The current project

is the construction of the chook house in the middle of the pen. As with the pen itself, the chook house is being constructed of galvanised posts and rails and the walls will be of corrugated iron.



We decided to construct it in this manner to avoid using timber wherever we can as timber harbours lice. The other reason is that the posts will form part of the aquaponics shelter/roof system once the pen progresses to that stage of development.

"What's aquaponics," you say? Ask Ray... :)

We have many

high tech systems at FSF.. check this one out..



We have been known to wonder if we drive 2 hours just to have a snag in bread with a cuppa tea!

Having mentioned

watering the tyre garden, I thought I'd show you our sophisticated watering system...




look at that lovely mucky dam water, full of goodies for the trees and vegies. It's like liquid compost!




These pictures are taken by the creek's edge, one looking towards the dam, the other towards the pen and the shed. It takes over an hour to water everything, even longer on hot days when we just about lose the will to keep going. We love winter!




We're always careful not to collect these tiny little cuties when get our watering happening..

Speaking of thriving...

here are some of our fruit trees.




Although we didn't expect to so soon, we have managed to harvest a piece of fruit from FSF! A single cherry... hehe. We were very surprised to see it growing and hoped and hoped that a bird wouldn't get to it before it ripened enough for us to pick it and eat it..




We waited and waited and each week it was still there.. slowly ripening...



Ta dah! We had half each and it was worth waiting for... delicious!

Whilst the war

on the weeds was being carried out, I busied myself with a small experiment. Ray had picked up a tractor/truck/not sure but sure is big tyre in his travels around tips and clearing sales and although I'm not usually keen to grow food in tyres, I set up a small garden bed to see how it would fare being neglected for two weeks at a time.




Having read about African women who bury unglazed pots into the ground as water sources for their plants I thought I'd give it a go. The theory is that by filling the pot and covering it to stop evaporation, the slowly seeping water provides moisture to the root zone of the plants. As we are not there to water more consistently, I figured that this was as good a system as any, and so gave it a go. Having said that, we have had during each fortnight away some rain at FSF so I am unable to give a definitive answer as to whether the pot alone would have produced the results below.. also, when we are there I give the plants a good drink, like 6 litres of water and obviously the thick mulch makes all the difference also... but I'd say that the experiment is a success - we're thrilled, everything is thriving!




FSF is truly a learn-as-we-go experience. We've never dealt with weeds before, we've never grown fruit trees or vegetables or built structures like these before.. we're flying by the seat of our pants! :D

On the weekend

of Cup Day, we had some rain. Boy, did we have some rain! The creek is usually dry, and although our neighbour Dave said that it does run on occasion, I confess that I didn't really believe him. I stand corrected!

When we arrived at FSF on the Sunday morning we were surprised to see that all the mulch from underneath the fruit trees had been moved with what looked like some force. It was forced up the trunks and had also been pushed to one side of the boxing that surrounds the trees. We were really confused, pondering what on earth had happened. Eventually after looking around some more and noticing that the grass had also been flattened and that there was a high tide mark around things in the shed we figured that we'd had a flash flood. So, fire, drought and flood at FSF so far - Dorothea Mackellar eat your heart out!! Naturally as soon as we worked that out I hightailed it over to the creek, and it had burst it's banks! Naturally also we didn't have the camera with us.. aaargh!



Monday came and on Monday night I decided to pack the kids, camera and lunch and hit the road on Tuesday morning. I didn't really expect the creek to still be as full as it had been but I was disappointed to see that it had dropped a lot - still I got some photos of it with water in it and also learned a lesson - always take the camera!



It was a good day. Katie and Erin toasted marshmallows and Shelby had a driving lesson. I got the pics I wanted and Ray had an empty, quiet house to sleep in (a pox on night shift!).

Lately

the most pressing issue has been weed control. As I mentioned earlier, last year Ray cut down hundreds of scotch thistles by hand, loaded them into the trailer and burned the lot. This year he got a new helper - a brushcutter!




Every fortnight since September Ray has been waging war on the weeds, concentrating on the scotch thistles with amazing dedication! Due to our no chemical policy, he's taken on a large task. The weeds have been beaten this year - they try to keep flowering and therefore setting seed, but they are weakening. However, that's only this year! Next year all the seeds that have been set from previous years will germinate and the whole process will start again. What's that saying.. "one year's seeds = seven years weeds.." Yikes.

An abundance

of feathered, furry and frightening critters call FSF home.. here's a few more.


Our rooster who now resides in Ballarat. We never did get around to giving him a name, which is a shame really considering he was such a good boy. A true gentleman - keeping his girls safe and always offering the best tidbits to them before partaking himself.



We have heaps of wolf spiders lurking under the leaves and mulch. No matter how hard I try not to, I still get a fright when I come across one of these critters. Beautiful markings, scary as hell!



A spawning beastie! Ack!


Oh the biggest and scariest of them all! The other weebeasties get polite personal space afforded to them from me, but there's nothing wee about these beasties - they get half a mile put in between me and them quick smart! The buggers love to hid under the bark on the logs of wood we put into the fire in winter. I hate it when it's my turn to get the wood..


