Setting up an Orchard on your Lifestyle Block A well cared-for, productive orchard can be a thing of great beauty as well as a source of food and possible income. As fruit trees are generally long-lived, it makes sense to plan and plant your orchard properly so that you can enjoy its benefits for many years. Continue reading →
Culverts 101 – the Benefits for Your Property I never really gave much thought to the culvert under our driveway until the winter of 2012, the first on our block. Ewan was working overseas, I was looking after the farm by myself and we’d had a massive amount of rainfall. Continue reading →
Useful Farming Equipment for Lifestyle Properties or Smallholdings If you’re setting up a lifestyle block, you’ll need to buy stuff, at least in the beginning. Be prepared to spend money. Even if you don’t want to. Even if you don’t have any. Unless you’ve got unlimited time and resources, it’s unavoidable. The best approach is to be clever about what you buy and canny about how much you spend. Continue reading →
Priorities for Setting up a Lifestyle Block If you’re thinking of acquiring a lifestyle block, getting some livestock, keeping chooks and growing your own food, congratulations. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done and I hope it turns out to be that way for you too. But be warned: it’s a heck of a challenge. Continue reading →
Gearing Up for Growing The 23rd of September, marked one of the most important days in our personal farming calendar: the Spring Equinox. From now on, with days longer than nights, everything – including our pasture, we hope – will really start cranking. Spring comes late here! Our growing season up in the mountains is short, so we have to do everything we can to make the most of it. Continue reading →
Setting Up a Tunnel House Like everything we tackle on our lifestyle block, setting up the tunnel house has been a process of trial and error. It’s dragged on a bit, with bursts of frenzied activity alternating with long lulls as other projects have taken priority. It’s still not finished but I’m hoping we’ll get it completed by mid-spring. Continue reading →
Keeping Healthy Chooks in Winter Our chooks get more cosseting than all the other livestock on our farm combined. They repay us with enormous brown eggs and lots of laughs. On the production side, we have 10 Brown Shaver hens and two pullets just coming into lay. The hens play with a handsome young Light Sussex rooster called Rocky and absolutely dote on him. Rocky the Magnificent Continue reading →
Wiltshire Sheep for Lifestyle Blocks Wiltshire sheep shed their own fleece. Back when we bought our block and I was researching sheep breeds, that alone was enough to convince me we should give polled (hornless) Wiltshires a go. The remnants of last year's fleece Continue reading →
Making Lambs: Tips for Tupping On Sunday 11 May, we reintroduced Spidey the ram to his 10 girls with the expectation that hot lovin’ would ensue. The official farming term for the hot lovin’ process as it applies to sheep is ‘tupping’. Spidey and Friend Continue reading →
Introducing Niki How can you tell that the people who’ve bought the farmlet down the road don’t have a clue what they’re doing? When the first livestock unit they buy is a bull. Yep, that was us in early 2012. We were the proud owners of 25 hectares of marginal land in a “very high” wind area at 700 metres in the Nelson Lakes area. Continue reading →
