Ahhhh!!! It’s actually cool today…what a relief from the unrelenting hot, dry weather. When it’s blistering hot every day, you always feel that there is no end in sight. So today we had already decided not to have our 4am wake up alarm and wake up with the light. Waking up naturally is such a lovely thing and we had the added bonus of a cool weather change. Great stuff: we are both in better spirits with the cool weather; heat makes you hot-headed and tense all the time…it’s maddening!!
Anyway, I took the time to walk around the farm to take some pictures to give you an update on what’s happening.
Oh, the garden is getting very bushy; despite the dryness this year, we have managed to get plenty of greens from our bucket garden.
Container Garden.
The fennel is flowering. We can collect seeds and start a whole load of these:
Flowering Fennel.
Gnome’s tobacco: Not fi eat!! That’s flowering too:
Tobacco Flowering.
Jalapeño peppers are doing really well:
Jalapeno Peppers
The farm keeps on producing and we feel so fortunate that we have an abundance of food.
Jackfruit is loaded:
Lots of Jackfruit.
It’s been a good year for soursop:
Lots of Soursop.
(Hi Tanya!! I’ll let you know when some are ready!! 🙂 )
I think it always good to encourage everyone to be artistic; it is a form of expression. I have been trying to help Gnome make the time to relax and do more activities just for the sake of passion and fun. With some of the physical labour on the farm, he does sometimes feel that the work is never-ending…it just ends up being a to-do list. He actually does the farm work out of necessity (who else is going to do it?) and to keep himself very healthy and strong. Pulling out heavy logs and brush-mowing are not his primary goals in life.
His likes are very simple though. he loves growing vegetables especially tomatoes and aubergines. And one of the things that he does for sheer pleasure is just to walk about his garden, taking the time to look at the fruits of his labour.
Growing Tomatoes.
He enjoys the process of making things. He likes to make wine: the pressing of fruit, the fermentation and bubbling away and then waiting for something special. It’s all about time and love and I don’t mean it in a wishy-washy sort of way…it’s solid. It’s not for the end product anyway because he rarely drinks.
Wine-Making.
Another thing that I am encouraging him to do is to grow tobacco. This is again about making something good and proper. He enjoys the curing process which takes about a year: hanging it up inside the house (yes, we need a barn or we’ve ended up making our house into a barn!), the flavouring, curing and blending.
Hanging Up Tobacco.Sliced Tobacco.
This allows Gnome to express himself and these are his arts. Yes, he will have lovely, aromatic pipe tobacco and cigars in the end but its the artful journey that releases the joyful spirit.
Tobacco Plant.
Gnome has been making rope twists with his tobacco; it is a form of pressure curing. Once he’s done his work of art, he gives them to Munchkin to store away for a year or more.
Tobacco Twist.
I have written about the history of tobacco. Click on link if interested. Personally, I really enjoy the presence of the plant (not sure if you understand what I mean). You almost form an affinity towards certain plants and they draw you to them and you can sit for long lengths of time just staring at the beautiful velvety leaves or inhaling the spicy aromatic scent of the flowers. That’s what I mean.
These are the things that we should be doing in our lives. It’s a fine balance of labour properly done to meet your necessities (shelter/food/clothing/energy requirements) and after that, we should foster an attitude of relaxation and enjoyment without filling up our lives with only monetary orientated deeds. And we need each other to remind ourselves that we are supposed to be having fun on this journey of self-discovery.
It’s Sunday and we’ve still working on a million and one things. Gnome asked, “…where’s the fun??”
Oops, these blog posts are supposed to inspire other people to live a farming lifestyle like us.
Gnome’s working on the veranda, pulling out posts and putting them into holes. I tended to the animals (goosies and guinea pigs mostly) this morning and watered the 40 or so buckets in our garden. After that I potted some sage and tobacco plants. I’ve just been clearing a big mess in the old plant nursery where the old posts were located. There are all sorts of crap: some of the stuff is destined for the dump but I have to pick through it all to save the useful stuff…like buckets and planting bags. I stopped to make lunch (shitake and bitter gourd soup with lentils….still have to eat well despite being busy). And Gnome’s still sweating away outside knocking things together.
