First of the Season's Sowing [ braamekraal/ ]
First sowing for the coming Summer. We've been experiencing a very early warm spell, so, despite, a day or two of cold and (hopefully) wet forecast, I've taken a chance on an extra-early sowing of Chillis and Eggplants. Since I'll be in Cape Town for two weeks starting next week, I'll miss my usual Chilli/Eggplant/Tomato sowing window (3rd week in Aug.) With a bit of luck the weather will stay warm enough to get this batch going.In any case I'll sow again in about 3 weeks' time when I return. For this sowing I've taken no risks, and only sown varieties that I have plenty of seed stock. Others - Rocoto Amarillo, Tobascos, Corno di Toro, Aji Dulce and a few more - where I only have a very few seeds have been held back for later planting in warmer weather.
Every year I swear that I will build a greenhouse, but it hasn't happened yet.
Tomato sowing next...
Cows Week [ braamekraal/ ]
Yes, I'm afraid we have Cows.Eight of them, to be precise. These poor cattle -- a weird mix of cows, heifers, bulls, tollies and even a month-old calf -- have been wandering around the neighbourhood, up and down the roads, for several days, now.
Not only are they a Hazard To Navigation, but they tend to wander into our garden (and, I suppose, everybody else's, too) and trample small trees, wander into the septic tank causing spectacular damage, nibble at fruit trees, and generally do Cow Stuff. Gods alone know where they've been getting water. We are 99.873% certain that they belong to the folk who live in the Forestry Houses, most of whom work for the local forestry company, MTO. Up to now the Forestry Folk have been allowed to graze their cattle in the firebreak between our smallholdings and the forest. But recently they were warned that, as part of a Fynbos rehab project, all the fences surrounding the firebreak were being removed. So it looks a lot like another case of people going, "Oh, it'll never happen." Only it has.
I decided to put these poor cattle -- and they really are in very poor condition -- to work. Not serious work, but work they'll benefit from and enjoy. I want them to eat off the long Kikuyu grass that infests what we refer to as the "Top Field" -- an area of around 25000m2 (about 30x90, but it varies) along our North border. The Top Field is relatively flat, though the topsoil is very thin, and I've long harboured ambitions of turning it over to field-scale crops -- grains, legumes, chiles on a larger scale -- in some sort of animal tractor/rotation system. Perhaps a Fukuoka style of thing. Not too fussed about the details.
So I ran the electric fence around the Field. Happily the cattle decided that they liked the look of the grass there while I was busy, so, by the time I had cleared tall grasses and branches from the path of the electric fence, planted a decent Earth pole, and set the whole thing up, they were all in the right place. And they've learned the Delights Of Electric Fencing pretty quickly.
I've informed locals so that if someone starts looking for their cattle they'll quickly find out where their cattle are being sheltered. I hardly want to be charged with Cattle Theft! The problem is that I really don't have a good supply of water for them. Right now we're managing by carrying buckets of (precious) house-water to a large bucket in their enclosure, but things cannot go on that way for too long. Then, too, these beasts really are in a very sad, parasite-infested and neglected state, and I would not like to leave them in that condition for too long, either. So that means I'll have to spend money on dips and such. Money I don't have... I guess I'm going to have to call Animal Welfare for some help if someone doesn't come and fetch them back in a day or two...
Still, I am enjoying having a bunch of Cows wandering about the place being useful. And once the grass is mowed shorter, I can, perhaps, invest in a couple of Pigs to root out the rest of the Kikuyu. Just a thought...
Sorry no pics. We left the camera with No.2 Son on the theory that it is better invested helping him earn his Honours degree than shooting happy snaps of the farm and sunsets.
Catch Up [ braamekraal/ ]
There's a pretty good reason for the very slow rate at which I've been blogging here lately: It gets dull and tedious repeating the same litany of woe. I mean, what more can I say?"Still no rain."
"It's not raining."
"Things are still very dry."
No. It's boring! And demotivating. It means that there's absolutely no point in busting my butt out in the garden trying to prepare the desert-condition beds for platings that cannot possibly survive.
Actually, truth to tell, we have had a little rain over the past 10 days or so - enough that I might start to believe that the drought may actually be coming to a (slow) end. Enough to convince me to get off my duff and start clearing the jungle of weeds from pathways, and to stick a few peas and beans into the ground in the optimistic hope that more rain will eventuate.
