Stag; the Wiltshire horn ram- welcome to the family

We have a new member of the family; Stag. He is a Wiltshire horn ram. The original  idea was to have sheep as lawn mowers to keep the fire breaks clear and to provide some meat for the freezer in the form of lambs each year. So far I have avoided breeding my girls because I didn't want to face the idea of eating their babies, but the time has come to let them fulfill their maternal drive. I think I will try to sell as many babies as I can.

I found Stag on Gumtree, on a conveniently situated property only two hours drive away. After a visit to check him out in person, we decided to buy him. He came home with us today and is now happily eating with the girls. We will have babies to look forward to in early August.

Our first meeting; Stag loves white sapote leaves.

As you can see in the video, he arrived a little stiff and sore, with a limp from lying on his leg for an hour or so, but within a few hours he was feeding well and walking around with the girls.
Interestingly, Stag's breeders regularly fed him handfuls of white sapote leaf (his favorite food), a little research has revealed that these leaves have a sedative and blood pressure lowering effect on mammals. I hope this doesn't mean that his quiet nature is due to being mildly sedated most of his life.

The guinea fowl were very worried to discover a new sheep in the home paddock and told everyone about it for a few minutes.

The girls were nervous about having a boy in the paddock at first.

But it didn't take them long to figure out the possibilities.

We put new bedding in the shelter and added a hay net and a mineral lick, now all we need are some rose petals and the romantic scene is all set.

A cute colour knitting pattern to share. a guitar

I have been posting a lot of craft related things lately, simply because that is what I am doing at the moment. So I thought I would post just one more (that's what I tell myself about chocolates too).


I created this knitting pattern for one of my phone cosy designs but you could use it on any knitted item.

It's not very clear but the guitar is in white on blue on this phone cosy.

Guitar colour/stranded knitting pattern.

Name: Guitar
Note: For stranded knitting or knit,  purl patterns
Description:

row1: [k] 32
row2: [p] 32
row3: [k] 4,[p] 3,[k] 25
row4: [p] 20,[k] 2,[p] 2,[k] 5,[p] 3
row5: [k] 2,[p] 11,[k] 10,[p] 2,[k] 7
row6: [p] 6,[k] 25,[p] 1
row7: [k] 1,[p] 7,[k] 2,[p] 16,[k] 6
row8: [p] 6,[k] 25,[p] 1
row9: [k] 2,[p] 11,[k] 10,[p] 2,[k] 7
row10: [p] 20,[k] 2,[p] 2,[k] 5,[p] 3
row11: [k] 4,[p] 3,[k] 25
row12: [p] 32
row13: [k] 32
row14: [p] 32
row15: [k] 32
row16: [p] 32
row17: [k] 32
row18: [p] 32
row19: [k] 32
row20: [p] 32
row21: [k] 32
row22: [p] 32
row23: [k] 32
row24: [p] 32
row25: [k] 32
row26: [p] 32
row27: [k] 32
row28: [p] 32
row29: [k] 32
row30: [p] 32
row31: [k] 32
row32: [p] 32

Enjoy knitting this little pattern.

Local insects and animals- Elephant beetles

Look who flew into our humpy one night this week.

You can't tell from the photo, but this is one ENORMOUS beetle. The elephant beetle, or Xylotrupes ulysses grows to an average size of 60 mm long. Our visitor was a female as she didn't have the distinctive 'horns' on the front. She buzzed in like a small aircraft and proceeded to circle the light in ever diminishing spirals, when she landed we caught her for a closer look and a photo session (bug paparazzi). It is fairly rare to be able to call an insect 'he' or 'she' but the elephant beetle is sexually dimorphic (male and female look different) so it makes using the right pronoun that much easier.
Elephant beetles eat decaying organic matter so they are useful in the compost heap. The females lay about 50 eggs at a time although lots of the larval stage (white curl grubs) end up as food for foraging animals. They have a particular affinity with scrub turkey nests (big compost heaps) so I am now wondering if we have one nearby.
Adult beetles feed on new leaf shoots and have been classified as a native pest in some areas because of their habit of gathering together on specific trees (apparently this is the beetle version of a night club; where they go to find mates) resulting in damage to the tree..

