A blog about my new adventure as a goat farmer.
Finally the air bnb is up and ready to go and we have our first booking this coming weekend.
Well, after 3 months of cleaning, painting and renovation our little cottage is finally ready to receive it’s first guests.
The Sunshine Coast Hinterland is a perfect getaway for tourists and locals alike. Being only just over an hours drive from Brisbane it is an easy weekend retreat.
Time for a small update I fear!
COVID-19 continues. Fortunately for us Australia has been relatively unscathed so far and Queensland even better. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Steve is still here. The longest we have ever been together I think. Peru has now opened it’s borders again so, sadly, I don’t think he will be here for too much longer. We have got so much done while he’s been here! Very useful to have around and, funnily enough, good company too!
We have finally managed to unpack everything. The biggest problem was finding somewhere to put it all. This place has virtually no storage space. Another problem we’ve been working on, Steve has been building cupboards and making space in the garage. When he finally gets back to Peru he’ll be able to send the furniture back. We’ll have all our stuff in one place again.
The little farm is doing well. Since everything opened up again in Queensland the AirBNB has been very busy. We’ve been making lots of marmalade and jam from our fruit trees and strawberries from local farms.
I’ve also started an airBNB experience doing cream teas with goats. “A Goat Cream Tea Adventure. It sounds crazy, it is but it’s very good fun, like a goat circus and the goats love it too!
There were a few problems with the veggie patch. My second planting was a bit of a disaster in that the pumpkins took over everything despite serious pruning. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they never gave me any fruit. Very disappointing. I’ve since had the soil analysed and rectified, 🤞 We have set up a no dig garden and replanted. So far it’s looking very promising. Just so long as the chickens don’t manage to break in!
My woodturning continues but only just. I had a near death experience with a faulty lathe. Fortunately I was wearing a very strong helmet and face shield but there was still a lot of blood and the helmet came off quite badly. I returned to the lathe last week with fear and trepidation, gently gently!!! Just started a box making course which might be safer.
For most of this I’ve been very lucky to have had a lot of help from a Fairy Godmother Veronica. She flew in from Argentina and, luckily for me, got stuck in Australia because of Covid. She has been amazing, helping with the airBNB, the garden and of course, the goats too.
With COVID still very bad in Argentina, she’s applying for an extension to her visa so, hopefully she’ll be with us for a while!
Summer approaches, not my favourite time. A little too hot. I’ll be back for an update for Christmas!
It’s hard to fathom what’s been happening in the world over the past few weeks. Everything has just gone crazy.
Back in February I was totally preoccupied with my business plan. Sadly I’d also come to the conclusion that, for me, starting cheese production isn’t viable. It’s not a project that can be done alone and, without money to pay someone, there’s no way forward. Perhaps I’ll be trying to sell my dear goats in the near future?
Earlier this month I had a lovely visit from my big slister Slusie, Susie. It was still possible to behave normally and we had a very jolly time. Two weeks further on and I have my friend Gill visiting and it’s a completely different story.
All that has fallen by the wayside since COVID19, Coronavirus reared it’s ugly head.
Steve also managed to get out of Peru. He got out of the country just minutes before they closed everything down and, with stories of luck at every turn, he’s very lucky to be here.
Both Gill and Steve have to self isolate for 2 weeks. But who knows how long it will actually last, as day by day more is closing. Gill’s flight out in 5 weeks time has already been cancelled.
In the meantime, we are very lucky. Nothing is ready to harvest but the veggies are growing, the chickens are laying. We haven’t done any stockpiling but hopefully the supermarket will remain open for essentials….loo paper could be a problem but I’m sure we’ll work something out!
So I hope everyone out there stays safe and well.
Biggest virtual hugs ever and look after yourselves please.
This blog has been seriously neglected.
Time to make amends.
My lovely neighbours brought me some Bunya nuts. It was a lovely surprise as I had no idea we had any bunya pine trees nearby. I have wanted to try them ever since I’d heard of them. It seems they are quite common in our neighbourhood.
I was very pleased when I realised we have actually one of our very own!
Bunya nuts have been on this planet for thousands of years. They are part of the Aboriginal culture and, I’ve heard that were even eaten by dinosaurs.
Bunya pine trees are enormous, they grow up to 45 metres tall. You certainly don’t want to hang around them when the nuts are falling!
Lo and behold, a few days later our tree dropped the biggest nut I have seen so far….and it contained no less than 97 nuts!
