Garlic Harvest

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Ever wondered how that pristine white garlic in the supermarkets gets to be so clean! It's grown in the soil so shouldn't it have a hint of it's growing environment on it?  And the  taste - well, there isn't any, it doesn't matter how many cloves go into the pot it is just so bland. To get it looking snowy white it's bleached and given a chemical bath - then you eat it!   some extra reading -- http://www.naturalnews.com/022801_garlic_Australia_food.html

April planting

Now that we have the space I decided to test drive as many garlic types as I could find to see if I could rediscover the taste of real garlic in our food. I scoured the seed catalogues and the net to learn as much as I could about the plant before I started to grow it. Our climate turned out to be perfect for garlic as it needs cold winters, like a lot of bulbs. Basically garlic can be planted at the same time as daffodils and most of your spring flowering garden bulbs.

up and growing

The trial garlic plot went in last March/April,  seven different varieties altogether. Each garlic bulb was split into cloves and planted. Most had sprouted within a week to ten days, so something in their DNA told them that the minute they hit the soil it was time to send out a green shoot and start the growing process.

October - not ready yet

We planted Italian Purple, Monaro Purple, ( which look the same to me) Italian White, Giant Russian, French Red, stiff necks and soft necks and a few nameless bulbs as well.
By May they were all up, then they just seemed to stop. Anxious to make sure my crop was not a complete failure I dug up a clove every month or so and I can report that all the growing action goes on below ground during winter. Each little clove slowly forms into a small new bulb that grows and grows till Spring. Then the green shoots really take off and the underground work gets serious as the little cloves morph into seriously big new bulbs.

My garlic is definitely not white

This year after a very wet start we ended up with virtually no rain from July till harvest, so the crop had to be watered. The blindingly obvious became clear - water is essential. The bulbs at the edges of the watering system did not prosper nearly as well as those with plenty of water.  Weeds were not a big issue because most of the growing cycle is in the colder months. I did discover a great Japanese tool for weeding that's more like a old cut throat razor than a hoe, it's so sharp you could shave with it- well I wouldn't, but that's how sharp it is. The tool comes with its own pouch, sharpener and a bottle of Camellia oil to clean it after use. Only the Japanese would treat a garden tool with such respect.  Unfortunately mine has assimilated into the Aussie way of life a little too easily, it's slouching around in the shed looking pretty dirty.


You know it's time to dig up the bulbs when the green foliage starts to turn yellow and die off. Everything this year has been done by hand, so it's labour intensive. You just have to get down and dirty. Next year I will have to move into the 21st century and find some sort of machinary to help me.

The crop was generally a success, except for the Giant Russians that are puny whimps. I don't know what went wrong.                                                 

The garlic is now drying in the shed, tied and labelled. I'm practising french plaiting and I'm gathering lots of recipes and ideas for garlic use. Watch this space.

On a sunny day the aroma of gently drying garlic drifting from the shed is tantalising. I can report that it's a successful vampire deterrent  - while we see many kangaroos, wombats, foxes, rabbits and wallabies --  not a single vampire has been spotted lurking around the shed.    

Garlic bulbils- I should have cut them off, but they looked too good!

Update on the little bull calf bitten by a snake

   

Last January we found one of our new calves in difficulty in the paddock, within an hour he was transformed from a healthy 3 month old to a paralysed, drooling shell, bitten by a snake.

 9 months later - on the hunt for the molasses bottle!

Check the January and February posts to track the calf's saga.        http://lplatefarmer.blogspot.com.au/

January - blind & paralysed

He survived, but not with a bouncing back sort of recovery, it was more a slow but determined struggle. It's hard to know exactly what goes on in bovine brains- not a whole lot at the best of times, but this little guy definitely finds life a challenge. He eats, drinks and is part of the herd, but he approaches life steadily and with a much concentration.

One of the many effects of the snake bite was loss of sight, we watched in dismay as he staggered around the paddock bouncing off barbed wire fences and trees, completely unable to find his mother. His sight has improved but he probably sees life in a blurry, unfocussed way. He is smaller than the other calves of the same age and he gets picked on by the bigger ones so he knows to stick close to his mother.

