Our new life and the building

So I think it has been almost a year since I last  posted. Many reasons why but the main reason has been a lack of power at a time when I can post. That means no sun, no blog. So not blogging at night when I have a minute to write.

I won't bore you with all the gory details - and they are gory- but show you a bit of the journey instead.  A real rollercoaster.  Character forming is what I think people have said. People who want to die fast!

The first photo shows the barn site cleared  of brush and the foundations dug and pads in.  All by hand. We had  a helper for a few days but found we could do more in a shorter  time and just finished it ourselves.  I had to see a chiropractor  after they were dug as when I looked up , I would fall over. Funky feeling!

After that we had a ready mix concrete  truck bring in 6.5 cubic meters of concrete to throw the pad foundations.  Did you you know that is around 15 tons?  And it was the 2 of us hauling bum to tamp out the air bubbles and level it off in an hour and 15 minutes.  Shattered .
Sorry no pics. Too busy aching.

Then you can see Jan building the concrete block squares to act as formwork for the holding down bolts. These hollow blocks were  filled.

We had the reinforcing  steel bent to the engineer's  specs and manufactured the cages on site. It was fiddly and we ended up forming a production line. I clamped and jan welded them. It was just quicker and stronger to set them in the foundations. We made small concrete blocks to rest the cages on and mixed and poured each fill by hand setting the bolts as we went. It's a very important step as the bolts must be precisely  in  place or setting  the steel  will be a mission.

At this point we hit a financial hiccup. It lasted a long time. Besides, so much happened concurrently so while it seems it all happened quickly, it was over a year from plan submission to this point. But more on the building's progress and other stuff when I have charged  up this phone.

spring planting

Spring field preparations.

Before

And after the ploughing. The field hadn't done much for many years and so was full of weeds, Kikuyu and sour fig. We rented a small Massey Ferguson from an old local and turned the weeds in. Luckily the kikuyu is not everywhere.

Next is some special soil work- humic acid, weed tea, worm tea and lime. All in and followed hotly by sweetcorn seed and pumpkin seedlings. I am very excited to see how this first big planting on this farm goes.

Landing with a bump

Yes, I know. Almost a whole year without any posts. Well I have been a very busy girl. We moved amid a LOT of rain and some small dramas to start from scratch on our own new tiny farm. We live in a caravan and a shipping container (everybody say "Yeeha!") and have built 2 timber cabins. One is a bathroom since Jan didn't want to hear me complain about the wind howling and rain lashing at us while we showered and used the loo in our rustic shade cloth enclosed bathroom. We are a bit more settled now and have ironed out a lot of kinks. Ok, some kinks.

We moved our hens, cats & dog with us. Of course we'd never leave a family member behind! It was Max's & my journey to end all from Riversdale to Foxglove Farm. 1 cat tried to eat his way out of his wicker basket all the way. Another howled until about 30 minutes out – 2 ½ hours of howling cat. The other was stoic and just gave an occasional meow. When Helix finally gave up his howling, at about the point we hit the worst of the flooded roads and roadworks, the rooster took over and crowed the rest of the way. Max says my eyes were going around in their sockets. We laughed as crying hysterically would have been depressing.

Sadly, due to the neighbours not controlling their dogs and our lack of good fencing, I am left with 3 hens and no roosters right now. I never thought I'd say I miss his crowing but I really do. I bet Jan will say the same in a few days too.

I will start my new flock again once I have a chicken tractor in which they will be safe and can work the future food forest for us. Boschvelders for sure.

Our first major challenge has been water. We have 2 boreholes of almost unusable water. Full of iron and so acid as to pickle a frog overnight who tried to use my bath water as a pond. I cannot use it to wash hair as it feels like I have been at the beach for a year! Nor for clothes or anything involving soap. The reaction between the 2 is amazing to watch. The soap separates into lumps and the water becomes gluey on the dishes or clothes.

Of course no-one said anything about that when we bought the land so we promptly put a large tank at the top of the property to pump into. If I had known better, I'd have kept that tank at the living area to catch rain water from every surface. We have run out of water a few times and had to buy in drinking water. It makes one very conscious of how much you use. Strangely, it was the basin which used the most.

I have not managed to get much planting done even with help from a few volunteers. Too many other things have been in the way. Just day-to-day stuff is so much more difficult when you are off-grid, like hauling water from rain water buckets to a fire, just to wash dishes/ hair/ clothes. I am an expert at lighting fires in howling gales and am getting good at cooking bread on the braai in a light drizzle.

We have also been building- since last year! Can't live in a caravan forever and, boy, do I hate camping now.

It took a long time to find the right draughtsman to put my ideas into CAD, then even longer to persuade (and it was persuasion!) an engineer to take on the drawings. Lots of money too.

It took us a while to get started with the momentous task of digging the foundations, hauling a load of Readymix concrete (13 tons done by only the 2 of us!) and finally building the block work to hold the steel portal frame. And we missed the window to get the straw bales for the in-fill walls and so can only finish the building once the wheat straw is harvested around November.

