Sheep and Flystrike

This post has been wanting to be written for a few months.  At the same time, I haven't wanted to write it.  However, I am hoping that my painful lesson may help someone else.

During our humid summer, flies were a huge problem.  I'd been waiting for the shearer to come and shear my sheep and he was very busy - it was put off twice taking an extra two months.  As February rolled on with temperatures in the high thirties, I was worrying about my sheep - especially my hoggets which had never been shorn.

Then one afternoon, my neighbour called and told me that my lambs had flies.  He dropped in with instructions and a bottle of dip.  He told us to clip their dags and legs but leave about 1cm of wool and liberally pour the dip over.  He said to leave that layer of wool for the dip to soak into and keep working.

I cleaned up the two lambs with flies and dipped them.  I caught the other two and although they had no sign of flies, I dagged them anyway.  I caught my two hogget ewes, checked them and dagged them too.  No sign of flies on them either.  It was quite obvious with the lambs because the flies were hanging around them, but not the other sheep.

I was quite surprised about one of my hoggets, I'd noticed her across the paddocks, spending a lot of time lying down while the others were up and around.  I'd been sure she had flies, but she seemed clean.

I had a hard time sleeping that night.  I kept seeing the maggots eating the lambs.  It's a nasty thing to see.

About a week later, the neighbour rang again (apologising profusely for 'interfering') and said we'd missed one.  I went back to check, I thought it was the same hogget I'd been worried about as she was still spending most of her time lying down and listless.  She got up and ran, it was very hard to catch her, but catch her I did and I could find no sign of flies or maggots on her this time either.

Perhaps it was the heat?  That was all we could think of and the shearer was supposed to be coming that weekend.  On Saturday, we penned the sheep up ready for him.  The ram we'd borrowed nearly a year earlier was going home after shearing.  We'd just gotten back to the house after penning them up for a cuppa when we got the message that he'd called and won't be able to make it today.  The place he was going to just before us had considerably more sheep than he'd expected and it was going to be too late by the time he finished with their sheep.  Give him a call during the week and he'd come out one evening.

We managed half a cup of coffee before the ram's owners arrived.  So we went back to separate the ram from the others.  Getting him onto the trailer was fun - it took four of us to drive him half the way and then a flying tackle from the owner as he was charging at me before we finally got him under control. It was a good thing that he hadn't been shorn because fistfulls of wool at scruff and rump was the only way to move him.  I warned the owners that we'd had issues with flies, they checked him over and said he was fine and rams rarely suffer from it anyway.

While I still had that hogget penned, I checked her over again.  I checked between her toes, I pulled apart the wool to see her skin for at least half of her body.  I found nothing.  It was bugging me that she seemed unhappy and lethargic, I worried that I was missing something and that my sheep was unhealthy.

The shearer didn't come that week, I left messages and didn't get a call back.

A week or so later, I saw her lying down in her paddock with a heron picking over her wool.  She wasn't moving and I was afraid that she had died.  We went to have a look, as we opened the gate for that paddock, she got up and ran away with half her wool hanging off her and dragging on the ground.

We managed to get her into a pen to check her over.  Her entire rump and back legs was bald.  No wool attached at all.  Around her middle was a wide band of scabs and maggots.

How did I miss this?  How could I check her over thoroughly a week earlier and not see a single wound, fly or maggot?  I clipped the rest of her wool with my dagging shears.  The neighbour came down with some fresh dip and to check her for us.  He thought she'd survive since she was up and eating when he came over.  He said to be sure that she had shade because sunburn could be an issue.  He also said that once the shearer had been, give him a call and he'd drench all of our sheep and give them a pour on.

I went away on holiday for a week.  It's a trip I make every year.  The shearer came while I was away.  The neighbour did his thing and iodined that hogget's healing wounds.

She went down and wouldn't get up.  Hubby and Miss Ten made a sling for her to hold her up.  They rang and told me about it and sent me pictures.  She survived the night, but still wouldn't stand on her own.  The next morning, they found her.  She'd gotten out of the sling, but had put her head through the wooden railings and broken her neck.  They figured she'd given up and wanted to die.

I beat myself up for it for weeks.  It didn't matter how many stories I heard about experienced farmers getting caught out with flystrike this year, that it could have only been a few days and it takes them that fast.  It didn't matter that I'd checked her over three times in as many weeks.

While I know that if you have livestock, you have dead stock and that's how it is, I still felt responsible for the suffering of my sheep.  Death by flystrike is a brutal and truly dreadful thing and I blamed myself.

