It’s been about 90 degrees the past few days here and I managed to burn myself pretty badly while out hauling hay. Lyndal and I managed to roll 7 bales of hay across the field in one day which was pretty damn exhausting and then filled and moved two trailers worth of hay to fill a hole that a fallen willow tree left that swallows goats. I haven’t had a day off (although I did have to sleep in til 8:30 one day) since I got here.  Lyndal hasn’t had a day off in 6 years so I really can’t complain.

We had farmstay guests last night and made a really nice dinner and had conversation with them all night. They were a couple and one was a chef at a local restaurant and the other was a student at university studying marine biology.  We made pork, a potato and carrot dish, meringues, a pavlova, fruit and nut cheese truffles, and a couple other things.

We’ve been noticing some of the goats have been looking a lot thinner, and have been having pretty bad diarrhea, so yesterday we collected fecal samples of all of the ones we’re concerned with and did fecal worm counts. This involved wetting the feces with a saturated saline solution, straining it, and putting it into a slide and looking at it under the microscope. Some of the goats had numbers in the thousands which is really bad so unfortunately we had to drench a few of them to de-worm them. This also unfortunately means that we have to milk them still, but have to throw away all of the milk for 35 days 🙁

 

I found a solid piece of furniture in the shed that could be used as a kitchen cupboard for the tiny house that Lyndal and Steve are planning to build eventually so I started sanding it down so I can paint it and fix it up for them. Theres also a couple of other projects like that I want to do, but I haven’t had a lot of free time so far so we’ll see if it gets done… I also spent a few hours sowing seeds of a variety of different vegetables that I’m growing in the potting shed to put in the dinner I’m going to make before I leave.

It’s officially been a week since I’ve been here! I’ve gotten down pretty much all of the names of the animals and I’m getting more used to the whole getting up at 6 am everyday thing.

Today I went to the winery that Lyndal works at to do some data entry for a little bit of money (to cover my food costs here) and got a tour of the place and met Jill, the owner and Lyndal’s best friend. She did a little wine tasting for some Texans and I got to listen in and taste a couple. They make a Rosé, Pino Gris, Pino Noir, and admittedly a couple others I can’t remember. Next week I’m going to go back and do some more work for her and put stickers on wine bottles (thrilling, I know).

I can milk the goats really well now with the exception of Gien, she and I just do not get along. It’s a lot harder than you’d think and it took me three days to get anything out at all.

We’ve been eating so well lately. We made pulled pork, homemade coleslaw with cabbage, carrots, and zucchini, and roasted plums with rosemary and have been eating on that for a couple of days. We even made the mayonnaise that went into the coleslaw which is waaay better than any store bought crap you get in the states. For lunch today we had a caprese salad with fresh basil, handmade olive oil, and lyndal’s cheese with some balsamic and salt and pepper. I also just learned how to make yogurt and ricotta cheese super easily and for lunch yesterday I picked blackberries to put in the warm ricotta and taught lyndal how to make a grilled cheese. My favorite thing so far we’ve made is zucchini blossoms stuffed with cheese, mashed potatoes and a ton of garlic.

We have peas and zucchini coming out our ears so tomorrow I’m going to make some pea pod wine. 

We let the goats out into the hay field today to try to pick up some of the stuff that’s on the ground so we don’t have to and they had a great time. 

I’ve woken up at 6 am and gone to bed at 12 the past however many days I’ve been here and I’ve never felt more alive. ( I’ve also only showered for 2 minutes once since olympia) I get up, eat toast, separate the baby goats from the milkers, milk the goats and sheep, clean, water plants, and then go inside for morning tea every day.

Two days ago Lyndal got a call about picking up 10 bags of free black oats in Scargill, a nearby town, so we took a nice drive around the countryside. The farmers we met were very lovely and happy to be putting their extra grain to good use. They shared a little secret about some ripe cherry trees alongside the road we took to get there, so we stopped by and collected about 3 kilos of fresh cherries to make jam and various other things with. We picked 3 gigantic cabbages and were planning on making sauerkraut and Sue, one of the farmers gave us an ancient dutch recipe to follow which included juniper berries which are my favorite. I spent the rest of the afternoon slicing cabbage (and sliced the tip of my thumb pretty well) and sitting with the little dog watching the sheep graze and pounding the kraut.

 

 

 

Theres so much fresh food to process we don’t even know what to do with it all. Yesterday I spent the afternoon picking and shelling peas with mazzy and I went out again this morning to check on the plant and there’s now about a million more waiting to be picked. We also have loads of plums aching to be picked and processed as well as another huge cabbage. For dinner last night we picked ripe tomatoes and made a fresh salad with basil and Lyndal’s version of mozzarella and home-pressed olive oil. I also made a pea pesto with mint, olive oil, salt and pepper, and a hint of lemon that we spread on bread.

