Welcome to Barton View Farm

We will soon be releasing a forum dedicated to the small landholder. I’ll post more when its ready to go.

It hard to sum up a persons life in short space, and even harder to fit in all the feelings that the passing of a parent can produce when they should still be around for a great deal longer. I will always remember my father as a man of steadfast faith until the end. A man who was lucky enough to find two women with which to share his life, even if the first, my mother, was taken from us far to early. At last at least they are reunited.

In as much as this is a time of sadness, it is also one of joy. A joy that we can reflect of those happy times we were together, the joy in your eyes of marrying Debbie and me, they joy of becoming a grandfather and sharing the endless love of your grand-daughter.

I’m glad you heard my voice before you left on your next great adventure. I love you and I miss you. We all miss you, but our lives were so much the richer for having you around.

Say hi to Mum. I still love her and miss her.

RIP Allan James Hall 07/10/1937 – 13/09/2010

3 weeks ago we sent our first steer off to get slaughtered and today he was butchered. Total hang time for the carcass was 15 days. We got a total of 101.5kg of beef, so we’re pretty happy with that from a mini Galloway.

The quality of the meat is absolutely superb. It so far superior to supermarket beef, they may as well be selling cardboard.

So, we’ve had some excellent rain here in the past 48hrs, nearly 50mm in total. It’s great!

The dams are full to overflowing, literally and with the surrounding run off going strong, they’ll still be over flowing for the next few days. Its great to have all the dams full this time of year. As well as the dams being full, the drinking water tanks are as well.

This rain is great for the seeds I put in the other day, so they’ll hopefully start to power along and germinate well.

If we keep getting rain like this we’ll have a bumper spring and summer with heaps of feed for the animals.

So, it was a great day here today. Clear sky and not too cold. Looking up my vegie chart I decided to plant some more seeds.

Here’s what when in today

Australian brown onions
Creamgold onions
Red Onions
Chinese Broccoli
Waltham Broccoli
Green sprouting broccoli
Mini Cabbage
Dwarf Sugar snap peas
Climbing Snow peas
Greenfeast peas

Heres hoping they all turn out

On another note, a friend gave us a portable electric fence energizer and some tape as we wanted to set up small areas outside the paddocks for the cows to graze. It all went very well, the cows had a couple of goes at the tape but got a fairly good whack and then decided that we had actually given them a good area with plenty of fresh grass to graze.

So I’ve been trying this for the past 6 months in the chook house as a way of insta-composting the chook poo for the garden. I decided to empty it today as the amount of rain we’ve been getting here has started to make it go very smelly. That and I haven’t been able to let the chookies free range in the big paddock all week, so its kind of a mushy muddy pile of goo.

I ended up with 10 full barrow load of almost ready to use composted chook poo and straw. I say almost as the top 3 inches is very fresh, so it doesn’t compost as well. I’ll leave it for a few weeks then mix it with the sheep manure I have and its into the vegie gardens.

Also had to give the pen area a good clean as its nothing but mud at the moment and the chookies are looking rather icky. I am now using a bed of rice hulls for inside as it tends to be better in the mud and keeps it all together.

Hello and welcome to our new blog. I hope to over the coming months, get this new site set up and start posting on a regular basis.

All the posts below this one have been imported from our old blog site.

For those who are interested, the picture at the top is the view from the top paddock

Well today is a sad day as we have had to bury one of our beloved pets, Goose the cream Turkish Van.

Much loved, adventurous, trouble, fun and a very loyal companion.

We wish you all the best old friend.

Well, firstly, let me say a big hello! to our new follower. I do humbly apologise that you’ve not had a bit more to read.

The winter crop of vegies didn’t do as well as expected, whist we got a pretty good feed, it was limited to 1 or 2 varieties, mostly broad beans.

So far this year I’ve been beaten again. This time by heat. We had virtually no spring here, so practically all the spring planting withered and died. Which I’m sure will have people asking the question about the effects of climate change. If you haven’t already guessed by the other posts, I’m not a true believer in what is commonly called “Climate Change”. I watched a very interesting documentary on what has been called “the little ice age” from around 1300 – 1800 AD. Interestingly, this period, where the average temps were some 3-5 below today, was preceded by another period called the medieval climate optimum. Now, during this warm period, it was warm enough to grow grapes and have a viable wine industry in England. Now then, there were no human influences on greenhouse gas emissions during this period, so what was the temperature rise due to? Fact is, no-one knows for sure. This ably demonstrates that good ole mother nature can do things to this planet without any help from us. Perhaps whats needed more than anything is a change to the way in which we view our selves as inhabitants, to that of guests of the planet.