36 hours after the snake bite- blind, confused, paralysed

An enjoyable side effect of his close contact with humans while he was so ill, is his  ease in our company and his curiosity about the things we do.  He's happy to potter around the shed though his help in the garlic patch isn't always appreciated. He drinks from the sprinkler and has discovered the molasses bottle on a shelf in the shed. He can't open the lid yet but he's working on it, in the mean time he has perfected the pathetic look that ensures a human gets the lid off for him.      
We never did find out what type of snake bit him, but we have eliminated the eastern Brown, Tiger and the Mulga snakes because they would have killed him, so that only leaves the Copperhead, Death Adder, Red Bellied Black and 3 or 4 others!!
Our record is not really so bad, in India there are a million bites a year and at least 50,000 human deaths.



      

Getting on the map

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After years of confusion we finally have a road with a name and with it, an address.  When our area was first settled and  land divided into farming lots, our road formed a circuit through the green and rolling hills of the district, and so it was imaginatively named Greenhills Rd. The entire district is full of green and hilly land, if you check the map, there are a total of six Greenhills Roads in the Shire. When you want to report a bushfire or fall off the tractor and need to contact the emergency services you have more than one problem.  

About 30 years ago a state forest was planted and fenced off, straight through a large section of the road, so for 30 years it sat as a dead end cut off from it's other half, quietly sliding off the map and out of recent memory as it's original name faded away. Deliveries  mostly failed to reach their destination, utility meters were seldom read. Only intrepid Sunday morning joggers and serious bike riders ventured down our track and they needed to have a pocket for wire cutters to hack through the forestry fence.  To be honest our road is seasonally either rutted and dusty or rutted and muddy, it doesn't deserve much more than a dotted line on a map, and as one neighbour puts it
 " rocks grow up and potholes grow down in it"  

Unfortunately, as life gets faster and more complex,  living in a parallel universe reached through dust or mud has it's draw backs, the neighbourhood decided it was time to come in from the cold.

One neighbour had a sign to his farm put up at the corner, so we all adopted his farm name as our address - and it worked for a while. Then the bureaucrats decided to solve the problem by acknowledging the name of one of the original land holders- that unleashed some historical and hysterical skeletons from old family closets and so was duly dispatched.   Meanwhile rates notices, utility bills and all junk mail continued orbiting in yet another parallel universe. Not even the local council engineers could locate us.
Some might argue that we had arrived at Nirvana, leaving the mayhem of the world behind, but the Rural Fire Service had devised a brilliantly simple farm numbering system and they wanted to nail their numbers to a proper road name. A cunning plan was hatched to circumvent the skeletons in closets yet still recognise the early settlers. The shire council tentatively agreed, the geographical names board checked that the choice was unique in the shire, the name was advertised in the local paper as part of the process and received no objections - the process was complete, we had a name and would soon have a sign on the road to prove it.

Many months passed, so many that we presumed the process had once again foundered on some bureaucratic shoal.
A post script:
The road sign had been up for a week before anyone noticed, we came and went round the corner without actually being aware that after 30 years the road had it's own notable, unique and unparalleled signpost.

Another postscript:
Our most recent electricity bill was an estimate, I suppose it's too much to expect instant admission to the world after a 30 year absence.

Building a Shelter

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all mod cons

For almost three years our shelter on the farm has consisted of a 6 metre  container and a hand built bush shed. We share the shed with enough tools to give Bunnings some competition, a tractor, a contrary quad bike, seasonal waves of rodents and layers of mud or dust depending on the weather. Tucked into the back of the shed are a range of storage containers holding about 200 litres of various vehicle fuels. A cap left off and a small spark could leave us heading heavenward. It's OK though because at least the diesel doesn't ignite like that so I only worry about petrol.

