The Farm in Diggers Valley
The lovely 710. She is the first of my heifers to have a fully Angus-based pedigree in my four-generation records of the cross-bred cattle. Here she is in January.
The sale heifers are also looking lovely. If I had room, I'd keep them, but they're all going off together to a new home where they will become breeding cows when they grow up.
A couple of them are the slightly smaller first daughters of my two-year-old heifers, but I suspect they'll grow into beautiful cows. The others belong to families of which I have other representatives and so don't need to keep these this year. Keeping 13 is already stretching things!
The cows, quite ready to be moved on to the next paddock. I sowed rye seed in Mushroom 1 and then let them go.
On my hands and knees I hunted for the new rye grass: it's only this big in the first paddock sown on the 1st.
The Cabbage Tree shoots have taken off. These are fascinating trees.
Paternal half-sisters 486 and 475. 486 will be off shortly, having failed to rear her calf this year, always having a calf which looks like it has Jersey blood (which she does, but it's still coming through really strongly, even in her grand-calves) and she already missed one year back in 2009.
475 is a great cow.
Our largest (although not the oldest) young Kauri tree has produced a seed cone.
The orchids in the Puriri log are at about the same stage they were a month later last year.
Fishy, fishy, fishy fish. This very dead fish smelt very fishy! I spotted its vague shape on the bottom of the pond, and with the aid of a dead flax flower stem, fished it out onto the grass for a closer look. It'll be one of the tiny fish which originally came down the water pipe from up in the hills. There's a picture of them when they were "teenagers" eighteen months ago.
This is a plant Stephan's mother, Muriel, used to grow on a piece of trellis outside Andrew's room. I always really liked it, so when I was visiting the new neighbours about four ownerships ago and noticed that they were about to reorganise that bit of garden, I asked to take a cutting and that plant has been languishing in my greenhouse ever since. It never flowered in its pot in the shade, but now here, out in the sunshine, it is blooming again.
I believe it is Senecio macroglossus, of the daisy, not the Ivy family. .
I carried the Budgies into the spare room so they could have some flying time out of their cage. Citronella didn't seem so keen and kept going back inside.
I did my last bit of seed sowing this evening, calculating that the ten or so kilogrammes of seed left in the last bag would do the Pig Paddock out by the yards, into which I could then put the cows.
This is Mushroom 1, after they'd all left.
The lovely replacement heifers - there's one more out of the picture somewhere, plus the twins, who are grazing with Zella.
I moved this lot out of the Camp paddock so the cows could have it.
Here come the cows, having finished grazing the Pig Paddock, which will now have to be left for six to eight weeks until the rye grass establishes.
The irresistible pile of loose soil.
Several of them had a go at it on the way past, then trotted out to the Camp Paddock.
The Annual Beef Cows 4 Profit field-day at Landcorp Takakuri. It was showery and cold, although not as bitterly so as it has been on the last two occasions. It was far wetter though, making driving to and around the property a bit tricky. I managed to get a ride on the back of the ute of the farm Manager, Daniel, figuring he'd know how to drive his tracks safely. Stephan and Mike, with whom we'd come, got a lift in a ute belonging to some of the workers from the Kapiro Landcorp block.
Farming is rarely this black and white!
My two big bulls are still grazing separately. They seem quite content, although I'm going to have to work out where they can go next, with the same sort of neighbouring relationship. They're beginning to run out of grass.