Yesterday I weeded the raspberry and blackberry garden and burned my back pretty badly, I’m not used to the hole in the ozone and the hot hot sun yet. (I don’t think my skin will ever get used to it…) It’s been raining a lot more than usual and Lyndal and Steve didn’t get a chance to bail a lot of their hay before it rained, so lots of it was sitting in the field and ended up getting pretty wet and moldy. It loses its nutrition when this happens, so Lyndal and I spend a couple of hours forking some of it around trees so it will turn into mulch and be put to some use. The average yearly rainfall here is around 500-550 mL and just in the last 40 days they’ve gotten over 200 mL which is highly highly unusual. Normally they’d be in the middle of a drought right now, but It’s rained so much that their water tanks are actually overflowing which is pretty unheard of.

Mazzy’s been sick with hay fever and asthma the last couple of days so I’ve been taking care of the watering and milking while she does chores inside to stay out of the allergens. We’re going to the doctor today to find out exactly what’s wrong.

It’s so nice to actually feel tired at night and normally when I wake up at 6 am I feel like a zombie, but I love the animals and the work here so much that I don’t even mind at all. I’ve learned so much about the animals and the farm already and I don’t ever want to leave.

 

Day one:

Lyndal and Steve (our hosts for the next 3 months) are probably the most genuine people I’ve met thus far. Lyndal picked us up from the airport in Christchurch and we went and dipped our toes in the ocean at Pegasus Beach and then drove 40 minutes home to AislingQuoy. We toured most of the farm and then sat down and sorted through strawberries and boysenberries for a while.

The daily routine includes milking the goats and sheep twice a day and since we arrived at around 4pm NZ time, it was just in time for afternoon milking. Each of the goats and sheep have names and specific needs when it comes to milking which will take a little while to remember. All of the girls get very anxious when we let them down the runway into the dairy yard and they now the routine and all line up the same way every day. We put out alfalfa in various spots and each of them get a couple scoops of feed mixture made with various grains to eat while they’re being milked. Everything in the dairy container (a literal shipping container fixed up into a milking station) is done the same way every time and cleaned thoroughly every time- the animals need consistency. Halfway through the milking process the jet lag caught up with Mazzy and I so we finished up and called it a night and came in for dinner. We had a wonderful pork something with rice and then had a cheese board of cheeses Lyndal made- each named after the sheep or goat that produced the milk to make the cheese. Most everything we ate came from the farm. We had a delightful gooseberry tart with berries collected from the garden named after the most wonderful goat Masala. We talked a bit about politics and favorite movies and then at about 10:30 we crashed.

 

Day two:

Every day we wake up at 6:00 and have a light breakfast of toast and tea (or oats and fresh strawberries for me) and then we go and feed and milk the goats and sheep. In the morning, the milking machine is used on the goats and the sheep are milked by hand like usual. The cleaning process for the milking machine is quite extensive- we pump cold water through it twice, then a boiling soapy water pump, and then another two cold water rinses. Then we went and let out the sheep into the different grazing pastures and then went in for morning tea.

Lyndal gave us a very extensive background on earthquakes in the area and we discussed what we would do if another one hit while we’re here. This is probably the safest place to be in the area, no fault lines are underneath us, and there are no large buildings or power lines close that could cause trouble. The southern alps sit on the alpine fault line which is also a subduction fault which causes many ruptures. There is right now a slow slip happening underwater SE of the north island which slowly releases pressure (which could be good) but no one can really predict exactly what it means. There hasn’t been nearly as much seismic activity in the past couple years (the southern alps haven’t had a great shift in 490 years) as there has been before which could mean nothing or could mean that something will happen soon… who knows. If you want to check up on the recent seismic activity go to New Zealand Quake Live online.

After morning tea we cleaned and chopped strawberries and made strawberry jam with fresh basil from the garden. The plum and apricot orchard is just ripening so we untangled nets and covered the trees to keep birds from picking the fruit once it’s ripened. We bopped around with the goats for a while, cuddling them and trying to remember their names. We also fed the rest of the sheep and goats that didn’t get fed when they were milked and made up feed for the animals for the rest of the day.  Lunch consisted of a brilliant pea quiche Lyndal made and salad that we picked from the garden- kale, zucchini, romaine, carrot, and Lyndal’s cheese topped with homemade olive oil from Lyndal’s olive trees. We walked around the rest of the property looking at all of the native trees and bushes she has planted and all of the other cool plants she has. We picked fresh mint to dry and save for tea and red clover to use as antibiotics. Now it’s 5:00 and we’ve just returned and we’re taking an hour to write our blog posts and cool off. After this it’s back to milking and weeding the strawberries and raspberries and who knows what else.

 

Cheers

M