Then I told a friend who is a vet.  I think it was part of my self-flagellation.  I told her and sat back waiting for the accusations of negligence and the telling off that I was sure I deserved.  Instead, I got an explanation about how sometimes the maggots burrow inside the animal instead of staying on the surface and eat it from the inside out. I was told the chances of finding the tiny entry point early enough to save the sheep are very slim to none and how there is nothing you can do when this happens.

It helped.  After a while.  At first I was disbelieving, I thought she was trying to make me feel better.  Then I thought about the kind of person that friend is.  She's not going to lie to anyone to soothe a guilty conscience, if I'd been negligent, she would have given me both barrels like I'd thought I'd deserved.  What she'd said about the maggots going internal was also later backed up by others.

I'm still upset about my sheep, but now I'm okay with it.

Dear Weather Gods,

I wish to lay a formal complaint.

I understand that weather is variable and that there are never any promises or guarantees regarding what kind of weather we will get.  I've always had faith however, that the weather will at the very least suit the season and time of year.

It's the first of May today.  We're supposed to be approximately halfway through Autumn.  We can usually count on the first frosts around now.  In any normal year, they're not too surprising as nights are usually getting colder over the previous month.

28 degrees for most of the day, dropping to 25 just before the sun disappeared behind the mountain is not a normal temperature for May.  It's almost as though we're getting a normal (if short day length) Summer finally after the Summer on steroids that we've just escaped from.

I became rather excited last week when I saw that we were forecast for rain this weekend.  The ground has gotten drier than it was all Summer.  Imagine my disappointment on Friday night when I saw that the forecast had changed and the rain was no longer coming (and sadly, the forecast was accurate) and we're still left high and dry.

Normally, I prefer the heat, Summer is my favourite time of year.  I will confess that the Summer we've just had challenged that somewhat.  I found myself hiding from the sun and the heat rather than revelling in it.  I am enjoying still wearing t-shirts without an extra layer and hardly ever getting the fire going even though that is not normally possible at this time of year.

I do find myself wondering whether there is some sort of shenanigans going on up there.  Have there been staffing changes or a new quality system that no one really understands and doesn't seem to make any sense but the management believe in it so you just have to go along with it?  Is this some kind of hold out for more prayers or rain dances?  Has the sheep mortality rate due to new and nastier flies encouraged by the unseasonal weather not been sufficient sacrifice to you?  Do you have it in for North Canterbury farmers so much that we have the wettest January ever but the driest Autumn?  Did someone forget to flip a switch or are you all drunk up there?

Please get it sorted before we feel compelled to try another company for this service,

Yours sincerely


Most of North Canterbury.

Dried Plums

As I said in a previous post I had been thinking about drying plums as a way to preserve the huge amount of wild plums I had already picked.

My first batch, I thought I'd cut a slit in the side, down to the stone and assumed that it would dry around it and the stone would sort of pop out and be standing proud of the rest of the plum.

Yeah.  That didn't work.

Plums are dried and stuck rather firmly to the stone.

So I cut the plums in half and took the stones out of those I could easily (the others went into a plum syrup type thing that I'll explain below) and spread them out on the dehydrator trays.

It took a few days of drying - I don't like leaving my dehydrator on when I go to bed, the noise alone is a nuisance - but I started to fill my jar with dried plums.  I think I'd done several batches before I thought to actually try one.

All that delicious juicy sweetness that these plums fill your mouth with when they're ripe must evaporate with the moisture.  These were so face-puckeringly sour as to be almost inedible to me.  We tried a few each to be certain it wasn't just that I'd picked a bad one.

Well bugger.  I have kept them, sure I'll find something they can work in.  A Phillipino friend who visited tells me that the Chinese would love them, they use a lot of flavours like this in their food.  Sadly I don't know any Chinese people to give them to.

The plums that didn't get dried - the slightly over-ripe ones that squished when I tried to halve and stone them - were stewed up with sugar and sieved.  I'm using them to make a plum fruit leather.  Unfortunately, I think there may have been too much liquid.  This is taking forever to dry out enough to remove from the paper and roll up.  I have been trying to dry this for more than a week!

Butter and Buttermilk

Since we weaned the calf from Brownie, the volume of cream we're getting with our milk has increased significantly.  It becomes so thick and rich that if we don't scoop most of it off, it forms lumps in the milk jugs and looks as though you have melted butter in your coffee.  I don't mind this in the slightest, but it can be off-putting for others.

I finally understand the "double-cream" that I see in usually British recipes.  This is no good for a cream sauce as it splits and melts and looks quite disgusting.  So I make butter.

