With a view and accomodation like this, and alpacas patrolling the perimeter, who wouldn’t be a sheep? You even get to have horns!
Who wouldn’t be a sheep?
19 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in livestock
Tag Archives: summer
How many swallows make a summer?
10 Friday Oct 2014
Tags
birds, ecology, farm, photography, seasons, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, water
Flocks of Welcome Swallows (Hirundo neoxena) have been hunting on our farm for months now, spiralling around us as we work, then resting as a group along the fences. They are amazingly acrobatic hunters, plucking insect prey from the air in circles and dives. Apparently, swallows need to eat their own body weight every day to maintain their health. While they weigh only 10 grams, this can mean they can eat up to 400 times a day (approximately every two minutes) to ensure their sprightliness.
Young welcome swallows huddle together at Seal Bay, Kangaroo Island (October 2014).
Over the last month or so, we’ve spotted swallows hunting over the dam on a couple of occasions. They circle, dive and appear to be plucking prey from just below the surface of the water. If they are hunting sub-surface prey, according to birder Jennifer Spry, this is a largely undocumented phenomenon. These photos are a little too indistinct to say for sure, but interesting nonetheless! Continue reading
Small mysteries: A year in bugs
27 Saturday Sep 2014
Posted in ecology, regeneration, trees
Tags
ecology, farm, insects, photography, seasons, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, trees, winter
As part of our record-keeping, in the almost-two-years since we bought Yarnauwi we’ve tried to document the natural phenomena we observe season by season. At the end of each year, we go back over our journals and add what we’ve discovered to the records of the previous year. Over time, we hope, we’ll get a much more complex understanding of the ecological patterns that occur in our landscape, as well as the changes that may occur as a result of our activities.
Already, in the short time we’ve been on the block, we’ve noted shifts in the populations and presence of certain plants and creatures. While we often overlook insects, when looking back through our photos and notes, we realised that we have actually been observing their more subtle role through the seasons: the sudden chorus of crickets after the opening rains, or the way the grass flickers with grasshoppers in late summer. In their honour, here’s a year in bugs. Representing less than a couple of years of observation, it’s far from authoritative, but perhaps it offers the beginnings of a pattern.
Autumn
Crickets sing from the cracked soil after the first flush of rains.
Bardi grubs (Rain moth pupae) emerge from the soil around the River red gums following the first rains.
Fleurieu Seascapes
25 Thursday Sep 2014
Posted in art & craft, ecology
Tags
art, photography, seasons, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, water, winter
Sun and rain, Winter 2014
Watching the light shift across the hills is one of the great pleasures of being on the South Western Fleurieu, and it’s further enhanced by proximity to the sea. On our journeys around the region, we’re regularly exposed to the changes of light over the ocean as the road hooks coastward at places like Lady Bay or Sellicks, or hiking along the cliffs and coast around Second Valley. Summer offers a starkness to the ocean and sky, but I’ve come to love the way sea and sky diffuse together in the winter. Here’s some of what we’ve seen.
A moveable sheep shelter
22 Monday Sep 2014
Tags
building, design, farm, fencing, hack, livestock, recycling, reuse, sheep, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, trees
The moveable sheep shelter in fresh pasture.
While the name Trees, Bees and Cheese might suggest otherwise, one thing we’re short on is trees. So with the arrival of sheep, and now lambs, we’ve tried to get in before summer with a sheep shade-shelter. With our soon-to-be-complete subdivision of the property into smaller paddocks, we thought we’d build a moveable shelter that would allow us to rotate it from paddock to paddock with the flock, rather than building seven or eight smaller structures. Continue reading
If a tree falls…
23 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in ecology
A couple of months after the central third of our biggest remnant red gum crashed to earth, I climbed into the centre of the fallen limbs to try to remove some timber for erosion control structures. I was surrounded by the faint, constant pattering of distant rain. The tree was rustling, but no wind moved the leaves. I put my ear to the boughs and realised the sound was coming from inside, exhaling as the timber dried and cracks slowly opened in the bark. Meanwhile, in the leaf litter below, the spiders and beetles delight in the thick undergrowth of their new canopy. Continue reading
Erosion control: 15 months on
22 Tuesday Apr 2014
Posted in ecology, planning, regeneration, waterways
Tags
design, ecology, erosion, planning, seasons, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, water, waterways
One of the first interventions we made on the property was trying out some very rough erosion control on this scoured patch on our boundary. Earthworks from recent fencing had disturbed the soil and invited headcuts to form. With help from Pete and Freya, we tentatively set up a couple of lo-fi erosion strategies, informed by the work of Watershed Artisans (formerly Dryland Solutions) and Brad Lancaster, both of whom we’ve gushed about before. We reshaped the main headcut to soften the overflow, and positioned some kind of mutant One Rock Dam/Zuni Bowl at an intersection between two small headcuts – not something I’d do again. We also positioned a One Rock Dam on contour above the entire area in an effort to slow and disperse water flow.
A scoured, erosive patch, December 2012.
Pipe Dreams: How to set up a watering system for stock
22 Tuesday Apr 2014
‘Pipe Dream’: useful for passing time in the late 1980s, not that useful for planning livestock systems.
One of our key milestones in the development of the property this year was the establishment of a watering system for livestock. Having a watering system supports our fencing of the farm dam and waterways for habitat regeneration and also allows us to more intensively manage the movement and impact of livestock through rotational grazing. While we’re still the furthest thing from expert, with the advice and support of our neighbours, we managed to knock together a watering system that works. In researching and developing our own plans, we found an absence of basic information on setting up stock systems, so the ideas below are a few of the things we learnt or found useful in planning a system for our own context and landscape. They are just one perspective in informing your own planning, and shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of any particular way of doing things.
New artwork: painting summer
22 Tuesday Apr 2014
Posted in art & craft, diy, ecology
Tags
Second Valley causeway, looking towards Normanville.
A little while ago, it occurred to me that maybe I should give watercolour a crack. The theory was that I’d be able to work fast enough to bang out a painting during toddler naps. In reality, I’ve still only finished a handful of works over the last six months, and as a consequence my skill development has been glacial. That said, it’s still a pleasure to sit down with the brushes and attempt to wrangle the Czech-made watercolour set into South Australia’s less exuberant colour palette.
Bee-house update: Roo-house?
11 Tuesday Feb 2014
Nature abhors a vacuum
Following the evacuation of its previous residents, the bee-house has not remained vacant for long. Offering waterside views and passive solar design, resident roos have recently been spotted conducting an open inspection of this prime real estate.
Yarnauwi Farm 