It's raining, its pouring

As I write this we are having a torrential downpour. Water has covered the land and is running across the property in little rivulets into our lovely new dam which we just sealed! Yeah! (don’t you just love it when a plan comes together) Our dam is now overflowing with water. We only sealed it a week ago with a 400 square meter piece of recycled plastic which means that there should always be some water in our dam for ducks and wild water birds. (the pics are of Lorenzo installing the plastic and my girls enjoying the new water slide.)
The most wonderful thing about all this rain is that we just finished planting our mielie field this morning so our new seeds are getting an awesome head start with lots of moisture in the ground. We have planted the field according to conservation farming methods of no tilling of the soil and hand hoeing. Each hole was prepared with 2 cups of manure and 3 organic seeds. I spoke with the dairy farmer next door last Thursday who told me he has heard from the weather guys that now is a good time to plant as we will have good rain in the next 2 weeks – well, it seems his weather guys knew what they were talking about and I am glad I took his advice and planted. And not a moment too soon as we had just finished covering the last holes when the rain started.
It has been a while since I updated the blog as I have been having some computer probs – in fact my hard drive crashed last week – so I am out of touch and behind on everything.
So in other news over the past week, our ram Rocky and I had a bit of a rumble on Sunday morning. It is mating season and he seems to be even more aggressive than usual, so as I was trying to shoo the sheep away from breaking the hen house door when he decided to attack me leaving me with many cuts, scrapes and bruises and a damaged confidence in my sheep farming abilities.
Some good news is that we ate our first lettuce, beans and baby marrows on the property last week. It is wonderful to eat the fruits of our labours and add delicious veggies into our family meals that have been freshly picked off our own plants.
Last week also saw me take some unusually drastic pest control action against the baby grasshopper infestation we are battling. After spraying with a home brewed organic pesticide and buying some bantam chickens to eat them, on Wednesday last week I ventured out with my vacuum cleaner and literally vacuumed them off of the plants they have been sitting on. Although I didn’t get all of them by any means – I have seen an improvement in the area I covered. I am sure that is a method that you will not find in any organic farming book, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Now that our dam is so full I am also planning to invest in some duck breeding pairs as they are apparently excellent pest hunters.
As you can see, lots is always on the go here on our little piece of heaven in Walkerville. We hope you enjoy hearing about it half as much as we enjoy living it.