Thursday, September 9, 2010

Farming in Bendigo Part 1

We've spent a couple of days in Bendigo, taking delivery of our stuff and then doing farm-related things with Stephen's family.  Bendigo's a rural town about 150km away from Melbourne in a straight line, but it's pretty much a whole different world to me.  


The removalist truck finally arrived on Tuesday afternoon - Stephen and I had to go and find the guy because he ignored the instructions about which exit to take from the freeway and got lost.  He rocked up in a big semi-trailer with two shipping containers - not the small flatbed truck with a single shipping container that the stuff was picked up in.  




Stephen's Dad's place is down a km or so of dirt road, and the driveway's about another km or so of dirt - so the guy refused to bring the truck up the road, and we had to ferry everything from the end of the sealed road to the shipping container in Stephen's Dad's ute (which we were very lucky that he had available).  (I did warn them that it was a dirt road, and they looked it up on Google Maps at the time and said that it would be fine - something must have been lost in translation somewhere.)  Luckily it all finished pretty quickly and now all of our stuff is safe and locked away in the shipping container.  


Wednesday morning was an early morning walk through the bush to go check out the vista from on top of the hill. The rains have made everything slippery, but I managed to make it without falling over in the mud.  On the way we saw a lot of kangaroos, a couple of wallabies and a bunch of echidna digging sites (the echidnas had hidden when they heard us coming). The view from the top was beautiful - in the foreground you can see the wattles blooming, and if you zoom in on the middle of the photo, you can see two kangaroos having breakfast on the hill.  There are sheep among the rocks in the background.




After that, it was off to help with the sheep-weighing on a family member's sheep farm.  It was an interesting process - they can only sell lambs once they hit 40kg, hence the weighing.  We needed to move a whole bunch of ewes with new lambs around so that we could put the 1 year old lambs into the holding pens where the scales were.  




Weighing the sheep was interesting - I was lucky and I avoided the sheep wrestling part for the easy job of recording the weight next to the sheep's number.  The actual weighing was done by a set of scales with a cage suspended underneath, in the middle of a straight thin passage from one pen to another (so the sheep can't turn around, it can only go one way).  They get the sheep to go into the cage and trap it there, and then they weigh it and then open the gate on the other side so that it can run out and the next one can go in.  It was all over pretty quickly.


The other interesting part was one of the sheep which had just given birth to twins, and had rejected one of them - she wouldn't let it feed and kept pushing it away.  Apparently this is fairly common, and one of the tricks is to put perfume on both of the lambs so that the mother can't tell them apart and lets them both feed, which is a pretty nifty trick.  I got the job of holding the non-rejected lamb while they distracted the mother with food so that the other one could feed.  They were only about 3 days old - how cute!




We saw some more kangaroos on the way home - it's pretty cool seeing them out of zoos as they actually hop places!  



1 comment:

  1. What are the necessary tips when we have have to move And thanks for explaining about Furniture Removal.Furniture Removal Melbourne


    ReplyDelete