The Summer past has been a total write-off. Not a single Tomato. Perhaps a grand-total of 6 chiles. If the Bushbuck will leave the plants alone for a bit. The Perennial Rye I was growing -- through the kind offices of Patrick -- eventually died. The dam I use for irrigating seed-trays is (still) so dry that the pump will have to be primed once again before I can use it. When, one day, there's sufficient water in the dam to bother. (Soon! says the optimist in me.) The F2 generation Tomato experiment will have to wait for a second attempt next year.
Even more difficult to deal with is that, by now, I should already have all my Winter crops in the ground, but, with insufficient water for seed-bed care, it looks like we're going to largely miss the Winter season, too. Some things I have plenty of seed -- Cabbage, Onions, Snow Peas, Broad Beans -- that I can take the chance with them and don't mind too much if I plant them and they fail. But there are some -- Kabuli Black Chickpeas, for example -- that I just cannot afford to take chances with. And that means that they have to wait another year before I can bulk up the seed supplies.
Which reminds me... I must plant some Lettuce. It's been very tedious having to buy such basics as Lettuce and Swiss Chard, especially since I've been on a (weight loss) diet where leafy veg features largely. (Lost about 8kg so far! and feeling much improved.)
Last weekend we joined a small neighbourhood gathering at the historic Bibbey's Hoek Hotel. No longer a hotel, it is the home of our new neighbour, Sue. She has recently completed a Permaculture Design course, and is determined to remodel the old hotel in a permaculture mould. Perhaps to even start some sort of permaculture centre.This is great news!
Despite the fact that quite a number of us in the Bibbey's Hoek neighbourhood are practising some form of permaculture design, up to now we seem to proceeded in blissful isolation. I do believe that Sue might serve as a catalyst for us working in closer cooperation. Certainly the gathering at her home last Saturday was characterised by an easy neighbourliness and friendliness. Nobody on a ego trip or an agenda. Yay! Maybe we stand some tiny chance of developing a more integrated and sustainable community?
New writeups: Bread Self-Sufficiency and Starting a Sourdough Starter [ braamekraal/ ]
Taking a short break from hacking a software project, I've managed to produce two new articles for the Farm Website:How to get Self-Sufficient in Bread. Not "How to Bake Bread", but an attempt to tackle all the steps necessary to become truly self-sufficient in providing your own bread - that staple pillar of our diet. Really, without self-sufficiency in bread, one cannot be much self-sufficient at all.
Care and Feeding a Sourdough Starter. How to get started developing your own sourdough starter, and how to keep it.
In truth the latter article is a light edit of a blog-post from October 2006. But having it on the wiki will make it much more searchable and accessible. Sadly this blog software and its crappy templates make it difficult verging on impossible for y'all to retrieve earlier articles; one of the prime reasons for wanting to move onto a better blogging platform. Right now I just don't have enough hours in the day. (In a good way!)
The Bread Self Sufficiency article is a bit ironic, since I'm currently on a weight-loss diet that means I've been eating no bread for the past month...
And here I was planning to focus more on the "Why To..." of self-sufficiency, and ended-up writing a couple of "How To"s... Oh well, more will come in time.
If there's anything in particular that you'd like me to write about, please drop me a line. (Contact details on the farm site.)
Technorati Tags: bread, baking, self-sufficiency, sourdough, flour, grain-mill
Long Blog, No Time [ braamekraal/ ]
It's true. Really, really true. The Earth does go around the Sun! Night falls noticeably earlier. By 7 of an evening we want lights to read by, and suddenly we know it's Autumn. And suddenly we realise that the Summer past has been a complete disaster for our self-sufficiency efforts.
February was shaping up to be a particularly bad month. What the drought had not yet killed, the Bushbuck came and ate. And what little they left was pulled out by Baboons.
And then the rains came. Not enough to believe that the drought is over yet, but enough to bring this February's rainfall up to the average I've recorded over the past 8-or-so years. The average, mind! And we're ecstatic to have it. The Tomatoes - all 34-odd varieties - are gone. I think I've lost the last of the OSU Blue. Fortunately I still have some seed of all the wonderful new varieties sent by kind people all over the world, but now I'm going to have to wait until next year to discover what they look like, taste like,... their preferences and peculiarities. Gone, too, the 2-dozen or so Chile varieties... A small handful - perhaps 8 plants in total - have survived the drought only to get munched by the Bushbuck. At this stage, if I still had a doggie to feed (I don't eat red meat, myself) I'd be sorely tempted to fill the freezer with Fillet of Bushbuck!
