Easter Saturday 23rd April

Mike called in on me Thursday afternoon, was I home the Easter, and if so, could I help milk Saturday/Sunday/and possibly the rest of the week? It’s income, so this morning found me over at the milking shed at 5.30am with 1700 cows coming in.

It’s a good shed, 80 bail rotary, which beats working in a pit, or bending all the time. Although as I found out very quickly, if you get a cow that insists on kicking the cups off as fast as you’re putting them on, you end up ¼ of the way around the shed and then having to go like mad to get back to the start. Only 3 of us working the shed, 2 putting cups on, one taking off, we were finished and all washed up by 9am.

Now my shoulders are complaining. The cups aren’t heavy, a few kilos at most, but lift and then hold them out a few hundred times and your arms start to feel like they have had a good workout.

I’ve got the benches into one poly tunnel, ordered the propagation tubes, and going through the seed catalogues for veg and native trees and shrub seeds. If my arms don’t fall off, I’ll have a bit more income to order up large finally.

I was going to go to Rockville Settlers Museum today, there was going to be a live action steam day there, all the old farm machinery, but as it is blowing a gale, and the rain is coming down sideways, I think I’ll give it a miss. Visibility is about 800 metres, after that it is a watery blur fading into a wall of grey. Still, it’s a northerly wind, so it isn’t all that cold, just wet and rather treacherous driving on the gravel.

If Sunday clears up, although I think I’m being overly optimistic, Patons Road Steam Museum is going to have a live day as well, so I may get to take a few photos.

My little herb garden seems to be ok, none of the few herbs I’ve planted so far have looked miserable. I used field tiles vertically, filled with potting mix, and then potted up rosemary, oregano, parsley, marjoram, coriander and chives. There are a few more to get yet, plus I need some river stones to fill in around the pipes to keep the weeds away.

The rest of the garden is in a “work under progress” mode. I’ve got one bed finished and planted with silverbeet/cabbage and brocolli, 2 beds under construction and 2 more in the marked out stage. I decided I didn’t like the fence between the area, so I’m using the fence palings as garden edging, then I’ll espalier a couple of apple and pear trees to the framework.