Repurposing, upcycling or is it Bespoke?

   click on  Apple Gully Farm  to see this at it's best

Browsing through a glossy magazine this week, an article caught my eye, it was about repurposing. I happen to be of the belief that farmers invented repurposing, they wrote the book on it.  Well they don't often write it down, they get on with it and it's all stored in their heads and the results are not always likely to feature in Better Homes & Gardens. But, think of all those wonderful bush letter boxes, and whoever thought that a very large umbrella frame would be ideal for drying the washing.  

When farmers need an adaption for the gizmo  it's often too far to go into town, too expensive or the model in the store is just not quite right, besides when you need it, you need it right away!  So farmers repurposed.

Our entire shed is repurposed, the posts and beams were our trees, the iron was salvaged  from another long collapsed shed, the work benches are old doors and half the important stuff in there came from an assortment of clearing sales. It looks at least half a century old but was built four years ago.

The best little box trailer ever was a repurposed concoction tossed in for free with a second hand quad bike, it's a master class in recycling ingenuity, all solid timber and steel, it weighs a ton but looks terrific in it's new bright red paint. Lately it's been doing duty delivering meals on wheels.

For some reason this winter we overlooked repurposing and decided to go shopping for a new hay feeder for the cattle.  We have small Herefords so everything seemed either too big or too high and most were too expensive. That left the option of scattering the hay in the paddock where is gets stomped, pooed and peed on because cattle have zero table manners.

Back home the repurposing wheels starting whirring, there were a few pallets lying around, a couple of metal gates and some left over mesh fencing stashed against the wall. The cattle were measured, the gates were measured and the pallets joined together.
By lunch time a bespoke cattle feeder had been constructed. The cost - $0     - repurposing at its best.

Bespoke cattle feeder

meals on wheels in the box trailer

RABBIT RAMPAGE

  Click  Apple Gully Farm   to see this at its browsing best

new rabbit housing estate now available at Apple Gully Farm

In our part of the world we are happy to share the pasture with our shy little black swamp wallabies and our family of wild deer, they nibble a little and move on.
We also have rabbits, we started with a handful and now we have them by the truck load.  They breed and eat and then they breed and eat. In between they dig holes of all sizes, sometimes shallow test burrows or single family burrows, when they really get going they expand into warrens that resemble rabbit size suburbs.  On our farm they have teamed up with the wombats by digging their burrows into the sides of wombat holes. Wombats and bunnies are formidable excavators and now  we have areas looking more like the Somme than paddock.

Blame the hunting mad Thomas Austin for importing 24 rabbits in 1859,  however,  the first fleeters were ahead of him- luckily they ate all their rabbits  faster than they bred because the convicts ran out of rabbit stew fairly early,  the settlement was starving after the first year.

By 1950 there was a grand plan to get rid of the rabbits, it was a world first, we had a special virus called Myxomatosis and it was going to wipe those 'wascally wabbits' off the map, and it almost did --for a while.

When I was 12 my pet black rabbit called Pookey who spent most of his life in domestic bliss living with the humans in our family home, was infected with Myxomatosis and died an awful death in his box in the kitchen, I was devastated.

one little burrow 

By the way, the comment ' breed like rabbits' exists for a reason. Rabbit pregnancy lasts a whole 31 days, they mature and are ready to breed at 4 months, females are always on heat and ready to go and can have up to 12 kits (young) per litter.      That's what breeding like rabbits means!

Maybe we should feel proud of our rabbits after all they are responsible for one of Australia's greatest  infrastructure projects, one to rival the great wall of China - thanks to rabbits we have the mighty  Rabbit Proof Fence stretching north and south in Western Australia.

However, now it's time for this story to take a dark turn because the rabbits have decided to take over the farm and the farmers must fight to hold on.  First it was the new trees along the drive way- undermined and ringbarked  by the nibblers, then it was the beetroot crop, the citrus trees were next - ringbarked and the first crop of oranges nibbled and left to rot, then the Photinia hedge was reduced to a pile of sticks,  the rhubarb disappeared over night, even the Agapanthus were not spared - dug up and randomly chewed.