We try to stay linked to the 21st century, we can boil water and power a few lights with a generator and our collapsible camp chairs create an impression of happy domesticity.  There is a thermometer nailed to a post in the shed and when the mercury slips below double digits there is only one option- put on another layer and work harder to keep warm. There is another emergency option -  and that is to pack up and go home.  The trouble is our plans are for the farm to be our new home, but walls of rusty corrugated iron just don't cut it.

as good as it gets

So we embarked on 'The Project' and set in motion plans for a new house. We decided on a gently sloping site and with the help of an architect and a team of builders set to work. Obstacle number one soon emerged, the 'gentle' slope was too steep for trucks to negotiate. That was quickly put right with the help of an excavator that wouldn't have looked out of place on one of Genia Rinehart's iron ore plots.

Mining in the Pilbara or our house site 

Obstacle two quickly became our road with four names, it created chaos with deliveries.
We know to turn a deaf ear to the calming tones of the lady in our GPS when she insists that we are 'off road, make a U turn where possible',  because despite having four names and the assistance of 4 tracking satellites our road does not exist in the global positioning universe.

Truck loads of bricks and windows turned up days late when drivers lost their way.

'once was a gentle slope'

Slowly our new home began to materialise from our laser levelled  'once was a gentle slope'  and the cattle somehow slipped through the fence and became our first official visitors.

'The Project' has been underway for 10 months, we have walls, a roof and some windows.

In by Christmas is the call - I just hope Santa's reindeer navigational system is fail-safe.

first visitors

home on the range

     

Keeping up with Mother Nature

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Winter is the time to catch up or even get ahead of mother nature,  the weeds take a breather,  things slow down, at least that’s what we thought.

Now that the yearling steers had gone off to market we were expecting to settle into a quiet winter with only our remaining cows and two of their heifers.  The cows are all pregnant and being old hands at the pregnancy thing will be calving in early Spring.  Good animal husbandry tells us that the heifers are too young to breed just yet, but like all adolescents they have other ideas. 

Recently we had a refresher course on what it is like to live with teenagers and their hormones.  Our older heifer began to bellow and act just like a skittish teen, she ran up and down the fence line, she hassled the rest of her herd and she kept the bellowing going on and off all day, it became maddening, drilling through our ears and echoing over the hills.  

She was a girl on a mission driven by mother nature or more precisely - hormones. The racket continued,  and sure enough it had the desired effect - the boys in the neighbour’s property appeared at their fence.  In a move straight out of the nursery rhyme ‘the cow jumped over the moon’  three of the neighbours cattle sailed over the fence and onto the road. I now know what it must be like to be a security guard at the shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. Out of nowhere and just on dusk our heifer came barreling down the hill and she too flipped over a low section in the fence, looking more like an Olympic hurdler than a heifer.   With that they all bolted into the dusk together for a night on the town.

Next morning a distant and very hoarse mooing led us into the bush where a tired, thirsty young heifer was happy to see us and more than willing to come home.   Picture the mascara running, and the high heels being carried and you have a vision of our girl tottering through the gate and back to her herd.  They greeted her with much head butting and a general celebratory romp around the paddock.

    'Go girl, that's the way- you've already got the boys falling at you feet and they're only steers. 

     Wait till you you see a real bull.'   they seemed to be saying.

 Luckily the neighbourhood lads were all just young and silly steers.  BUT in another 24 days time the cycle will begin all over again.  Another winter job, keep ahead of mother nature -- check all fences and keep the boys at bay.

The Summer that wasn't

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or just Google   'Apple Gully Farm'

You're never short on conversation in the bush if you have a rain gauge, ours is screwed onto a gate post and this summer all we seemed to do was empty it.    The rain gauge conversation  can take place anywhere - over the front gate or between two drivers going in opposite directions on the road is as likely as any,  you just stop on the road when you recognise the oncoming vehicle. On our dirt road we all know each other, so if and when a third ute arrives there's no impatient honking of horns, the driver just gets out and joins the conversation.
The rain conversation goes like this-
"20 ml in the rain gauge last night"
"ah, we only had 17"
"yer, and across the road- they got 22"
"good for the pasture heading into autumn"
"yer, but hear the bloke down the road has an outbreak of liver fluke"
"yer bloody wet under foot with all this rain"

When you're a farmer it's wise never to be too overjoyed by mother nature, even when she is in a generously benign mood.