All the other things still apply- animal care, schooling, volunteers/friends visiting, eating (imagine that!), shopping and would you believe, trying to make an income too. Eish!

I must still work out how many trees to plant to offset all the concrete but I think with the large orchard I must plant this month, I won't have a problem covering it. And August has to be planting month. The trees already have buds so I had better get on with it.

More info and details on this years' journey to follow and pictures when I can figure out which box in storage, has the cable to get them from my phone to the laptop.

A Big Move

I have delayed writing anything new here as I did not really know what was to happen next. We have however, managed to arrange funds for a very small farm of our own and so will be moving at the end of September.

We have loved living here and do not actually want to leave this magical place but the time has come to start earning an income and looking out for Max's social development needs too.

It will be fun and games for the next -oh say, 2 years as there are no buildings and no Eskom power on the new farm. We will be living in a caravan and shipping container until we can build our own natural off-grid house. We'll use a steel frame and fill in with straw bales and cover with a lime render. Most of the work will be done with our 4 hands so do drop in here for a laugh!

Transmission to resume around the end of September.

New chicks

Amazing things are happening this early part of winter on the farm. 4 of our hens have been sitting on eggs and our first new chicks have hatched! Now, I am up to my elbows in little chicks.

Sadly, the daddy of these chicks is no longer with us. The most gentlemanly rooster I have met so far, had a tennis ball sized cancerous growth on his neck and so we had to say goodbye. After the previous week's attack and the loss of my most beautiful, fattest, double-yolk egg laying hen- Hope- to a hawk, the loss of Rocky was a severe blow.

2 of the chicks also did not make it. When a chick hatches, it has 3 days until it must eat and drink water and if not, death is very swift. The stores from the egg will last those 3 days. It seems, this new mother would not leave her nest of another 9 eggs (communal nesting is a problem!), to sort out these early hatchlings. She would essentially have had to abandon the other eggs to raise the 2 babies. She was not willing and in my inexperience, I did not help the 2 chicks, putting their beaks into the water bowl and showing them how to peck for food, while mom was still busy. I did better on the next one!

 Blanche and 3 of her chicks.

Wonderful news though, the hen who had had no eggs hatch yet ( a white hen appropriately named Blanche Devereaux), has 4 chicks! Actually, she stole 1 chick from another mom who was still on the nest. What a wonderful, first-hand education my child is getting. We had almost given up on the viability of the rest of the eggs but now there are a total of 8 chicks wandering around cheeping their heads off. Just like Max.

Chicken's salad. From left to right: L'il Momma, Blanche Devereaux, Jessica Simpson, chick number 1.

This picture at first glance looks lovely. Max certainly likes this spot. When you realise that this is erosion from the neighbour's farm now working its way into ours, it's most alarming. It will require some major- and very expensive -work to halt this fall away of precious topsoil. It would be much worse if there were no wattles and palmiet holding it in place for the time being. The farmhouse is in the distance above.

It seems we aren't the only ones trying to stay warm. This beautiful (and rather large) puff adder was under the sewing machine table where Granny & I sew almost every day. Granny found it after I told her there was a mouse or something in her fabric boxes. tee hee!

There have been many puff adders this autumn and we have been happy to see so many babies around. Wary but happy.

more feeding of the hungry

The soup today was a hit. As was dinner with a salad of cos lettuce and cucumber, topped with chickpea salad amongst other stuff. The salad was made of chickpeas, cumin, sesame & sunflower seed and chickweed. This amazing weed is cursed by gardeners and thrown away when it should be eaten by the ton.
It is full of vitamins and minerals and has a clean, green taste. This was an example for the volunteers of foraged food as we had not planted the chickweed- it too is a volunteer!

So tomorrow we will all try blanched stinging nettles as a side veg to lentil curry. Sounds yum to me.

Feeding volunteers

Today we collected another volunteer from town to join the 3 already here. It is the most we have had at one time and will be a test for me to see if I can maintain my sanity.
These helpers (so far) work hard and need a good helping of food. It's the trade for work agreed upon when joining the various organisations who promote volunteering. It can put a serious dent in your wallet if you don't plan ahead and explain the way things work ahead of time. A bottle of jam or chutney can be polished off in 1 sitting if you aren't careful.

We make soup often and so always make extra and freeze it. This is our lunch every day with bread and sometimes some cheese or pickles. (For dinners, since we rarely eat meat, there are our usual fare of curries, stews, roasted veggies etc.)

My celery plants were almost completely eaten by birds so I bought celery today for a little different soup. And a bit of food recycling!
Granny cooked a gammon (ich!) given to us at christmas, for dinner and then sandwiches tomorrow. It gets boiled but the water wasn't wasted, it is in the soup!
And I made pickled onions with the last smalls from last years' crop. The salt used to draw the onion juice out, gets spread out on a plastic tray and dried into onion salt. Some of it also went in the soup.
Some broccoli stalks and leaves, some stinging nettles and a large bunch of herbs finish this into a delicious green soup packed with nutrients and bound to warm up the volunteers tomorrow.

May melt some parmesan crusts onto stale bread as croutons to float on top too.