The Good Life in October

I named this Blog "The Good Life" in honor of the '70's English sticom about Tom and Barbra Good and their quest for a simple, self sufficient lifestyle, as we were just watching the dvd's of the series borrowed from the library, I was struck as how similiar our lives reflected those of Tom and Barbara. So much so that every now and then I will call Mark, Tom. Any here are a few pics of our version of the good life

Mark is preparing our corn and potato patch, this is in our horse yard, the horses don't spend much time in there over summer, except when they get too fat, we call it the Jenny Craig Paddock. We limed this after the first rotary hoe and now it is getting a second hoe. Yesterday Kath and I planted two rows of potatoes right where he has just hoed in the picture

In true Good Life honour we had to have a pig, we cant remember what the pig was called in the show, but our pig is Miss Piggy, here she is with her favourite things, namely her food bowls and some feed bags and sticks that she likes to play with in the mud wallow she and her dearly departed brother made by constantly tipping their water bowl over. Now we just fill up the wallow when we fill the water bowl and everything is good. As I mentioned we did have her brother, but he and a steer now fill our freezer, YUM.

We dont have a goat called Geraldine but we do have some dairy cows that we brought to take to the dairy that we managed, and then brought home when we left, we have hopes of building a dairy on our own farm soon. This is the daughter of one of our dairy cows feeding a few calves. We are raising about 12 calves at the moment and instead of buying milk powder and feeding them we have 5 cows in milk that do the job for us. This is Baby, she is the only one with a name, when we run out of milk in the house she is the one who supplies it for us.

Here is a shot of part of our garden, we have asparagus under the straw then there is some cabbages, lettuces, wombok cabbages, snow peas, garlic, brocolli, cauliflower, silverbeet, herbs,and weeds

The same garden from the other side

The next part of the garden is more silverbeet, (no we are not great fans of silverbeet, it just self seeded) more brocolli and cauliflower and about 1/2 of the tomato seedlings from the last post

This is a shot of the whole garden area, minus the corn and potato patch from the viewing platform of our round yard, I have seedlings in the greenhouse, and some berries behind it, Mark went crazy with the rotary hoe, but this was really all wasted space and I do have heaps of seeds and seedlings to plant. I am just a bit nervous as to how I am going to keep up with it all.

Things are not always perfect in paradise, this is what our driveway looked like the day after a 1 in a 100 year flood, our car is still parked on the other side as we were not game to drive it over the wash out in the dark, late the previous night, so we rolled our jeans up, took our shoes off, well everybody else did, I left mine on, now I can say that anything they can do, I can do in high heels.(not stilletos though).

Mark standing on what was our culvert, the water used to go through here now the level of rock on the other side is higher than here so now we have a spillway. You can see the dirty water on the left, this is where the major wash out is, it was about knee deep

Does it take millions of years to cut a ravine? No it just takes one good flood.

The dry way to cross the creek.

This part of the creek used to gently flow around to the left, after this flood it has decided to go right.

The fence in the fore ground was totaly under water. The main creek, which is the Cudgewa Creek runs well down to the right. The last photos were of our small creek which feeds this one.

Resident wombat now has an inground pool.

Going for a drive later that day, we found that there is always someone worse off, here not far from the dairy we were on the asphelt was lifted and placed so neatly heading for the paddock. This is the work of the mighty Murray.

This is the damage at Tooma. Willow trees have been declared a weed so our local landcare had poisoned them, this is the result, there was not one green willow in the pile. As a result of the flood, a big dam upstream had also burst, this also had a major impact on bringing all the dead willows down. Can you see what else was brought down?

This man decided to try a spot of fishing. The boat was stuck so tight it didn't even wobble as he got in.

This tractor, seeder and some other farm equipment was caught in the flood. This particular farmer, almost a year ago was partly burnt out with a bush fire. It brings to mind the words of the John Williamson song "On our selection": The year we came we had a drought, Then floods they put the bushfires out.

Damage done to the downstream side of the road.

And then the bridge with all the willow trees piled up against it.

So I guess it is obvious that perfect paradise won't come till we get to Heaven, we will still have droughts, and floods, and fire, and weeds. But God is in control.