Despite the reasonably good rains, dams are still pretty-much empty. The soil was so dry that every drop was absorbed and very little runoff water made it into the dams. Pictures here are of the bottom dam; on the left is the dam before the rains, on the right is after. As you can see, very little change in the water level. The only change is a mysterious Red Tide floating on the water's surface. No doubt it'll be gone quite quickly. If you click through to the full-size image on the right, you'll see J standing at the water's edge, and Myah the Bumpy Dog swimming; at the point J is standing, she would be up to her armpits in the water if the dam was full!
At least the Forest gets to breathe again! And, as thought they've been waiting forever for the rains, mushrooms have burst out of... everywhere! The lawn is a mass of yummy Agaricus campestris. We found a well distributed cache of Boletus aestivalis - a close relative of the well-known Porcini (B. edulis), just smaller and with a thin stem - a short way away in the Pine Plantation Down The Road. So, in some fashion, life goes on. I do think a lot, though, about how our Winter prospects would look if we were truly dependent on only our own produce. It's a frightening picture, because we would certainly be facing severe hunger, if not outright starvation. As it is we're near the end of our money reserves, and having to buy in dreadful bought lettuce... We haven't had to buy veggies for probably 8 or 10 years, now... It's a blow, I can tell you!
But life goes on...
An Offer of Marriage [ braamekraal/ ]
New neighbourhood story up on the farm website: An Offer of Marriage. Hope you enjoy it! (This one is almost 100% a True Story - or as true as memory will allow after an interval of about a decade.)Snakes Alive! [ braamekraal/ ]
Myah the little doggie alerted us to something mysterious under the carport...At first we could not see it, but it is snake season, and pretty hot, humid weather, so they're the first thing we generally think of if we don't see anything obvious. A bit of cautious looking about by me - in my bare feet and shorts, so quite careful - and I located the snake under the bushes just behind the carport.
A quick call to my friend next door, Brett, and he popped round with his snake-catching device and bucket. Brett is well known locally as a Snake Guy, and has caught a couple of snakes around our place in the past.
Had the snake been a Boomslang (lit. "Tree Snake") we would probably have just left it alone, since Boomslang are very shy and basically non-aggressive, despite their deadly venom. Puffadders, on the other hand are very aggressive, so not a good idea to leave lurking with the dog around.
I freely confess that I am terrified of snakes. Something in my Lizzard Brain that just freaks out in the presence of a snake. So I'm very grateful to Brett for dealing with the snake for me! He releases them in remote locations where they will thrive, far away from where they're caught, since Puffadders will travel up to 5km back to the place they were.
Still, they're at least more honest about what they're about than some human snakes I've come across.
Rain! [ braamekraal/ ]
36 mm yesterday. A nice soaking rain, too, and very welcome, seeing as it's the first semi-decent rain we've had in a month.
Meanwhile the Spelt is ripening nicely, and we should be able to harvest it within a week or so. This year's harvest will all be kept for seed, but hopefully next year... we'll be brewing with Spelt ;-)
Actually, we could also use it for bread. On our last sojourn to Cape Town some weeks ago, we stopped off at a lovely museum cum antiquey-shoppe in that famous tourist trap, Hermanus. (Actually, if you want to see lots of Southern Right Whales, Hermanus is the place to be. Whales come within mere metres of the seaside cliffs, generally from about May/June until October/November, as it's a safe haven for them to give birth. When we stay with family in Gansbaai
There we found a grain mill in pretty good nick. After umming about it a bit we bought the thing. In retrospect we got a steal! We paid R270 for it, and the plates look like it has never been used for actual milling! We soon put that right, and have baked a couple of loaves with hand-milled flour. It's not as onerous as I had been led to believe. We've learned that no good comes of trying to mill the Wheat to flour in a single pass; it takes 2 or 3 passes through the mill, sifting out the fine flour in between, to get good flour. That said, it only takes about 3 or 5 minutes to mill sufficient grain (450g) for a loaf, so hardly justifies motorising it or anything. And the flavour of the resulting bread is not to be compared with bread made from factory flour.Put it all together, it means that, in just a short time, our self-sufficiency efforts seem to have taken a quantum leap forward. All that remains now is to rebuild the Clay Oven!