The truth is we have had serious rain this summer as those who live near flooding rivers know only too well.  Our rain gauge maxes out at 160 ml, but a few weeks ago the water level was at the top and overflowing and that was just over night!  We guestimated another 10 ml- so that's  nearly 7 inches in 12 hours in the old system.

The road was a disaster, most of it was probably down the creek and well on it's way to the Pacific Ocean the morning after the mighty downpour.  The force of the water running down our hills scoured out a couple of thousand years worth of top soil in places and the cattle were looking totally fed up with the soggy conditions.


From past experience our neighbours knew that if they wanted their road repaired and the culvets cleared they would have to do the work themselves. So when things get boggy- the bogged get going.    By lunch time four farmers with various skills and four tractors of various vintages had completed a job that might have taken a local council three months to start and three weeks to complete.

Thanks to La Nina  the countryside has changed dramatically-  the frogs are loving it and of course so are the snakes, it's a pile your plate up  never ending  smorgasbord-a-thon for them,  however it does mean that long pants and boots are de rigueur for all humans.   I've taken to stomping very loudly through the bush to give the snakes plenty of time to get out of the way.

Oh and did I mention leeches,  slimy, black, blood sucking parasites that stalk their prey in search of their favourite dish. At the slightest whiff of blood they drop from overhead branches, they wave from blades of grass and they inch along the ground intent on only one thing - a nice patch of warm skin. It doesn't even have to be exposed skin, down your front or up and over your boots will do   You seldom realise  one has attached itself  because they kindly inject local anaesthetic into their victim just before they settle in for a meal. However they leave a vicious calling card in the form of an itch at the bite site that lasts for days  - - and yes I'm itching while I type.  I can report that salt works if you find one, you just need to carry a salt shaker round with you - and I do!

Just in case you're confronted with a wily leech this might be useful and you'd be right if you guessed that Australia features well up in the leech tables.    http://www.invertebrate.us/leech/info/leech.pdf
this has me hoping I never need leech therapy  http://www.Leechtherapy.com.au/

Spare a thought for those who make their homes underground. The wombats have had a miserable time with La Nina, no sooner do they excavate a new hole and tear up our paddocks, than they fill with water and it's time to move on yet again. Bits of our farm are starting to resemble the Somme.

Snake Bite - the outcome

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or just google 'Apple Gully Farm'

In week 1 following the snake bite, the calf lurched back and forwards from death.  Its impossible to find the bite site in a hairy animal, but it must have been around the mouth. His nose swelled up and broke out in blisters, he had enormous difficulty swallowing, his tongue was paralysed making it impossible for him to suckle, in fact he seemed to have lost a young animals instinct to suckle. He walked with an exaggerated high stepping gait. Interestingly he could still moo so he bellowed himself hoarse. He was definitely blind as he continued to bump into fences and trees.   So where to for a calf who can't see and can't drink or eat?

the junior members of the herd with 'snake bite'

It was obvious that he would not survive without hydration, we gave him milk and water 10 ml at a time from a syringe. Amazingly his mother, a big Hereford who normally wouldn't tolerate a human closer than 1 or 2 metres, let us milk her in the early days. Some days the calf tentatively drank out of a bucket, he even tried to drink out of the dam.  He regained some vision and managed to walk around trees and not blunder into the dam and drown.

In week 2 he took a big set back, he seemed to become so weak and depressed that he was barely able to walk, he stopped even trying to bellow and refused to drink, all the hard work was coming to nothing. Towards the end of the week we found him flat on the ground, neck stretched out and his breathing  shallow - the end seemed near.
The calf was desperately dehydrated and goodness knows what the snake venom was doing internally
the list of effects of snake bite is scary

• coagulation is inhibited
• renal failure
• myotoxicity - muscle destruction, including diaphragm, heart and lung muscle
• double or blurred vision
• neurotoxic paralysis

the normal treatment,  for a human that is -- 'administer anti venom as soon as possible to neutralise the venom'

but we didn't have that option.  Instead drastic dehydration measures were called for and the litany of lethal effects would just have to wait.

