Saturday, September 22, 2012

Get in for your chop

In the heady rush of yesterday's beautiful spring day and its beguiling promise of better times to come I see I have attempted to restart the blog. On the busiest day this week. Shoehorning it edgewise into the farm/study/pet schedule at least gives me an excuse to sit down. Most of today has been spent bagging up and labeling lamb and mutton cutlets, roasts and potential stews picked up from our lovely local butcher yesterday, encouraged all the while by some of the main beneficiaries.


We decided to reduce the little flock further to save on fencing, mainly, but also to help keep some vegetation, albeit mostly capeweed. This year we seemed to have had either no rain at all for weeks, or a heavy downpour of days-long duration that helpfully sweeps up all our topsoil and deposits it into the neighbours' dam downstream. That's ok, because every few years they just spend a small fortune on earthmoving equipment and pumps to dig it all out again. We never get it back, though, it goes onto their commercial-scale broccoli patch so we would rather try to keep the precious earth here in the first place, thanks all the same.

Actually, it's not all cape weed. Some of it is scotch thistles too.