Plumbing Again [ braamekraal/ ]
First it was the Header Tank.The Header Tank lives in the roof of the house, and provides cold water to the kitchen and Geyser by gravity feed. Some gunk had found its way into the ball valve that regulates the water inlet. Oh Joy! An hour spent hacking about in the (cooking hot!) ceiling above the main bedroom, doubled over in the cramped, dark, hot and humid ceiling-space, gammy knee complaining all the while about the weird angles it is forced to whilst supporting the weight of Me, whilst simultaneously trying to avoid putting a foot through the ceiling-panels, dismantling and rebuilding fiddly gunky bits. Did I mention it was hot and foetid up there?
Two days later, upon awakening, I stumbled downstairs, mumbled my way to the kettle to start my accustomed Morning Herb Tea (fresh Yarrow, Rosemary and Spearmint, if you must know!) But... no blue light from the kettle! Ugh. A glance at the microwave clock confirmed: No power. Given current circumstances with the State Owned Electricity Kakistopoly I leapt to the obvious conclusion -- a power outage. But no! For once Eskom were off the hook; our Earth Leakage tripswitch had quite perfectly done its job.
Having some days previous noticed a tiny leak from the house water-pump, I immediately and correctly fingered the culprit. Clearly, some water had found its way into the pump electronics or motor. I had already investigated the various cost options for replacing the motor and/or pressure dome and or other associated bits and pieces. But, judging by the evidence, Herr Murphy's Famous Law had beaten me in our race to A Fix Or Bust.
Upon dismantling the various pressure switches, gauges, inlet, outlets and domes, I discovered that the problems were Multiple. First was the Pressure Dome. For mysterious reasons it fills up with water outside the rubber bladder that makes it all work. This is impossible. Actually, there is one way this can logicaly happen, and that's if the bladder has a leak. Then it is Bicycle (Puncture) Repair Man to the rescue. Only sometimes, there is no detectable leak. In which case the water, in defiance of all laws of Classical Physics, is somehow osmosing1 itself through the very fabric of the rubber bladder. Must be something Quantum.Easily fixed, at any rate. Take the bladder out of the dome, dry everything out. Replace. Repressurise the dome -- which is what makes the whole pressure-switch system work in the first place -- and we're done. Unfortunately, along the way, I discovered the source of the original -- tiny! very tiny! -- leak. The base-plate of the dome had corroded and developed a pinprick-sized hole. A quick trip into town to the farm-supply place confirmed my most jaded guess: Buying a replacement base-plate is not an option. One is forced to buy an entire new pressure dome (including bladder and base-plate) despite the fact that only one pieve is faulty. All Hail the Kakistopoly at work!
Nothing daunted, I returned home and got to work with some epoxy resin, and patched the corrosion. Not for the first time, either.
Along the way of fixing the pump and its associated machinery, I decided to replace a couple of the fittings which were badly corroded. Not too surprising after 14 years, really, but I have to ask, who the hell makes water fitting with Steel instead of Brass? I mean, what were they thinking? Had their brains been surgically removed? Or had they simply never heard of Rust? (The lower-left picture tells the story...)
Put all back together, along with a couple of other minor fixes -- like replacing the electrical cable from the motor to the switch, which the manufacturers decided to supply just exactly 5mm too short to allow the entire structure to be assembled in such a way that makes it impossible for water to leak onto the pump electrics, no matter what. All Hail to the Kakistopoly! This involved dismantling the little box housing the electrics and then searching for some of those little round metal wire-connector goodies, which involved...
You get the idea. It is my belief that any single job, if allowed, is fractally composed of smaller jobs that need doing first, each of which is, in turn composed of yet smaller, but conceptually identical (but different in their details and implementation) jobs,... and so ad infinitum.
Stuck the whole business back together. "Throw the Switch, Igor!"
"Yeth, Marthter!"
Click.
Tripped the damn Earth Leakage again, didn't I?
