Reprise of earlier post

This is another post that I put up in September last year, it’s part of a short
series I did on the joys of farming, when we tried it a few years ago, and I
thought as lots of the current readers would not have seen it, I would give it
another run.

Posted on Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Self Sufficiency in the 80s

Many years ago, when we first bought our little piece of self sufficiency, a very
small farm, or, a very large back yard, depends on your point of view, the
chores were dictated by the degree of urgency they represented.

As the property had been part of a larger farm we had many internal
boundaries that were not fenced, the subdivision had been done on old titles
rather than where the existing fences were.

Thus our first endeavors were to get some paddocks with fences and gates to
hold our sheep and cattle, then to get the existing shedding into a more useable
state of repair.

These tasks took about 12 months to complete as they had to be fitted in with
our job, which was taking school photographs in the surrounding districts, had
we tried to live on the farm income, (nil for 12 months, and not much more for
the next 5 years or so) we would have starved.

So it was with much relief that we got through these essential chores and were
able to pick some tasks for pleasure, we chose to plant lots of trees, little 6 inch
high trees, these required yet more FENCING to keep the stock from eating
them!

Harking back to the self sufficiency theme that had led us here in the first
place, we then dug some vegetable garden beds and planted out our veggies.

That was an over simplification of what we did, our soils were very poor,
mainly clay, and starved of all the requisites for a good veggie garden.

So we dosed it up with vast quantities of manure, fortunately we had a good
supply under the shearing shed, a liberal dose of gypsum to help break down
the clay, heaps of compost that we had been busily making over the last 12
months, and last but not least plenty of mulch to protect the seedlings and
conserve water.

This project was started as something we wanted to do, rather than had to do,
but it took on such large proportions by the time we found we needed to build
some wind break FENCES around the garden area that once again we were
very pleased to see it finished.

We decided to have a break from these projects for a while, it was about then
that we discovered that if you are farming, even in the smallest scale that there
is never a time that you are not BUSY.

I will post this as episode one and just see how much more rolls from the
production line later.

# First posted by Peter @ Tuesday, September 06, 2005