I’m now on permanent over at Amberglen, morning milking at the moment, and in a couple of weeks more hours working on the farm as well. Sunday morning was certainly better than my effort Saturday, but still need to get a bit quicker, although as I found this morning taking the cups off, the 2 Argentinian guys that were putting on, aren’t any faster than I was, so that is some small consolation, with them being there for the last 3 months.
Sunday was a bit of a disaster zone, Hayden slept in, so Colin had to get the ute out at 6am and bring the cows in, which meant a late start, and a later finish, but it was pissing down with rain so no one was in a hurry to go anywhere. This morning was another one to match, one of the gates along the race had been left open, and the lead cows decided to take a detour in the paddock, so the quad bike and the ute spent 30 minutes trying to herd the cows up in the dark.
Some of the funny things that happen in a job, a couple of cows finally got me this morning, and I ended up with a fair dump of cow shit down one side of my overalls. No worry as far as I was concerned, it was warm, and I’m walking in it anyway so I just carried on. Hayden came around a bit later, saw me and said to go home get changed, you’re covered in shit. I just said, it’ll wash off, and carried on taking cups off. After he’d gone, Tom let out that Hayden does that to all the new people, if they do go home and get changed, they seem to get put off the roster in future. I’d picked something like that, just one of those things you put up with milking.
Finished the bench in the polytunnel, so that one is set up, apart from the watering system, which will come later. The hose will suffice for now.
I spent a bit of time making some adjustments to the roof vents, as they come, there is a fairly large gap at the ends where the “V” shape of the vent doesn’t sit flush with the rounded roof. A couple of rolls of foam insulation took care of that, and the warmer air doesn’t all escape out at night now. It was quite noticeable on a cold night, the amount of heat leaking out, like a small geyser of hot air into the colder night outside.
I’ve got pumpkins all over the place at the moment, Mike at Amberglen had a couple of paddocks of them hoping to make a bit of money off them. Unfortunately, as usually happens with crops, everyone else had the same idea this year, and pumpkins are selling in the shops cheaper than Mike can get to cover his transport cost. So we are all getting pumpkins every time he sees anyone. I’ll be turning yellow or orange if I have too many more. So far it’s been pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, roasted pumpkin, steamed pumpkin, I haven’t tried pumpkin chips yet. I think I’ll be buying a large deep freezer soon to cope with the amount of food that is available.
No comments:
Post a Comment