So enough ranting from the soap box. This year I intend to be a lot more “fruitful” with my writings to let everyone know what we want to achieve. Someone asked me a while what I wanted to achieve and where I got my inspiration. After pondering this question for quite sometime, I’d have to say River Cottage and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. We dont really have an equivalent (and no, I don’t see myself as one) over here, but our desires are the same. To reconnect with the land and do something productive. Know what we are eating and let our child experience nature, more than just a visit to the park and the supermarket.

So whats really been happening on the farm? Well as I said, no spring. So I had to move straight into the summer plant and a rethink on the design of the patch. Whats become pretty obvious is that we have been blessed with an over-abundance of sunshine, so as soon as it cools down, we’ll be making shade screens for some of the gardens to protect the more heat sensitive plants. Its also meant a redesign to the rotational planting system as not all beds will get screens. So these screens if you’re wondering will be 50% shade cloth over a poly tube frame. Easy to put on and take off. I’m also building a greenhouse/shadehouse to help germinate seeds and flowers.

We now have our heard of cattle. We chose miniature belted galloways as we don’t have a lot of infrastructure and needed a breed that was easy to handle. Like the majority of the animals here, they will be food not pets, so in the coming months we’ll be beefed up.

We are also using the sheep and cattle as a large component of our noxious weed management program to avoid having to spray the paddocks. This year will mark the first full year of the program, but we a hopeful that they will make a positive contribution and that spraying can be kept to a minimum.

We also discovered the importance of locking up the chickens as a few months ago we lost 15 to a fox. It’s taken until last weekend to get replacements,and has spurred us into the chook breeding business. Come winter we hope to be hatching our first brood of light sussex chooks, and will also be doing rhode island red and australorps.

Well, that’s it for now. See you all next time, and again, thanks for reading.

I believe that this blog does allow comments, so if you want to go right ahead, just don;t get personal.

cheers

Dave

Well, its now been just over a year since we bought our little patch of paradise and so much has happened.

Since we moved in the menagerie has grown to 7 horses, 3 dogs, 2 cats, 5 sheep and 30 chooks.

We’re trying hard to be as self sufficient and as “organic” as we can. The chooks we use for eggs (not meat yet) and the sheep we eat (or will when they get bigger). We’ve also been trying to grow our own fruits and vegetables, unfortunately without much success at this stage. I’ve got nearly 200m² for the “patch” but last year i fought a losing battle with the weeds.

It was certainly no help when my motorised till broke and I had to do it by hand. Too big a job in the end and I lost 80% of what I planted to weeds. Last winter was also my first real attempt at growing from seeds. A spectacular failure to say the least. My lovely greenhouse was scattered all over the paddocks by a large storm, which unfortunately at the time had my first set of seeds.

Not to be out done by Mother Nature, I picked up the pieces and rebuilt what I could, which was basically just the shelving. So, planting seeds, take 2! After having a stroke of brilliance about using large zip lock plastic bags as mini greenhouses, I started again. Fantastic! Seeds germinating everywhere. You beauty, I think to myself. I noticed after a while that they’re looking a bit spindly. So after reading some of the books I bought off the Diggers Club (www.diggers.com.au), I determine its a light factor. So I do what seems like a good idea, put them in the sun. Only problem here is I left them in the bags, and had myself a batch of steamed seedlings, not once mind you, but twice. Just goes to you just can teach some people

So it’s now coming into autumn, and after buying a shiny new Husqvarna DRT70 Rotary Hoe (use this link and you can see it yourself http://www.husqvarna.com/au/landowner/products/cultivators/drt70/). It really made short work of getting the patch back into some sort of state to do something with this year.

So I’ve been busy over the last few week ends mixing in all the good stuff and getting the gardens ready to go again this season. The first set of seeds went in on the 21/3 and the other seeds get put into seeds trays this week end.