Butter is really simple to make. Put the cream into a cake mixer and beat it until it's butter and buttermilk.  With my cream, it doesn't take long.  In fact, it's quicker than whipping cream with store bought cream.

Cream

Nearly there, but not quite - note there's no liquid

Now we have butter

Once you have butter, press it together lightly and strain it through a sieve, making sure to catch the buttermilk in a jug.  Then run the butter in the sieve under the tap until the water runs clear.

Buttermilk.  You can see the tiny butter blobs around the edge of the jug.

Put your butter into a clean bowl and beat it quite firmly - more liquid will come out and more rinsing will be needed.  If you want to salt it, add 1 tsp of salt to 500g of butter and beat it through at this stage.

From there I turn it out onto baking paper, shape it into a block, wrap it and freeze it.  It doesn't keep as long as store-bought butter.  I don't know if this is because I don't always get all of the buttermilk out or if it's because I only pasteurise and do no further heat-treating.  Freezing has the added bonus of being perfect for making pastry.

The latest attempt at spreadable butter on the left.  A block for freezing on the right.

Several times I've tried to mix it with olive oil or rice bran oil to make it a simple sandwich spread - my mother used to do this when I was young, but it's hard to tell when you've added enough oil as it's soft and spreadable when it's freshly made.  So far, all of mine have been rather firm.

Many people ask what do you then do with the buttermilk.

Anything you like!  Choices are endless.  Miss Ten likes to drink it as it is.  It works nicely in my cheesemaking.  I've used it making bread and baking.  There's nothing particularly unpleasant about buttermilk, except maybe the odd tiny globule of butter that may be floating in it - and even then that's only if that is unpleasant to you.

Summer Abundance

While my kitchen is being rebuilt, I've been finding things to occupy Mum and keep her busy.  Fortunately, this summer has been abundant so far.

I picked the broccoli sideshoots and blanched them.  For some reason I'm getting huge sideshoots this year.  Normally, they're about bite-sized, this year, they're getting to the same size as the original head of broccoli and I'm getting at least ten per plant.  I currently have several kg of frozen broccoli in the freezer and there's no sign of them slowing down.  I've also missed picking lots of them in time so there are several that have gone to seed.  I don't consider that to be a problem though, I should have plenty of broccoli plants next year.  I was also told recently that after November, you might as well pull your broccoli out because you don't get anything useful from it.  I beg to differ.

The cauliflower was a bit of a bust though.  Out of 18 plants, I've gotten four caulis.  Two bolted because I wasn't quick enough, the rest turned brown and black before they were fully grown.  Luckily the pigs like them and Brownie the house cow assaults anyone who goes into that garden and won't let them leave without giving her some cauli leaves.  The entrance to the garden is right next to the gate for her paddock.  

We found a local fruit and vege shop selling sauce tomatoes 4kg for $4.  20kg bought so far has become 10 litres of tomato sauce, 10 jars and 9 ziplock bags of spaghetti and 5 ziplock bags of pasta sauce.  The ziplock bags are in the freezer.

Tomato sauces cooling on the bench.

I have two favourite recipe books for various preserves, both from the 1960s.  One is the New Zealand Country Women's Institute Cookbook and the other is 575 Recipes by the Good Housekeeping Board.  Their recipes for tomato sauce are different and each year I face the dilemma of not remembering which one I used last time and which one I prefer.  So this year, I made the tomato sauce in two batches - one from each book - and labelled them with which recipe book.

The spaghetti is a recipe from my father-in-law.  Hubby remembers him making it when he was little and went out of his way to get the recipe for me to make for him.  I did it a year or so ago, but it went off in the jars.  This year I sterilised the jars more carefully and followed up with a water bath.  We'll see how this lot turns out.  

Wild plums.

A glance down the gully showed that the wild plums are coming ripe.  Hubby, Miss Ten and I spent about an hour picking plums after it cooled down enough to be bearable outside.  I explained to them both that the best way to tell which were ripe was that the ripe ones fall off when you touch them.  It rained plums on all of us for a while.  The terrain around our wild plum trees is rather steep, with the added bonus of plenty of fallen plums making for treacherous footing.  At one point, Miss Ten slipped and went down several metres of slope on her backside - stain removal on her shorts will be fun.

We didn't get very far through the gully before it became too dark to continue safely.  We came back with 7kg of plums.  Not bad considering they're only slightly bigger than the average cherry.  I still have several jars of plum jam made a few years ago.  I've decided to stop making jams until we actually get through some of what we have in the cupboards.  Just how much was in the cupboards was fully revealed when we had to move them for the kitchen rebuild.  This time I've made plum sauce so far and used maybe half of that picking.  My issue now is that I've run out of bottles for sauces, unless I resort to using soft drink bottles.