And now I have to pack some soap and products and….oh, and then there is the Chocolate Festival to prepare for next weekend….
So, I think that it’s time for an afternoon break. I have to keep in mind that life on a farm comes in cycles of busy and quiet and there’s no in-between!! The important thing is to pull yourself out of it once in while and remember, we’re supposed to be having fun!!
Okay, goosie time!! Look, the yellow wellies work…the goosies think that we are one of them!!
There should a Farming 101 course or a Dummy’s Guide to Farming. We sure could do with this since neither of us grew up on farms. Now, this is a funny story that happened this week…which makes me wish that we had farming classes at school that taught you the basics…like how to pull a wooden post out of a 3 foot hole without doing your back in.
Gnome is currently working on building a back veranda and needs to erect 8 sturdy rose-wood posts, 10 feet tall, 3 feet into the ground. He’s dug the holes (oooh, that started the sore back) and now he has to re-locate posts into this new area. Now, these posts have been used for different things around the farm and need to be dug out of their holes. The posts are about 200kgs (400lbs) in weight so it’s no joke! I saw Gnome perform the heroics of removing one post (ooooooh…sore, sore back!!) and I promptly told him to stop before he did any silly damage to himself.
So we decided to take a break (cup of tea and a Kit-Kat) and do a Google search on “how to lift posts out of holes.”
Something called a “Farm Jack” came up. We both looked at the description and it suddenly dawned us that this was the exact piece of invention that we were looking for! Where had it been in all these 13 years of farming when we were painstakingly trying to dig posts out of holes…
And then we realised that there was a piece of equipment that looked exactly like a farm jack lying rotten and neglected, dying a horrible death under our house. It had been left as a “can you keep this I’ll be back in 2 weeks” piece of equipment which we have now kept for 10 years waiting for this guy to come back who will never come back.
We both looked at each other and said at the same time,
“Oh we have a farm jack!! Is that what it is! “
All those years of keeping that piece of equipment and having no idea what it was!! Too Funny, right? Or should we just feel very silly and sheepish…
Ancient Farm Jack
Anyway, Gnome took the hunk of metal junk out and with a pair of pliers, some diesel and a wire brush proceeded to clean it up. Upon closer scrutinisation, the original two pins had been replaced, in a haphazard way, with a nail at the top and a half broken screw at the bottom. Gnome attempted to “fix” the farm jack and with some magic and a piece of wire with a metal key-holder managed to get the thing working. It wasn’t perfect since the bottom pin was broken so he used a wire to lever the pin back and forth. It worked…it actually worked…well, we got a post an inch out of the hole before the make-shift lower pin gave way and broke. Arrrghhhh!!! It was looking so promising.
Farm Jack Quick Fix
Well, it’s not fixable now and the broken pin is stuck so can not be removed and replaced. It is such a shame because if it wasn’t for that, it would work!
Now to look for a farm jack in Belize. Not easy. We tried looking for one in Toledo, Belize and the likes of it has never been seen or heard of before in this district. We must search further afield…
Work has temporarily come to a standstill on our farm due to a sore back and difficulty procuring equipment. 🙂
About a week ago we found one of our goslings, 3 days old at the time, sitting immobile and unable to stand. It was twittering away to itself and appeared unperturbed. On closer examination, it appeared to have broken its right leg. We are not sure what happened because he was fine before; maybe a guinea pig had accidentally trod on its leg or a clumsy gosling had sat on him…who knows?
Since it was unable to move, it was not eating or drinking.
Gnome, accident and emergency specialist said that it would probably take 4 to 6 weeks for the leg to completely heal. He further explained that this would mean that we had to open up a 24 hour hospital care unit for the little one. In other words, this meant one to one care, attention and feeding. He asked me:
“I know that we are both very busy right now. Munchkin, do you want to look after the goosie?”
I thought about it carefully because there are plenty of things to do on the farm and many other things that we do including seeing patients and making products. Do I really want to use up my time looking after one goosie when there are many healthy goosies to give the time and attention to?
