Farm Fever

I've caught farm fever.
Finally I can plant my seeds - or so I had thought!
Frosts, torrential rains and freezing conditions have meant that my laundry has been turned into a hothouse full of seedlings.
Tomatoes of all colours, lettuces of all shapes, caulis, cabbages, basil and brussel sprout seedlings all wrapped in plastic bags and sitting on a windowsill waiting for transplanting.
I've already killed a half a dozen lettuces because I was a little too hopeful and threw them out into the cold, hard world (literally) about a month too early.
And let me tell you, The Kids aren't impressed with this 'crunchy' grass in the mornings - although being able to draw faces in the frost on the windscreen on the way to school is a small consolation.

My friends think I'm mad the way I pore over gardening brochures and search the internet for new varieties of vegetables.
They're probably right but it's making me enormously happy.
Especially as how throwing a few seeds in jiffy-pots and watching them unfurl their little green tendrils through clean potting mix is an easy-peasy job.
I keep thinking 'how satisfying to be growing our own food', 'how wonderful to be so close to nature' - I wonder if there's a way, later down the track, to be close to nature without actually having to hoe it, weed it or mow it?
The Kids don't mind a little 'getting close to nature' - they've been giggling for days about buying bags of 'cow poo'.
Apparently it's a pretty rare delight to have parental endorsement for digging in poo - I suppose they're right, seeing as it took me two years to convince The Boy not to play with his own.

One Hell of an Investment

My first day in our new home-town as an official local, a real estate agent knocked on our front door.
I had to pull aside bean bags, boxes, fire wood and the wooden panelling we'd stripped off the stone walls to open the rickety front door - and then he asked me if we were looking to sell any time soon.
So I console myself that we've made a good choice - even with more sheds than Bunnings, even with dodgy wiring and shoddy septics, this place has got potential - and he hadn't even seen the view over the back fence.

Our first week at Gladstone The Dog cut his paw on a piece of old iron, both cars blew up and a dodgy, home-wired plug melted and blew the entire house's electrics.
I would have cried except, for the first time in years, we had the time to deal with all the everyday things that go wrong everywhere.
So I bundled the kid and the wounded dog into the stalling falcon and hoped that moment would keep the car going from the top of the Flinders Ranges all the way to the Ford dealer in the nearest major city...and we almost made it too.
The car shuddered to a halt at the highway T-junction into the city, with cars banked up behind me and B-doubles zooming along in front.
But - don't ever let anyone tell you chivalry is dead - because men erupted from the cars behind me all keen to give me a push, the car started and I drove a good 2km in the wrong direction until I could do a u-turn on a hill and nurse my shuddering, creaking, stalling vehicle to the city where it rolled into the carpark of the dealership and promptly defied all of the mechanics' efforts to restart it for the next week.
We then walked - two sleepy kids and a footsore dog - to the vet which, thankfully, was right next door to McDonalds, making it easier to bribe the children into patience.
I had a hard time explaining why both the dog and the car were enjoying 'sleep-overs' in the city but the kids had to go home.

From Lamb to Lamb Chops

The Kids haven't made the connection between lamb and lamb chops yet.
That kind of puts a dampener on any plans we have for livestock.
Not that I think it would bother The Boy - he's got a healthy dose of his Grandather's 'feed the man meat' philosophy.
If he really understood what meat was he'd already be gnawing on my calf while I sat here at the computer.
The Girl though? She thinks a little bit too hard and I'm not looking forward to the Kentucky Fried Chicken epiphany when it comes.
She's still having trouble with the knowledge that eggs come from chooks' bums - and she's really not interested in handling them when they're still warm.
However, the lure of pocket money seems to have overcome the "eeuwww" factor though.