Despite being one eyed, and quite elderly, Willy loves to get up to the farm. He considers it his duty to patrol the pen perimeter every hour or so which then earns him the right to sleep under the trailer for the remainder of the time he's there.. :)



If a picture says a thousand words, then I'll just leave it up to Bonnie's face to tell you how much she loves the farm..


The lone ranger.. most unusual because this tree usually houses so many of these noisy sods that we can't hear ourselves think. I'm glad I like them otherwise they might drive me nuts!


Along with frightening, furry and feathered, we also have fungus! I have no idea what this is, so if anyone can enlighten us we'd be pleased to find out..

Over the

two years that we've been hanging out at FSF, we've taken a number of photos of the folk who reside there permanently..


Katie discovered this little fella whilst spending a week with Ray at the farm during school holidays. She immediately dubbed him "the Gonzo bug". We've since discovered that he's a gorse weevil so we were pretty pleased to see him. We'd like a hoarde of his mates to turn up as well so they can knock off the gorse we have but unfortunately that's unlikely. Ray acquired a brushcutter in September so the gorse will be meeting with that shortly.


This little fella doesn't reside permanently but just stopped by for a feed one afternoon. He was remarkably friendly, letting me get quite close to him before wandering off to another briar rose bush for some more tucker. A great visitor - nice and quiet and didn't overstay his welcome!


This unusual creature is known as the Grim Fence Clinger, which has evidently migrated from New Zealand. He is a rare find, known for being fiercely protective of his territory and those within it. The Grim Fence Clinger has a voracious appetite, has been known to exhibit strange behaviour such as imitating monkeys, expels gas continuously, and amazingly for his sex, doesn't snore! All in all I'd have to say that we are most fortunate to find this rare and special creature at FSF.


A most Maori lizard! hehe, not really.. :) This guy is a Shingleback lizard trying to frighten away the giant with the camera. It didn't work.


Aren't they just beautiful? A pair of juvenile Welcome Swallow who left the nest the following day. Since then we have noticed many Welcome Swallows around the place but not any more babies. Two other nests have been constructed but no babies. We arrived recently to discover this particular nest had been knocked out of it's mud housing and was on the ground. We brought it home and Erin took it to school.

I forgot

to say that FSF is 14 acres, and as you can see from the pic alongside the posts, its a very strange shape!

During...

the end of 2006 until May 2007 things carried on rather well. Ray was busy looking after the chickens that we'd acquired and the pasture was recovering from the fire. We'd purchased and planted four apple trees and a cherry which survived the planting and the fire. We'd been advised that in order to save space we could plant two apple trees in the one hole, which we did. Construction of the pen was continuing with the lacing of mesh to rails and the connection of the snake netting to the mesh.

Here are some general photographs from that time...



The above picture shows the posts and mesh in the trench to the depth of 1m..


Ray's tent city with the pen partially constructed.. just to the left out of the picture is the shed..


This shows the same corner but from further back.. and about a month after the fire. To the left of the pic is the aviary which house(d) my galah Strewth (he's back in Gisborne now) which stands alongside the shed.. The fruit trees are planted running parallel to the left side of the fence (inside it, naturally) which also has the gate in it. The trees are too small to see as this pic was taken in Dec 06.


The CFA had to uproot and turn over the Fairy Stump during the fires, which I was most annoyed about.. they didn't put it back the right way! How are the fairies going to live in an upside down house?? After righting a wrong, and putting it back the way I think it went, all seems to be well. Their little mossy pools are up the right way again and their waterslides go down again, not up!


The upside of having all your pasture burnt out is that you get to see things that you might normally miss. We discovered this hole full of eggs just near the dam. I think they'd be some type of reptile, but we didn't get to see what emerged.


Our gorgeous chookies.. when Ray relocated back to Gisborne in May 07 these fluffy ladies went to a new home in Ballarat. We plan to have chooks again, probably Australorps, but not until we are close by.

Next...

came the grassfire. On 21st November 2006 a limb fell from a large gum tree on the other side of the railway line to our property. Yep, one of our boundaries is the railway line from Melbourne to Adelaide. The wind was howling and the temperatures were high that day. Ray was still living in Ararat at the time and was at work. I can't recall how I found out that there were fires in the area but I called Ray and suggested he check it out... he did, and discovered that the fire had gone right through our property. The fire started over the other side of the railway line, jumped the line and whoosh.. there goes FSF. Luckily for us (and Ararat too) Ray had done a great deal of clearing in the previous months. He'd physically pulled out hundreds of dead scotch thistles that burn like firecrackers from underneath the gum trees along the creek and had collected masses of fallen firewood. What was a fairly cool grass fire could have become really ferocious had the thistles still been there because they burn so high and hot the canopy of the trees would have become alight as well. FSF is quite close to what is known as "The Common" and had the fire gotten into there via the trees along the creek the whole of Ararat would have been jeapordised. So, we're really thankful that it was a relatively minor fire, although we did lose one chicken who was sitting on a clutch of eggs and all of our fencing. We are currently still discussing with Powercor the intricacies of that argument! One of our apple trees was singed all over and although she's (pink lady) appearing to do well her bark is splitting and I'm concerned that she will die eventually.