Oh well, this one was too cute for me to say “No.”
Sleeping Goosie.
As Gnome says,
“Cuteness goes a long way…”
Goosie Hospital is officially open; run by Matron Munchkin!!
The last few days, we’ve been having a bit of car trouble; we were driving back home and the fuel warning light came up. Of course, we didn’t know what that meant so Gnome had to phone up the Toyota dealership to ask them about the light. This is what he was told over the phone: get a new fuel filter, get a car mechanic to install the fuel filter and then get the mechanic to re-set the warning light. This is what Gnome did: get a fuel filter, do a Google search on “how to install a fuel filter” and “how to reset a warning light.”
There was enough information on the Internet for a Gnome, without any car mechanic skills whatsoever, to install the fuel filter. We would ordinarily have just paid to get it done but this time Gnome said to me,
“…wait a minute…between the messing around with a mechanic and paying for it, maybe it’s just easier if I have a go at doing it myself.”
And so he did. His conclusion was that generally car stuff is quite simple and straight forward and if you actually take the time to read up instructions on the Internet, you can generally get it done yourself. He did say as an after thought:
“…I’m talking about car stuff…not medical stuff…there are too many people who get on the Internet to make a self diagnosis and get it wrong.”
That for true, I can vouch for that!! Too many people using Dr Google!!
Anyway, with the car thing, I am really glad that Gnome works with the philosophy of self-reliance and he’s not afraid to learn new things all the time.
Okay, so what’s happening on the farm? Well, we have some new harvests. This is suriname cherry which has a lovely resinous taste. I have taken a picture of one pristine cherry because we seem to have something that is biting holes in all of them. I can’t spot what is causing it but I think that we have a problem with ants.
Suriname Cherry.
Some nice cayenne chilli peppers. Gnome has strung these on a string in the kitchen to dry.
Cayenne Crop.
Oh, and these are canistel. They taste like sweet potato; we actually eat this with our meals as a carbohydrate substitute. Our tree is loaded this year! Yay!!
Canistel.Canistel.
Ooooh…it is really punishingly hot right now!! Try to keep cool everyone!!
It’s taken us a wee bit of time to recover from Sunday. You see we lost two out of three of our new goslings. This is what happened: On Saturday night, we performed Operation: Move Mama Goose from bush with goslings to safe house.
Mama and Goosies.
We did our usual kidnapping and bundling and moved them to a nice luxury nest in the Zen garden coop. We cleared everyone out of the place so that she would have the place to herself.
The new baby goosies:
Of course, Geese don’t take kindly to being moving about and the next morning she was making a racket. She had free reign of the entire coop with water, greens and grains but she wouldn’t have any of it. She kept on pushing against the fencing and incessantly complained the whole morning. The three little goosies were just following her about and were not perturbed by her fussing and complaining. Occasionally, I would cast an eye over to make sure that the babies were doing okay. The last time I looked was about midday and everything was in order. At about 1pm, it started raining so I decided to run outside to make sure that the baby goslings had found shelter. And lo and behold, mother was there with no goslings!! Arrrgh!!! Deep Shock…where were the babies??? I called Gnome and we searched the entire coop looking for the babies and couldn’t find any trace of them. Mama was so distressed and kept on crying out…
We eventually opened the coop and let her out because she was just going crazy. She ran back to her original nesting spot and plonked herself down, refusing to move.
We again scoured every inch of the coop…still nothing…
Was it a hawk? What could take away three baby goslings without leaving a trace? We did deduce that it wasn’t our cat because he had an alibi…he had been asleep inside the house all day.
We finally decided to get Mama goose back into the coop in the hope that she could call the babies and perhaps they would miraculously appear. Anyway, she did her calling and Gnome thought that he heard some peeping noise coming from the cardamom bush in the coop. He went over to investigate and meanwhile, I walked around the coop again and found the bodies of two of the dead babies. They both had similar injuries to the head like they had been grabbed by the head and shaken back and forth.
Gnome found the third one…luckily, still alive and uninjured. Thank Goodness!!