Choices. Life is full of choices. I could move back to Cape Town, get a well-paid job as a software designer or architect, live in a little flat in Kloof Nek or Bantry Bay, and be able to afford hiring Someone Else to take care of this sort of shit, or... I could spend the next couple of hours dismantling the motor to see whether I can dry it out and make it work again, with no assurance that this will work, nor any experience of doing anything vaguely like it before.
Anyway, a solid tap with the hammer got the motor into pieces, and 10 minutes with a hair-dryer had it all nicely dried out. Would it ever work again?
"Throw the Switch, Igor!"
"Yeth, Marthter!"
Click. Hummmmmmmm...
R1200 -- the cost of a new pump -- saved. And only a morning spent. Until the next time.
[1] Is there actually such a word?
Tragedy Tamarillo [ braamekraal/ ]
The sad remains of our newest Tamarillo/Tree Tomato after strong winds yesterday. I was so looking forward to propagating this one, as it is a new strain -- much taller than the other strain we already have, and bearing much larger fruit.
In other, better, news, the Spelt is forming beautiful heads and flowering. The tallest stalks are shoulder high, and so far (knock on wood) the pesky Finches have shown not the slightest interest. On the other hand they have uncanny knack for sensing when seeds are 3 days short of fully-ripe!
Catch-up: WinterSeason09 [ braamekraal/ ]
The Winter season has been an almost total write-off due to the still-continuing drought. Good rains (46mm) last week might be the break we've been looking for.In the ground currently:
- Self-sown Deer Tongue Lettuce and Cimaron Lettuce for seed;
- Kabouli Black Chickpeas, Winnifreds Chickpeas and (ordinary white) Chickpeas from the health-shop, all for seed;
- Spelt in 2 locations, doing quite well;
- Beets for eating;
- the Chenopod grex, which, though not doing particularly well, plods on;
- Amber Globe Turnip (also for seed);
- some surviving Chiles;
- and lots and lots of Chickweed.
No compost. (See drought notes prior...) so it's going to be an interesting Spring/Summer. I believe that this new climate-regime is permanent. This is our New Normal weather. Welcome to it; Adapt Or Die.
Noisy Neighbours [ braamekraal/ ]
So a Sailor walks into a bar. A ship's wheel is sticking out of the front of his pants. "Errrmmm.... Excuse me," says the barkeep, "Do you know you have a ship's wheel in your pants?"To the West we have Deon, a local farmer with very extensive lands - I would guess in the thousands-of-hectares range. He's bought himself a bulldozer - quite a serious machine - and is clearing areas of his land of weedy trees. He's already cleared out some watercourses to the West, and that's a good thing, especially with the drought still more-or-less in residence. It's actually quite fascinating to see the real lay of the land once the trees (and they're mostly all invasive aliens) have been removed. He's taking good care, too, that topsoil is not being stripped. Still, it's a pretty noisy business, this bulldozing.
"Oh, Aye!" replies the old salt. "It's drivin' me nuts!"
To the West East we have the local Forestry company thinning the Pine Plantation, so on that side its chainsaws and tractors pulling out logs all day, not to mention the daily logging-truck growling past. The thinning operation has been going on for about 3 or 4 weeks now. At times it's pretty noisy, and other times we don't hear them at all until we go for a walk in that direction (our favourite walks) with the doggies. I find it quite fascinating, the weird and unpredictable ways that sound travels (or fails to travel.)
And to the North we have Ms Bayou Babe (the official Village Halfwit) engaging in Major Earthworks on her property. A digger-loader is now well into its third week of work on the land. They must be halfway to China by now! In a way I feel sorry for these people; it seems to me a kind of sickness, to hate a piece of land so much that you feel compelled to completely terraform it. What led you to acquire that piece of land if you did not love it for what it was? Anyway, it's noise there, too, from dawn to dusk.
And to think we moved to the country for the peace, quiet and tranquility!
It'll all come to an end, sooner or later, I know, but in the meantime, "It's drivin' me nuts!"
- plan be Categories
Zeitgeist
- Recent ramblings...
- First of the Season's Sowing
- Cows Week
- Catch Up
- New writeups: Bread Self-Sufficiency and Starting a Sourdough Starter
- Long Blog, No Time
- An Offer of Marriage
- Snakes Alive!
- Rain!
- Plumbing Again
- Tragedy Tamarillo
- Catch-up: WinterSeason09
- Noisy Neighbours
- Listening to...
-
blogs i read regularly
