And Life Goes on. !!!

Well,
 Christmas is over for another year, I wasn't as excited   as I should have been, but I loved having my Mum here with us for a few days.
My brother Gordon  also joined us and while he was here Brian and he got a few small jobs done.
One of those was to put a temporary fence around  a few of the vegetable gardens to stop the chooks and guinea fowls  munching away on our young spinach plants. They also installed the new retracting hose reel that Brian got for Christmas and put a temporary shade cover over my two young blueberry bushes to protect them from that hot biting summer sun.

The garden is doiling well considering the lack of rain, Brian has been watering diligently every day, the garden in the orchard is doing well and  I saw the otherday that the melon vines have some decent sized melons on them. Maybe he will win first place again this year at our local agricultural show.

The Brother in Law next door gave me a second bucket of plums, so I made up a second batch of plum sauce.

They were Satsuma variety this time,

They made a slighter darker red sauce up and I have included the recipe below. I used white vinegar, but any would be fine. This recipe is from the old Commonsense Cookbook.

 It  was about this time that Brian noticed the birds starting to attack our new plum tree in the orchard with it's small crop and we picked half a bucket of  fruit from the tree.
Ours is a grafted tree with two varieties, Satsuma and Santa Rosa plums.

So once again I cut  them up and  this time decided to make plum jam.

Below is the recipe for the Jam, also from the old Commonsense Cookbook.

It cooked up beautifully,

and produced 13 jars of gorgeous plum jam.  We don't eats much jam, but always handy for sale, or gifts or  to have on hand for visitors or Devonshire teas.

I recycle jars that my younger daughter saves for me. She purchases them at Aldi with  products that she cooks with regularly and  they are a great size for the pickles and jams( I just purchase new lids  for each use.)
Our eldest daughter and  her children came to spend a few days with us over New Years, the weather was  extremely hot but we managed to get through with  our fans and a paddle pool for the littlies and lot's of drinks. We invited the in laws next door and their grandchildren over for New Years Eve dinner.
Brian had bought a new fancy Christmas laser light  and the kids loved it how it lit up the back verandah

The  neighbours brought sparklers over and the kids loved  playing with them also, we had a lovely night.

New  Years  brought with it many storms around the area but  sadly we missed most of them with just once  giving us 2,5 mm of  rainfall while  farms very nearby getting   around the 50 mm mark, oh well it will eventually come.

We have had a sneaky  turkey hen, that every day for the last three weeks or so has hopped the fence, by way of flying up onto a rainwater tank, wanders around the yard until she thinks no one is looking,

Then she sneaks in behind one of the raised vegetable gardens,

And hops up into it,

Then plants herself among  the zuchini plants,

And lays her egg  !!! and then Brian  steals it and the process is repeated again the following day. ( we have enough turkeys for a while ,so we are just eating the eggs .
Brian started a new batch of chickens off  in the incubator this week, some special australorp eggs from a friend and  some of our Isa Brown eggs as well.

We moved the last batch of 16  chickens from the halfway house,

down to the grower shed,

gave our grand daughter a few hens for Christmas( her request) and moved the cockerels up to Death Row awaiting despatch( not nice way to think but a fact of life here.)
We advertised some of the half grown turkeys for sale yesterday,

hoping that maybe  there may be a market  for them, but if not  we will despatch them to the freezer and canning for the pantry.
We  moved the  29 three week old turkeys  from the brooder in the shed into the now vacant halfway house.

As the paddocks are drying out extremely quickly, we decided to purchase a large round bale of oaten hay for the sheep,

They flattened it in no time at all, and have barely left the pile for the last 4 days since it was dropped.  They waste a bit usually, but this time they have just stayed there munching away.
This week marked two years since we made the final move to live here permanently here on the farm,.

It was a big decision, and at times has been fun, and not so fun, hard work and  and relaxing times, construction and mess , but we are slowly creating the place we want to be in  and wouldn't swap it for quids.
We have met and made many new friends, re acquainted  ourselves with old friends, joined a few volunteer groups and had a few trips away,  Life is Good  !!!!
Take care of you and yours until we meet again,
Cheers,
Jane and Brian.

The crazymonth of December.

Since returning from my trip away to Melbourne . Early  December and the lead up to and including  Christmas has been the busiest   period  for ever it seems.
The heat and the dryness have hit with avengence and the  pump control panel on our solar bore died so  we have been doing a lot of hand watering  and carting water  from the Brother in Laws  spring fed dam for which we are eternally grateful.
The  control panel was covered under warranty  and so after an inspection and waiting for it to be  ordered and delivered the pump people came and sorted it all out.

We now have water again,  it pumps up from 300ft underground, it only pumps slow( 6litres per minute) but  it is good quality  water  and while ever the sun shines, it keeps pumping. This supplies our garden, washing machine and toilet as well as troughs.
We put our Christmas tree up in early December,  it started to make  it all feel real.