Anyway, we both agreed that the dead bodies of the goslings were not in the coop at the beginning of the search. How did they mysteriously appear in the coop midway through the search? After thinking about it a bit more, we realised that we had both left the coop to retrieve the mother and during this brief moment, the culprit must have snuck into the coop and performed the wicked deed.
So who was it Sherlock Gnome and Munchkin??
It was the dasdardly drake:
The Drake.
He was the only one who could get in and out out of the coop because he has discovered a secret weak spot…the rest are too fat to get through.. I recalled to Gnome that I saw the drake sitting next to the cardamom bush when I had run down to check on the babies. He quickly scarpered and I forgot about him in the ensuing confusion.
Oh dear, that means that the babies were probably still alive at the beginning of the search?? But we lost them when we both exited the coop.
The remaining baby gosling has been put in with the two older goslings in the safety of the guinea pig cage. Everything has quietened down and mama has already forgotten, thankfully.
Well, it’s up to these two to look after the new baby goosie!!
This story started yesterday morning when we woke up at our usual 5am time, all bleary eyed and half asleep trying to block out the incessant morning gobbling of the turkey. I wasn’t too sure what was going on…rubbing my eyes wearily, I recall that we had been watching a Scottish film the night before (The Legend of Barney Thomson with Robert Carlyle which was incidentally based in Glasgow). This is what happened first thing: Gnome started talking with a broad Scottish accent. He wasn’t putting it on intentionally either…
I just guffawed at him and said that I needed a wee cup of tea before I could comprehend why he was talking like that. Gnome exclaimed,
“What do you mean? I’m just talking normally!!”
After finding some semblance of normality with my Yorkshire tea, it suddenly dawned on me that Gnome and I spend every waking (and un-waking) moment together, with sparse company in-between, and he has got so used to my accent that he has adopted it unconsciously. It did occur to me that on many occasions, he has been mistaken for a Scot. I usually pipe up and say defensively, in a strong “can’t mess with me” Scottish accent,
“Hey hang on a minute!! I’m the Scottish one.”
It makes me laugh when people get awfully confused because I look Chinese (Cantonese) and I come out with such a rough accent. Ha-Ha!!
Anyway, I thought Gnome’s Scottish accent was pretty good and that’s something coming from a Glaswegian. I then proceeded to challenge him and I said (think of me talking in my usual accent):
“Well, son, you might be able to do Scottish-Glaswegian, but can you do Scottish-Sean Connery-style??!!”
Gnome said,
“Well, I’ll have to watch some GoldFinger with Pussy Galore and practise some James Bond lines….”
He didn’t manage to finish the sentence because all of a sudden there was a tremendous amount of goosie noise coming from behind the house.
We ran outside and saw that all the geese were surrounding a setting goose (May Jones; one of the Jonesy Girls). This goose had decided to make her nest in some long grass about 15 yards behind our house. Since we didn’t want to move her (we’ve had failures with kidnapping and re-location) we decided to leave her alone. Gnome got to her first and then shouted at me to come quickly.
Mama and Goosies.
This what we saw. Three cute fluffed up goosies hiding behind mama!
Gnome has been boiling up sulphur and lime for our Lime-Sulphur XXX Pet Dip For Mange, Fleas, Ticks and Ringworm.
Boiling Sulphur and Lime together.
Available at the Farmstore in Punta Gorda, Toledo by the way. Just ask for Presidente…for Pets. You will know why once you see the bottles because we are recycling old Presidente beer bottles:
Lime-Sulphur Pet Dip.
He’s making it on a kerosene stove on the veranda which has been inadvertently converted into yet another work space…not fit for people…he does it on purpose so that we can’t invite anyone around:
“errh…sorry folks you can’t come round because I’m boiling sulphur today…sorry about the inconvenience…maybe another day when I’m not boiling sulphur!!”
Today the sulphur concoction boiled over so there was a very strong eggy smell pervading the veranda, the house and our senses. Gnome loved it and as I have previously mentioned he is a Catholic Gnome so he feels thoroughly cleansed when he plays around with sulphur. He said to me, in a rather a playful manner,
“Don’t cry over spilled sulphur my dear…this will get rid of the snakes…the evil eye…and bad spirits…I’m giving the house a thorough cleansing!”
