as a brick wall to keep livestock contained, but sometimes it doesn't - it's important to know when it will and when it won't.

Hay is a commodity that is worth more than gold, treat your hay with respect.

If you have livestock, you have dead stock.

There is a right and wrong way to set up an electric fence.

It pays to learn how to do your own plumbing and drainage repairs because getting a plumber to even return your calls in less than a year is a major achievement.

There's no such thing as "Unusable land".

Never say never.  Animals that you (or rather Hubby) declared you'd never get can easily become a well-loved feature of your farm.
In the last five years, we've had our ups and downs, we've had successes and failures, joys and heartbreaks but there's still nowhere I'd rather be.