She is a most impressive beetle.

Personally, I don't see these beetles as a pest, but as just another member of my ecosystem. I plan to leave some piles of organic matter around for them to lay in and maybe harvest some grubs for the chooks at a later stage.
Have you seen these beetles where you live?

At last...the new toilet is operational

I finally decided to stop digging the toilet pit 'just a little bit deeper'and put it together. With the help of the whole family, we dug a final two wheel barrows of soil out of the pit, making the hole 1.5 cubic metres in size. Then my long suffering partner and daughters put the pedestal part together and bolted the whole lot to the floor.

The new pedestal on the floor. The floor is in two pieces and is not fixed, so it can be opened if the pit ever needs to be emptied.

The inside of the pedestal; The square inner lining is made from two old buckets with the bottoms cut out. This inner lining extends down through the floor and can be cleaned easily. The outer pedestal is a steel drum with the top and bottom cut out.

A flash new toilet seat bolted onto the pedestal completes the set up.

We put up the movable toilet tent over the whole thing for now.

So now the experiment begins, I hope this system works and we don't have to do this all over again.

The toilet building itself comes next, but that's another story.

How the humpy was built...or 'Slap it all together and hope it stands'

In the last couple of weeks I have had a few questions about how we came to build our little humpy in the bush, so I thought I would lay it all out here is question and answer fashion. If you have more questions, please leave a comment and I will answer them to the best of my ability.

Question one; Why did you build a temporary dwelling rather than a house?

Several reasons; firstly we could not fund the building of a house as we were busily trying to pay off the purchase of the land, secondly because we (well, I really, my partner doesn't care where he lives) were not sure where on the block would be the best place to build for passive solar and storm protection advantages.

Question two: How long did it take to build?

The real answer to this one is "Years", but we build the roof structure, some walls and a lock up area in about three weekends with the help of a borrowed tractor and some ropes (and a chansaw). We are still building the temporary dwelling now, making it more usable and completing little projects that make our life easier.

Question three; What is the humpy made from?

The humpy is made from round poles and corrugated iron. We began the building with cutting down enough trees from our property (of species scorned by white ants) to make 5 metre long poles for the uprights. After these were towed in, debarked (with an axe) and stood in the pre-dug  (1 metre) holes, we went out and got more trees for the beams on which the roof is built. On top of these beams we put smaller saplings which we attached the iron to. The timbers are held together with metal strapping which allows them to move as they expand and contract and move in the wind. All this was covered by sheets of (nearly) new roofing iron and a gutter made from PVC pipe cut in half was attached. Then we moved the caravan, and ourselves in.

The metal bits on the pole are the strapping, without which the roof would blow off.

A shot of the unlined ceiling of the bathroom. It shows how we spaced the saplings on the beams.

We paved the floor with outdoor pavers (cheap seconds) which gives us a hard, semi-level and (most importantly) sweepable floor.

This is the northern view of the humpy. The tarp is covering where the front door will one day be.

This is the western view, again this tarp is covering a section of wall not yet completed.

I know it all looks a mess (because it is) and Jerry built (because it is), but it is a very strong structure which has been through a lot of wild storms and has been built for a tiny cost from second hand materials. Our home is mostly happy, filled with lots of laughter (and some tears) and most of all is a haven for any creature who needs healing (sometimes human animals too). My house is a mess and always half finished because I have the concentration span of a may fly and the curiosity of a squid, meaning; I want to try everything, and I want to try it all now.

Desperate times call for desperate measures...or shearing sheep with scissors.