Hobbits perhaps - no just rabbits 

Finally the rubicon was crossed when my garlic crop was attacked. My proud boast that nothing but nothing in the Australian bush ever ate garlic lies in tatters. Sadly my once free range garlic happily unfenced and unsprayed now succumbs nightly to the furry menace.

'once was a hedge'

 The rabbits have developed a taste for the exotic, they are becoming epicurean nibblers, if I had Thai basil, Okra and Vietnamese mint growing they would surely be adding them to their gourmet menu.

shrub reduced to a stick

Drastic times call for drastic measures,
Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet paints a suitably dark image
                                  "Diseases desperate grown
                                   By desperate appliance are relieved"

Watch this space for our desperate appliance

What's been happening down on the farm

     click on    Apple Gully Farm    all the pictures and posts are there

creative garlic

I can't believe that this blog has been lying idle in the blogosphere since late 2013, an age ago.

The great silence suggests that nothing has happened.  Not so, it's the opposite, too much has been going on. Spring has come and so has the garlic crop along with 3 new calves. We are lucky we still have the third, his mother had been listless and failing throughout her pregnancy with a problem that despite multiple tests could not be accurately diagnosed.  She struggled valiantly on through the last months managing to give birth and support her little bull calf for another month and then as ailing cows do, she sat down and waited to die.  So we had an orphan to rear. Its amazing the difference mothers milk makes, despite hand feeding, our orphan is a runt and will probably never catch up with his peers.  

the bucket is a substitute mum for our orphan

Spring started with great promise and then rapidly reneged on all it's promises. The wind blew week after week evaporating what little rain fell  - green paddocks turned slowly yellow.
 
Then came summer- with a vengeance. A hot summers day in our part of the world climbs to around 30 degrees C. All through late spring we baked in 30+ days,  the pasture reacted to this by not growing.  Perversely, on Christmas Day it was cool enough to light a fire, then on Boxing day a vicious hail storm blasted through,  shredding the veggie garden and pelting the cows with hail stones like marbles. poor things winced and flinched wondering who or what was hitting them.

hail stones like marbles

 For most of summer this year the thermometer has hovered around 34 to 39 degrees C. Combine that with very little rain and it spells trouble.  Gradually our creeks have stopped flowing, the grass has turned brown, the blow flies are driving humans and cattle nuts, and the cattle have gravel rash on their noses  from scavenging around in the short dry pasture.

In other ways nature did manage to ignore the fiery weather and just got on with the business of growing and producing. The wild plums turned on a great crop. I shared an hysterical January afternoon picking plumbs with a flock of inebriated parrots. As they stuffied themselves with the slightly rotting, fermented plums under the trees they squarked and tottered about like a bar full of drunk students. None of them was capable of flyng more than half a meter off the ground and a few just lay about trying to focus on me or for that matter on anything.
 My jam making skills need some work, so I'll be back at the pub -- er-- tree next year to pick another batch. 
The mediterranean sunshine has produced a bountiful supply of sweet heritage tomatoes on vines that would now be 15m tall if I hadn't pruned them back to within human reach. We have been utterly spoilt and will never again be able to enjoy a cricket ball hard and tasteless commercial tomato.

our heritage tomatoes

Here's a test-- take 3 supermarket tomatoes, line them up and gently lower a house brick onto them, they can hold up the brick. Now take 3 of our giant Black Russian tomatoes and try the same experiment - you will have instant passata for your efforts.

so sweet and juicy- like a water melon disguised as a tomato

As February rolled around and the hot weather persisted  it became  clear we could not support all of our  herd through autumn and the winter. Even if the rains come, we will still be short on pasture this year. So we confronted the harsh reality of being farmers rather than the keepers of large pets. The old girls as we fondly refer to our original Herefords would have to go.

Tuesday has come and gone and so have the old girls, they arrived in 2010 and had over 3 pampered years on Apple Gully. We've kept their calves who bellow forlornly for the milk bar. Perversely, the rains came the very next day,  too late for our old girls.

We are not alone in saying we will be glad to see the back of this summer, the only thing we escaped was the bushfires.

the original old girls on the day they arrived in 2010