Introducing...

(Fanfare)... The Produce Facility.. (fade fanfare)

We bought FSF (so named due to the chorus of frogs singing one day whilst considering whether or not to purchase) with the idea that we'd like to be as self sufficient as is possible in this day and age without working ourselves to death.

Ray (the ideas and infrastructure man - also very cute with brown teddy bear eyes) designed our Produce Facility (aka "the pen") to be a self-contained food production area, fully enclosed and protected from predators. Within the pen we will eventually have our chickens, fruit trees, vegetable gardens and four aquaponics systems.

It is a 20x20x3m chain meshed square which will be divided into four sections, thereby allowing us to rotate the chickens for their excellent weed eating and fertilising abilities. In order to keep predators out Ray's mate Russell (Heckle) brought his dingo around and dug a 1m trench into which Ray (Jeckle) put the posts and chain mesh. We're pretty sure that nothing will be keen enough to dig 1m down through chain mesh to get to our chooks! After connecting the rails and mesh it began to look very much like a weird tennis court, or as some said to us, "is that the new Ararat Prison?" Along the bottom and also dropped into the trench is snake netting which is in the process of being attached to the mesh.. still. Once we have finished all the lacing and attaching of mesh and netting, and backfilling all the trenches the fun will really begin. The roof. I don't even want to think about that yet! Once finished the idea is that nothing other than the tiny birds who will of course want to eat all the buggies on our plants will be able to get in. Hallelujah!

More pictures of the pen to follow..

So...

Whilst Ray was up on the block in the stinking heat, before he found work he built what is known as "The Camp Kitchen" (aka "the shed") whilst also working on what was originally called "The Produce Facility" but has since become known as "the pen". I think he's pretty clever because he built the shed without the assistance of any power tools at all. I suspect our new neighbours thought he was bloody nuts, and offered the use of a generator, but he declined, enjoying the challenge of doing it all by hand. Actually the neighbours still have a good natured giggle at us as we do things manually and without the assistance of chemicals of any sort, under any circumstances. One casually drops in "I've got some spray for that ya know" every now and then, but shuts up quickly when I ask him when his third teste is going to grow! Yes, we get along well with our neighbours thankfully.

And then...

We contacted Margaret from the Solar Sisters for a consultation about how suitable the land was for our ideas. We were certainly idea rich and experience poor then (and aren't much different now!) so we considered that it was a very good idea to get some help. Margaret came along and brought a friend, Gareth with her and we had a lovely time chatting with them and getting some advice. The photos are of the view from the front gate down to the belt of trees along the creek, which runs only after a deluge; next is the dam, and then the natural waterhole which we call "the swamp". The creek runs right through the middle of the property, with the dam and the swamp being "over the other side" which is left completely alone.

Consequently we put in an offer on the place and it became ours in December 05. To say that we were thrilled would be an understatement! Ray threw in his job in February 06 in order to live in a tent on the block and get our new life underway. The plan was that the girls and I would follow him there in March 06 to rent in Ararat whilst we built our home on what was now known as Frog Song Farm. Unfortunately that plan went astray and Ray lived up there alone with me commuting there every second weekend until May 07 when he came to live in Gisborne. We now only get there every fortnight for the weekend and that will continue for quite a few years, but we're still managing to get a few things done whilst we're there.

Before the beginning...

Just a little bit of background about us... Ray is from Palmerston North in NZ and I'm from Melbourne and we met in March of 2004. We're really glad we met because we're just made for each other! After all, how many people confess to wanting to seriously live in a hobbit hole?!

After a number of outings looking at various blocks of land in and around our local area of Gisborne and coming up with nothing suitable I started looking on the internet for suitable land. I plugged in "land under 25 acres in Victoria" (or something like that, my memory's not much chop) and up came a lovely property in Armstrong. Ok.. Armstrong. Where the flip is Armstrong??

It turns out that Armstrong is a blip on the Western Highway halfway between Ararat and Great Western in Western Victoria, just a short trip from the Grampians. Niiice! We decided to go on a wee drive that weekend. Poor Ray, I bent his ear for two hours on the way up there about the "must haves" that were not negotiable in order for me to consider changing our lives so considerably. I honestly think that the list was so I could find some fault with the idea and get out of it! You guessed it, everything on that damn list was covered! Which, I might add, I'm very happy about. Now. ;)

In the beginning...

there was Linda, Ray and the girls, Shelby, Katelyn and Erin.



I'm Linda, and I'll be keeping this blog about our dream, Frog Song Farm. Hi!!

Hmm, having seen this photo closer I'd say it's not the best one of us, or the most recent having been taken 3 years ago, but anyway, that's us..