Preparing the nuts.
First you remove the nuts from the main pod.
Then after boiling or roasting (200deg) for half an hour, you have to shell them. The shell is very hard and it takes ages but is well worth the effort. Boiling them splits the shells slightly and I found I could remove it fairly easily with a pair of clippers.
The neighbours were of course invited to share in the bounty and we made a delicious warm salad/ stir fry. The nuts were combined with garlic, zucchini (courgettes), parsley, olive oil and, I also added some finger limes and ground pepper berries which seemed fitting alongside the indigenous bunya nuts.
I also used them as a base for a curry which was delicious but as the flavour of the nuts is so delicate, (they taste similar to sweet chestnuts), sadly the curry completely overpowered the flavour of the nuts.
This blog has been seriously neglected.
Time to make amends.
My lovely neighbours brought me some Bunya nuts. It was a lovely surprise as I had no idea we had any bunya pine trees nearby. I have wanted to try them ever since I’d heard of them. It seems they are quite common in our neighbourhood.
I was very pleased when I realised we have actually one of our very own!
Bunya nuts have been on this planet for thousands of years. They are part of the Aboriginal culture and, I’ve heard that were even eaten by dinosaurs.
Bunya pine trees are enormous, they grow up to 45 metres tall. You certainly don’t want to hang around them when the nuts are falling!
Lo and behold, a few days later our tree dropped the biggest nut I have seen so far….and it contained no less than 97 nuts!
Preparing the nuts.
First you remove the nuts from the main pod.
Then after boiling or roasting (200deg) for half an hour, you have to shell them. The shell is very hard and it takes ages but is well worth the effort. Boiling them splits the shells slightly and I found I could remove it fairly easily with a pair of clippers.
The neighbours were of course invited to share in the bounty and we made a delicious warm salad/ stir fry. The nuts were combined with garlic, zucchini (courgettes), parsley, olive oil and, I also added some finger limes and ground pepper berries which seemed fitting alongside the indigenous bunya nuts.
I also used them as a base for a curry which was delicious but as the flavour of the nuts is so delicate, (they taste similar to sweet chestnuts), sadly the curry completely overpowered the flavour of the nuts.
This blog has been seriously neglected.
Time to make amends.
My lovely neighbours brought me some Bunya nuts. It was a lovely surprise as I had no idea we had any bunya pine trees nearby. I have wanted to try them ever since I’d heard of them. It seems they are quite common in our neighbourhood.
I was very pleased when I realised we have actually one of our very own!
Bunya nuts have been on this planet for thousands of years. They are part of the Aboriginal culture and, I’ve heard that were even eaten by dinosaurs.
Bunya pine trees are enormous, they grow up to 45 metres tall. You certainly don’t want to hang around them when the nuts are falling!
Lo and behold, a few days later our tree dropped the biggest nut I have seen so far….and it contained no less than 97 nuts!
Preparing the nuts.
First you remove the nuts from the main pod.
Then after boiling or roasting (200deg) for half an hour, you have to shell them. The shell is very hard and it takes ages but is well worth the effort. Boiling them splits the shells slightly and I found I could remove it fairly easily with a pair of clippers.
The neighbours were of course invited to share in the bounty and we made a delicious warm salad/ stir fry. The nuts were combined with garlic, zucchini (courgettes), parsley, olive oil and, I also added some finger limes and ground pepper berries which seemed fitting alongside the indigenous bunya nuts.
I also used them as a base for a curry which was delicious but as the flavour of the nuts is so delicate, (they taste similar to sweet chestnuts), sadly the curry completely overpowered the flavour of the nuts.
We are making progress. In some things it’s very slow and others much faster and you can never predict how each job is going to go. The dams are nearly clear of the dreaded weed but the last little bit seems to be taking forever. Mostly because it’s quite backbreaking (literally) and I’ve found myself having to take a break from it and some gardening jobs because I don’t want to develop anything permanent….sometimes you have to listen to your body.
But the Airbnb is now listed and we’ve had our first guests. It went very well in that we got a great review despite them not having any hot water! We’d turned on the gas and the water pump but somehow didn’t see that the water heater wasn’t on. Whatever next? Two more sets of guests booked for this weekend and hopefully they won’t find anything amiss.
Progress is great because it finally frees me up to be able to do other good stuff such as follow my hobbies, make friends or even just to relax sometimes. This is very important, especially getting involved with the local community. We have met quite a few of our neighbours and, as good neighbours do, we’ve been helping them out this week.