Spaghetti and sauces on top of the fridge for now.

I've been looking for recipes for plum chutneys and relishes.  Maybe some that can also utilise the frozen rhubarb my neighbour gave me.  I've found a few, but none that keep for longer than a few weeks without refrigeration or freezing.  I want recipes that will keep in jars for as long as I need them to.  I'll have to keep looking.

I thought about drying some, but given how small they are, I'm not sure if the result will be worth the work.  I may try it with some and see how it turns out.

Meanwhile, we've also had more rainfall this month so far than we had all of last year!  Not enough to officially break the drought, but certainly not the worst El Nino summer and drought that was predicted (so far - touch wood!).  I went for a wander yesterday to see if the combined rain and heat had provided any field mushrooms and came back with over a kg.  They were sliced, sauteed in butter and frozen in single serves.  This is the only method I've found for preserving a glut of mushrooms that we'd actually use.

Even with my kitchen still in partial disarray, I'm using it flat out and making jokes about how this pantry will be full by the time it's finished.  In all honesty, I greatly doubt it, the plan for the pantry is to make the shelves the size of what will go on them.  I find current pantry styles frustrating.  The shelves are spaced so widely apart that what looks like a full pantry actually has a lot of wasted space or double stacking which isn't always safe or practical.  A friend sent a video to me that showed a practical pantry built for a woman by her husband.  It looks like the video was purely shared to facebook so I think the only option to share it for others is a link and not embedding - it can be found here.  I found the video truly inspiring and showed it to anyone who would watch it.

Now the kitchen is usable again, I also had a mad cheese-making day.  It was a bit hectic but I got cream cheese, quark, edam and (blue) stilton made.  Christmas present vouchers paid for a vacuum food sealer which I'm now using for cheese.  I enjoy the look of waxed cheeses aging on my shelf but on a more practical level, I can't tell if there's a tiny hole in the wax until it's leaked everywhere and I've effectively lost that cheese.  This can also be more challenging if when it leaked it's dripped onto other cheeses - it means I can't be sure which one is the leaker.

Vacuum sealed cheese.

Coming up probably in the next few days are mustard pickles.  I chopped up the stalks trimmed from the broccoli (no point in wasting them) and will be having a look around to see what other bits I can put into them.

Rebuilding The Kitchen

Most of our time lately has been devoted to redoing our kitchen.  The floor was rotten and there were spots that you'd feel seasick if someone walked past you while you were standing there.

It has been a long and slow process.  The kitchen is a room that five other rooms are only reached through, three of them from a small hallway. Because our house is an old farm cottage that has been added on to and rearranged several times over the last 90 years, it is a bit like a rabbit warren.


One of the first things to do was to take out one of the hall cupboards and cut a doorway through the back wall to meet that other little hallway.  That was always part of the plan and it was something that needed doing first so that the toilet and bathroom were safely reachable.  Part of that little hallway is going to be the new big farm pantry.

Hall cupboards

From the other side

Doorway cut

From other side.

The dining room can be reached through the lounge, but that took some rearranging of both rooms where various kitchen stuff and removed cabinetry were being stored.

I have found it interesting that there are several places where it seems we are restoring the original design, rather than making huge changes.  When we took the wall covering (mdf not gib) off in the old small hallway, we discovered wood paneling that showed that where my new big pantry is going to be, was previously a pantry.  Old water pipes that had been left partially in place - although they were just metre long lengths sitting inside the walls - showed that we're putting the sink and taps back closer to where they were previously, Some of the power points in the house are in the old steel pipe conduits, not all of the conduit pipe was removed when power points were moved, this made it amusing to be cutting a hole in the wall for a power point and finding a conduit pipe right next to where I'm putting this one.

I think the paint missing in lines shows where pantry shelves were previously.
It's also interesting that restructuring it for food storage was at least planned.

In a pleasant change from the lounge, not all of the joists or bearers were rotten this time.  Although the outer wall is going to need a lot of work in the near future.  One window had been framed properly and done well and was structurally sound.  The other, well, an attempt had been made to do it properly, but that was as far as it went.  In all honesty, with this house, I am more surprised and disbelieving when I find something done well than I am when I find corners cut or shoddy work.

Removing the old floor

Working out the new joists

Nearly done.

Floor down

So after a week and a half, that included my housecow coming on heat and jumping a gate to run with her steer calf, the pigs becoming serial escape artists, Miss Ten going on Girl Guide Jamboree and needing to entertain my Mum who has vascular dementia while Dad and Hubby worked on the kitchen, we're close to the finish I think.  Hubby has gone back to work today and the kitchen is almost usable.