The young apricot tree in the new orchard  bore half a bucket of apricots which we were surprised  to get,

Out of which I was able to bottle 9 small jars of  apricot halves in light syrup, these jars are just the right size for Brian and I for  a meal without leftovers or eating way too much.

We already are picking heaps of zuchini's and so I decided to once again do a batch of bread and butter  zuchini pickles. My daughter had been saving jars for me, nice angled jars from Aldi that she buys a certain few products in, and I had about 5 dozen of them from the last few years and decided that I  if I  wanted to sell this that these jars would be the best option to use.

 We have had an extremely busy few weeks at our  volunteer jobs  as well, cleaning the campground facilities, publishing the local newspaper and a run of local funerals that means repeatedly stripping and remaking and cleaning the 22 beds in the local rail barracks accommodation. We then had a weekend  at Parkes to  have an early Christmas get together with one of our daughters and her family which was lovely.
We returned home and that night attended our local town Christmas get together down at the local oval. The Lions club  do a massive amount of fundraising through out the year and donate to wonderful causes, but  they also fund this  evening as well each year.

Santa arrives on the local fire engine and hands out sweets and chats to each child, there is a free sausage sizzle dinner for each child and a jumping castle and other activities.  They run ham raffles and adults are able to purchase food and drinks also.
At the conclusion of the evening each year the Lions put on a spectacular fireworks demonstration for all to see. I took many pictures and video but will just post one photo here.

There are a few  silly but important little rituals   to me that  really mean it's Christmas, one of those is that I have to make rum balls, it's just something that we have done forever and now my  children also follow this tradittion..

I use arrowroot biscuits, coconut, sweetened condensed milk, cocoa,and rum.

Mixed altogether then roll into balls and then roll in extra coconut, they refrigerate and freeze well, but rarely last very long.

It's a messy job, but fun,

and the reward is worth the effort.

 Our  firefighter pump that we keep with the 1000 litre plastic cube on the ute over summer( used for  pumping water from the BIL's dam or to fight fires) had become unreliable ,so we decided to buy a new one. As a good named brand pump was prohibitive in cost we opted for a chines  look alike brand off ebay, the old blue one was given to us many years ago, so has earnt it's keep.

Brian has hooked up the new yellow one and it is doing a brilliant job and starts first pull every time. We need  it to be reliable so that if needed  it will work immediately.

A neighbor friend and I decided to go in search of figs, we knew of a tree at an abandoned house on a neighboring property so  we went to  see but unfortunately the birds had beaten us to them.
We were telling another friend about it the next day when we were overheard and this person told us he knew of a tree that we were welcome to pick,  so  we did. They were a green variety  that I made   fig jam from. This was the first time I had ever made fig jam, something my mother is well known for.... I borrowed her recipe, so am hoping mine is as good.

This year I made the decision that I would like to spend Christmas day with my Mum, something I hadn't done for 3 years as we have been spending it with our daughters and grand children.
We picked Mum up  from her home about an hour away on the Friday afternoon and brought her to the farm.
We went into town to the bowling club for dinner on Friday night where she caught up with some of her friends( Mum has been gone from here for about 22 years now and most of here friends have either moved, are in care or have passed away, there are not many left.)
On Saturday she asked to be taken to visit a fiend who for many years was a neighbor and also they lawn bowled together.
Joyce( on the left of the picture) is an amazing 98 years old and Mum is 92.

It was so wonderful to see them together, chatting and giggling away  like long lost school friends.
They had a lovely catch up. The are both amazing women, both living independently and are  reasonably healthy for their age and are quick witted , smart and humorous. I only hope I am half as good as they are when and if I reach their ages.
The brother in Law next door offered me a bucket of plums on Christmas eve( probably the last thing I needed at that busy crazy  point before Christmas) , but I gladly accepted and got busy and made a batch of plum sauce. The BIL has a great recipe that he makes annually so he passed that to me and I got busy.

This will a great addition to the pantry, as plum sauce is just so good with everything.
My Brother from Sydney also joined us for Christmas which was lovely.
We had a very quiet Christmas day with just  the four of us, I missed being with the grandchildren but felt it was much better to spend some quality time with Mum, you never know how long we will have them.
Christmas lunch this year was a traditional baked  affair with plum pudding( cooked by Mum) ,icecream and custard to follow.

My Christmas gift from Brian was a brilliant new Breville food processor, my existing one started dying when I was making the rum balls,(that's when Brian purchased the new one) and then totally died when I was doing the plum sauce. The new one will certainly get a lot of use. The old one had been passed to me about 10 years ago  and was about 40 years old.

It must have been a very exhausting  preparing all the Christmas lunch and all the associated clearing and cleaning(lol)... as the men of the household all seemed to collapse  onto chairs and sleep for several hours in the afternoon......

But that's what our Christmas's are usually like, and truth be known probably wouldn't have it any other way.
I hope your Christmas was as joyous as ours and that   the new year is a happy and healthy one for us all.
Take care until we meet again down the track,

Merry Christmas  and a Happy New Year to everyone,
Cheers,
Jane and Brian.