Harry and I went over to help them butcher their steer.(many apologies to the vegans and vegetarians amongst you) They keep cattle just for their own beef supply. The animal in question was 3 years old and probably one of the most well looked after and happy animal. I’m not sure I could do it but if you are going to eat meat then I can’t imagine a better way. It took us all day and now they have at least a year’s supply of meat, not to mention all the friends and neighbours who will get a share. The dogs too did very well, a little too well, but I won’t go into that!
I have joined a local woodworking club. And Harry did too later, after I came home and described the workshop they have. It’s incredibly well stocked with every type of woodworking tool you can think of. They have 6 lathes for example. So I’ve started woodturning again. It’s almost a year since I sold my lathe and I definitely felt very rusty. But I came home with a lovely camphor laurel bowl. Christmas presents begin.
Yes, Christmas is only 5 weeks away. A scary thought but it also means Bessie will be home for a few weeks. December is going to be a busy month. First we have Ellie’s graduation followed by her “Nightmare before Christmas” party. A chance to use all our Hallowe’en and Christmas decorations at once. It’s going to be a lot of fun, watch this space!
No doubt too there’ll be plenty of local fairs and events to go to so a chance to get involved locally I hope.
It hasn’t been such a good week on the Bessies Farm.
The goats have been sick.
There’s a little protozoan, coccidia, that commonly effects young goats and can make them sick enough to kill them. Fortunately they develop an immunity to them as they get older.
What I didn’t tell you in my introduction is that we started off with 4 alpacas. When one of them died almost three weeks ago that is when the proverbial hit that fan.
The paddocks where alpacas and llamas used to live, before we moved here, are infested with a worm called “Barber’s pole” (doesn’t that sound pretty? A stripy red and white worm like a candy cane, how Christmassy), so we were suspicious that this may have been the cause. When you lose one animal it’s obviously very important to check the others.
They appeared to be fine but, just to be sure, I sent some of their poo off to the vet for inspection. It’s so much fun hanging around animal bottoms waiting for poos to drop. Just for good measure I sent off some of the goats poo as well.
The alpaca poo was fine. We’ll never know what killed our alpaca, possibly a snake, but the remaining 3 are healthy thank goodness.
But, there was coccidia in the goat poo.
LOTS! According to the vet. Even though they were symptom free.
And by the time I got the medication and went to administer it, little Willow had started having diarrhoea.
I wasn’t worried because we’d started treatment. In fact, 3 days later when her poo returned to normal, I was ecstatic!
But just hours later Willow was a shivering wreck and not herself at all and with red droopy ears. She was still eating a little. This was our first vet call out.
Willow looked much better next morning but later that day, (Halloween), I noticed her eye was really swollen and it got worse as the minutes passed. Another visit to the vet, this time us going to them. Harry drove, with me and Willow sitting in the back. Willow recovered quickly after some antihistamine.
On and on and on….meanwhile Wilmah gets a massively swollen jaw…what next? I’m busy trying to ignore it and not call the vet but when I take her temperature it’s 40.2 (a goat fever) and then she starts coughing. Strict instructions from Ellie not to call the vet…but I did!
And when the vet arrives Wendy starts diarrhoea production.
Whatever next?
In the thick of it now and learning fast how to avoid those massive vets bills.
(Isn’t having a vet for a daughter meant to avoid vet bills altogether?)
This is my plan:
Buy a microscope and learn how to do faecal floats and egg counts myself.
Visit from goat specialist asap to make a worm plan.
Get horses to come and eat our grass. Coccidia doesn’t survive in a horse gut.
Start Bioworma…the new thing for worm treatment. https://www.bioworma.com/bioworma.html#
So not a very exciting update this week. Boring but important.
It seems it’s time to start a blog because nearly everybody who has visited since we moved here has suggested that I do a blog about it. It’ll also be a good way to record my progress!
Here goes….
Tree change
Sea change
INTRODUCING THE FAMILY WINDLE
SARAH, aka Bessie. Writing this blog
STEVE, aka Bessie, long suffering husband of the other Bessie and financial backer.
ELLIE, daughter of Bessies and almost qualified vet, presently living in Brisbane.
HARRY, son of Bessies, currently residing here at the “farm” and helping me set up.