The external walls have been insulated and when I was covering them, I sealed everything that could be sealed.  Hopefully that will work to keep drafts and rodents out and warmth in.  Hot water pipes have been lagged, underfloor insulation is coming.

External walls - I hadn't removed the lining from the one on the left at this point.

Insulated wall.

Gibbed, roughly stopped, and sealed.

Painted.

The floors are in, except for a few small spots that will require some tricky bits - doorways joining to other rooms etc.  I'm looking at a laminate flooring that looks like wooden floorboards.  I found one that even with the foil underlay stuff will cost approx a third of what all others do.  It seems too good to be true though, so I will investigate further before buying it.

The stove has been moved to a more sensible position - one that will allow a rangehood.  The cabinets that we pulled out have been reconfigured and put back in.  This time, the stove and dishwasher are in line with benchtops and cupboards and are not sticking out.  No drawers are blocked from opening fully by the stove, and the dead space beside the old stove has gone.

We were going to reuse the old benchtops, rearranged somewhat to suit the new layout, but Mum and Dad offered to take me shopping for new ones, far better ones and they just asked that we keep them in meat for the year.  I didn't need to hear that offer twice, I leaped at it.  Especially as it included a new double sink and sink mixer.  They'd found some great specials that meant it cost less than half of what we'd thought when we originally looked at the possibility.

Getting the benchtops home made for a nervous drive - that was sitting almost on my shoulder.

Joining benchtops and waiting for silicon to dry.

Bench fixed in place.  Sink and mixer fitted.

Cutting and joining the benchtops was challenging, but I think we've done well.  Dad thinks that at one of our joins is less noticeable that his (professional job) at home.

Now that Hubby and Dad have gone back to work, we're down to evenings and weekends, not counting the little bits that I potter around with during the day.  The new hallway and linen cupboard is coming along and the new farm pantry is this weekend's mission.

Where we're up to with the kitchen.

Knitting a Homespun Woolly Jumper

Since I have a mountain of coloured wool that was given to me, I thought it was about time I started knitting more than socks with it.  My self-taught spinning has reached a point where I'm a lot more satisfied with the evenness of my thread, although it's still not to a stage where I'd enter it in the A&P show.

I decided that Hubby needed a nice warm jersey.  He gets a bit snobby about handknit jerseys and would never consider one for "nice going out" wear, they're for home use only, but I can live with that.  There's no way he'd wear one in white or the silvery grey that I've got, so it had to be the dark brown.  I was quite curious to see how the colour would come out once it had been spun and knitted.  There is a mix of greys in with the brown and the gold coloured ends were intriguing.

The fleece before carding and spinning.

We had several discussions about how thick and heavy he wanted it.  I made the choice to make a 3-ply yarn for it.  Now when I say 3-ply, I'm not talking about anything close to commercial 3-ply.  A single of my spinning is probably similar in size to that.  I mean three of my singles plied together.  It's come out something similar to a commercial triple-knit or 12+ply.

A ball of my triple ply homespun.

The next issue I run into is seams.  I hate sewing seams on my knitting.  I have a fear that regardless of how well I pin it or mark it (unless there are stripes to match), I'll end up with puckers and stretching and uneven seams.  I also have a thing about measuring each side right.  Because just smoothing out a piece can change it's measurements, I'm rather paranoid that my sides won't truly match without a creatively uneven seam.

So this time, I chose to knit an entire jumper circular.  This took out any chance of uneven pieces and messy seams.  The only seams are at the top of the shoulders because there was no avoiding that no matter how hard I tried to come up with a solution.  I even knitted the sleeves circular.  I picked up stitches along the armholes and reduced down the length of the sleeve finishing with the wristband, rather than the other way around as is usually done.

At times, especially as I reduced down to the wristband, the sleeves were extremely challenging.  Having a long circular needle meant I had to get creative with where I pulled the excess and still be able to knit effectively.  Towards the end, I was needing to adjust it every 5 or 6 stitches, but it worked and worked well.

A sleeve almost at the wristband.

I used threads of different colours to mark the start point and halfway (or the other side).  Those threads continued down the sleeves to mark where I was reducing.

One of my markers.

Knitting an entire men's jersey this way certainly raised some interesting challenges, but I'd do it again, overall I found it far easier to do and work with.

I didn't work to a pattern as such.  I measured up his favourite but battered sweatshirt and worked to it's measurements.  I had to redo the sleeves as they ended up far too baggy and too long as this seems to be wider at the shoulder than his sweatshirt although both seem to have the same straight drop shoulder cut.