The extreme heat of the last few weeks has driven us to take our sanity to the edge in regards to our sheep.
They have been shedding their wool very slowly over the summer and I have left them to it as shearing in the middle of summer can sometimes lead to sun burnt backs (for the sheep as well as the shearers), but now they are beginning to grow their winter wool underneath the old fleece it is time to tidy up their haircut (woolcut?) a bit. We discussed getting someone to come and shear them for us or buying/hiring some shears but in the end decided that money is just too tight, so out came the scissors. We looked at a few 'how to shear sheep' sites and decided to have a go at shearing them while they were standing up.

First we haltered one of the girls, in the handling pen with her sisters. That way she was calm and happy to be played with. Then my eldest daughter and I took turns cutting the old fleece off while the other held the lead rope. The sheep were surprisingly patient and calm while we did it, which helped matters immensely.

We sheared (clipped?) two of the four girls each one taking about an hour and a half to do. We had originally planed to do one a day as it its hard going and very frustrating work, but when we let the one shorn sheep go her sisters butted her and chased her from the herd (she looked different) so we caught the worst bully and gave her a clipping too. This seemed to even out the odds and they all got along again.

I managed to salvage two shopping bags of usable wool from the two girls, the rest had started to felt and is too matted to use. Next year I will have to clip them in the spring so I can get better wool. I got shedding sheep so that I didn't have to worry about shearing if I had no use for the wool,  but it seems I will have to shear them anyway. However, this is only their second molt, so it is possible their shedding will improve next year (I hope so anyway).

This is Gaia before her clipping

You can see where they have been shedding...and where they haven't.

This is Gaia after her clipping, somehow she looks smaller.

She really appreciated the cool breeze on her skin, and being able to scratch every itch.

This is the usable wool from Gaia and Kraken (sorry about the terrible photo), after I took all the felted stuff out and the really dirt stuff around the edges.

This is the wool close up, it looks like clouds to me.

I hope I can get enough usable wool from my girls to make something to wear (it's been a dream for a long while). The girls (Gaia and Kraken) certainly appreciate the new coolness, now to do the last two; Nut and Kore.

What do you think I should make from their wool?

Local insects and animals- Yellow faced whip snake

This is Esmerelda, the Yellow faced whip snake that calls our yard home.

The yellow faced whip snake is a very common visitor to yards in our area, we see the two that live in our yard regularly. This particular snake (Esmerelda) is fond of following me around as I feed the chickens (if I feed late) and I have had to chase her off when I feed the sheep so she doesn't get trodden on. Whip snakes are friendly and curious creatures, they like to know all the gossip and will come very close to you if you sit still for a long time (although, as most sources say they are timid snakes, that might just be the ones that live here).
They eat small reptiles like skinks and frogs, are diurnal (not night owls) and home bodies; staying within the same area all their life. They have been known to lay eggs communally and may even exhibit pairing behavior. They would rather get away from you than bite and there has never been a fatality from a whip snake bite.

Basic information

People in our area often kill them thinking they are Eastern brown snakes (they do look a bit like baby browns), but their behavior is very different and the extra large eyes give them away if you stop to look closely. Whip snakes are mildly venomous; having the same kind of venom as bees. If you are allergic to bees, don't get bitten by a whip snake. They are not aggressive at all if you don't try to pick them up (they hate that), but they will crawl (slide?) over your legs in a friendly manner if you are sitting on the ground near them.

Differences in behavior between whip and brown snakes
Brown snakes

• Mostly encountered at dawn and dusk, unless you disturb their resting place.
• Behave aggressively as soon as they see you; rising to striking position, swaying and coiling body together.
• Flick their tongue rapidly and often.

An Eastern brown snake in an aggressive pose ready to strike.

Whip snakes

• Mostly encountered from mid morning to mid afternoon.
• Behave curiously; rising up above grass to watch but not in a striking position (see photos). Will follow people or animals but usually puts out a 'just passing through' vibe.
• Do not often flick their tongue, instead remaining still and quiet.

A curious whip snake checking out the area.

Esmerelda watching me to see if the camera is dangerous.

Deciding that the camera is not dangerous she shows me her good side and goes about her day.

Do you have any interesting snakes in your yard?