GOATS – WENDY, WILLOW, SARI, XENA, HANNAH, and WILMAH
ALPACAS – SNOW, TYLER and NOVAC
DOGS – HAMLET and JASMINE
Jasmine is new to the family, she was rescued about a month ago, from a puppy farm. She’s very nervous but extremely affectionate and will hopefully settle in soon.
CAT – PABLO all the way from Darkest Peru, he speaks Spanish!
It’s been quite a ride since arriving back in Australia. I didn’t think things would happen quite as quickly as they have!
So here we are, living in Maleny, in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, up on the Blackall Ranges. Such a beautiful spot, very green and lush and typically 3 degrees cooler than down at sea level, (which makes it much more comfortable). A friendly, relaxed community with a very creative feel. To me it feels like getting into a warm bath.
So how did it start?
I think the seed for this massive change began to grow in early 2018 when I was working as a midwife in England. I hadn’t worked in the UK for 25 years wasn’t really prepared for the changes I saw in the National Health Service. So naive. It was so much more stressful than I had imagined and I was shocked to find I couldn’t cope at all. After six months I handed in my notice and put the house on the market ready for my return to Australia.
Midwifery is such a passion and it’s hard knowing I may never deliver another baby.
During that beautiful summer of 2018 in Devon, I spent most of my time on my bicycle with just Hamlet for company. It was idyllic.
This was when the adventure began, stemming from my passion for animals, food and the countryside.
THE GOATS
The wee babies arrived only a week after we did. Just three weeks old. Harry fenced in a small area around the garden shed for them while Steve and I drove down to pick them up. At the beginning we were bottle feeding them three times a day and they were really very little.
Since then they’ve moved to a much bigger shed, which Harry has built, and they are moved every morning to a larger paddock.
I was told that if you if you have a group of goats, (at least two), that is a herd and that they won’t try to escape. What I wasn’t told is that if I got really young goats that I would be the ‘mother’ and, hence, leader of the herd. As a result they all want to be with me and keeping them contained is quite a challenge to say the least! The best thing is that they’re very good at showing you their escape holes, you just have to walk around the paddock with them. Now all I need is an endless supply of pegs, wire and cable ties!
The idea eventually is to breed from the goats and get them producing milk and to start making cheese. I’ll find a billy goat to run with them maybe around May next year; after a five month pregnancy they will kid next October-ish and we will start producing milk. That’s when the real work will begin. Milking and Cheesemaking! Lots of research in the meantime. A massive learning curve!
Making cheese is a fun process and I can’t wait to be using our own home produced goats milk.
THE DAMS (3 large ponds/lakes)
These sound idyllic and hopefully they will be once they’re sorted.
Cleaning them was a high priority. They were infested with an invasive, introduced weed called Water Lettuce, which is highly toxic and very attractive to mosquitoes. We had so much that Hamlet even attempted to walk on it! It’s nearly done now, after several days work by several people. I didn’t want to do the recommended spraying as I fear the wildlife, especially frogs, would suffer.
THE CHICKENS
We were given 4 chickens by the previous owner. On closer inspection though, it was only 3. One of them had been dead for quite some time! Also the three that were left were laying such flimsy eggs that they were breaking them and eating them. The chicken house was infested with rats and falling apart. Harry has since built a new chicken hotel and we have dispatched the 3 egg eating chickens to a fine retirement with my friend Kim, animal lover extraordinaire. Enter six new pullets who are starting to lay and seem very happy with their new home.
VEGGIE PATCH AND HERB GARDEN
We have prepared one veggie patch and completely covered it with chicken netting. Carl, our Austrian backpacker cleared it and built it almost entirely singlehandedly.
We planted seeds and most of the seedlings have now been transplanted into it. We’re now building another one….hoping to be as self sufficient as possible. We also dug out a large flowerbed to create a herb garden. A lot of work. Lots of pictures of beautiful fresh vegetables to come hopefully but please send me lots of gardening advice….I’m a complete novice.
We have built a compost heap though and with any luck it’ll help fatten up those veggies!
AIRBNB
This has been another major project…. The property has a wee cottage, this is a rather grand term. It’s actually a self contained two room apartment with a balcony.
It’s been totally renovated and now with a few pictures, furniture and ornaments it’s almost ready.
So welcome to my blog!
I do hope you enjoyed this and that you’ll subscribe. It’s a big adventure for me and I’d really value your feedback.
Hope to see you soon.
Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
Bessies goats! 