No time to find a 'non irritating radiopaque polyurethane tube with a Y adapter for feeding' in it's place we had a plastic funnel, (that I worried had been previously used to fill a fuel can !)  a metre of plastic tubing, 4 litres of water and 2 litres of milk. We had our feeding tube. The calf was too weak to resist, so down the tube went and 6 litres of fluid gurgled through the funnel into his empty rumen.
We waited not expecting much.

Then a small miracle happened, about 2 hours later the calf stood up. As he stumbled along he bumped into his mother and inadvertently discovered her bulging udder, instinct must have taken over at about the same time as the paralysis lessened, he tentatively started to suckle.

In the third week he made steady progress. His sight improved, he began to walk normally and he was totally enjoying being back at his free milk bar, he even started to nibble some grass.
Cows aren't meant to have a great brain but his mum is obviously delighted, she licks him from head to tail, nuzzles him and generally doesn't let him out of her sight, they take their morning and afternoon naps cuddled up together and the herd is back to normal.

mother and son back in the paddock together

Snake bite trivia picked up along the way
a boa constrictor knows how long it takes to squeeze the life out of it's victim by detecting it's decreasing heart rate
a snake senses smell in stereo- through it's forked tongue- it moves to attack on the side with the strongest smell or it retreats away from the smell
snakes also sense heat and vibration in stereo
snakes cleverly over stimulate clotting using up all the blood coagulant factors resulting in both massive internal clotting and bleeding.

I'm a survivor !

SNAKE BITE in cattle

 

if you aren't seeing this at it's technical best click on         http://lplatefarmer.blogspot.com.au/
or just google 'Apple Gully Farm'
    
Sharks, snakes, spiders, blue ringed octopus, sting rays, cane toads, even the humble platypus. One of the privileges of living in Australia is our ability to boast about our venomous animals. A tourist's visit is complete only after they have visited an animal park full of our dangerous fauna.

Down on the farm we crash about in the bush where the occasionally sighted snake seems as bothered by us as we are of them,  we go our separate ways --  quickly, mutual respect I think it's called.

Our cattle spend all their days foraging around with their noses down in the grass and up until 2 weeks ago they too had managed to avoid our venomous fauna.  Until, that is, at dusk one Friday we noticed a 3 month old calf acting strangely, flicking it's ears and shaking it's head. Over the fence I went, and the normally wary 100 kg animal allowed me to walk right up to it, hold it's head and even check it's drooling mouth, it lent against me in a effort to stay upright.

Within 45 minutes paralysis had set in and it collapsed. These things always seem to happen at night or on a weekend- this was both. Though we had never witnessed the effects of a snake bite, intuitively it seemed the only possibility.

Snake bite  victim in ambulance with worried herd members looking on

Had this been a human, a loved pet or a valuable stud animal the available option is treatment with antivenom - at $600/ vial with 1 - 5 vials required.  So, what do city farmers do with a calf worth no more than $200?


Accepted wisdom is -- work out the economics and leave it to nature.
Early next morning the calf was still alive- just.

Google was no help, all it could offer was

        'Little has been described about the effects of snake bite in cattle. 

        Possibly because of their sheer clumsiness, 

       they may receive multiple bites and thus severe envenomation.'    

So we decided the little bull calf deserved a fighting chance. Google also needed the opportunity to update it's information on snake bite in cattle.


A compromise was made -- no anti venom, but as one half of the farming team is a small animal vet, everything else would be considered.
A rusty trailer in the shed became the intensive care ward.

emergency nurses working with the vet

The bellowing mother had alerted the neighbours, the kids were upset and eager to be nurses, the adults were bemused and interested to watch a city vet out of his comfort zone.  No sterile procedures here - no gloves, no masks, no monitors, just dirt, hay and rust.
The intravenous drip was nailed to a pole and we waited. 


 Within an hour the saline and glucose fluids were enough to rouse the calf. It was winched to it's feet and attempted to stagger out of the trailer. 
It was moving with an awkward high stepping 'goose step' gait and seemed to have an uncontrolled cud chewing action, grinding and drooling incessantly. Disoriented, it staggered around blundering into things -
      it was alive but blind. 

visiting hours in intensive care