Well, what could I say? One can not go against the word of a Catholic Gnome!
Okay, we also have more goosie trouble. Our white goosie (we call her January Jones) has been sitting on a clutch of goose eggs.
Sitting Goose.
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that there has been problems with a male goose who keeps on fighting to sit on her eggs (yes, I know…do ganders get broody too??). After many fights, the eggs were getting smashed and alas she ended up with one egg. I had been timing her sit and her EDD (Estimated Date of Delivery…Ha-Ha using medical terms…might be Estimated Date of Hatching) was on Wednesday. Anyway, we gave her a few more extra days and lo and behold, the egg exploded because it was rotten. Now you would think that she would get off her nest since there were no more eggs plus there was a terrible stench of exploded egg. No, she wouldn’t budge an inch.
Since January Jones had no more eggs to sit on and she had lost so much weight over the last month, we made an executive decision to throw her off her nest and out of the coop. I know it sounds horrible but she was wasting away and we needed to break her broodiness so she would start eating again.
Well, she’s thoroughly pissed off with us! Every morning she waits outside the house to ambush us. She runs full throttle at us and tries to leap and thrash at our legs! What a feisty goose…I hope at some point she will find it in herself to forgive us because these goosie attacks are getting a bit too much.
Anyway, I still want to end on a positive note. Here are some recent baby pictures!! We love Oor Goosies despite their evil temperaments!!
Officially we are now crepuscular; up at 5am, doing our stuff until it gets too hot to move!! I just wanted to share with you a funny story that happened about two weeks ago. This was when we had no idea what to do with our goose eggs; the incubator was unreliable, all the female geese were insisting on nesting in the middle of the bush, there was a lot of pushing and shoving resulting in broken eggs and there were no reliable broody poultry. Our first solution was to get Muscovy ducks as they are known to be become broody at the drop of a hat. These silly little ducks have proven to be duds. As Gnome says,
“They’re treating this place like a hotel….”
Muscovy Ducks.
These two possess absolutely no broody tendencies. They just twitter, stuff themselves full of corn and will have nothing to do with us. Talk about a bunch of free-loaders!!
Anyway, at about the same time, our darling duchess (aka female turkey) had laid a clutch of eggs and was sitting all snug and cosy on top of them. And then lo and behold, the Overlord (Aka male turkey) came along and smashed up the eggs (we are not sure why he did this) and the poor duchess was left whimpering on top of a bunch of broken eggs, refusing to move.
Overlord and Duchess.
This is when we decided upon Operation: Kidnap the Duchess. Gnome made a lovely luxury nest cabana-style in the coop.
Deluxe Brooding Cabana.
In the middle of the night, Gnome stealthily grabbed and snatched the duchess and placed her in the new nest on top of 7 goose eggs. I assisted with a flash-light to guide the way. The next morning, we opened up the nest door to find the duchess all quiet and calm, sitting happily on top of her eggs. Since then, she has not moved at all and we place food, snacks (she loves bananas) and water by her side. We hope that the eggs hatch…we have about another two weeks to go. We did read on the Internet (although we are now cautious of any information that we read) that when a turkey sits on goose eggs, you actually need to help her move the eggs around on a daily basis and spray warm water to keep them humidified. Well, the Duchess will have none of that because she won’t get her off the eggs! God forbid that we try moving her about; she would probably freak out and we definitely do not want to de-brood her! Let’s hope and pray that we get a few goosies out of this one…
Officially we are now crepuscular; up at 5am, doing our stuff until it gets too hot to move!! I just wanted to share with you a funny story that happened about two weeks ago. This was when we had no idea what to do with our goose eggs; the incubator was unreliable, all the female geese were insisting on nesting in the middle of the bush, there was a lot of pushing and shoving resulting in broken eggs and there were no reliable broody poultry. Our first solution was to get Muscovy ducks as they are known to be become broody at the drop of a hat. These silly little ducks have proven to be duds. As Gnome says,
