The Dream

I will start out by saying that after 10 days of no smoking i have temporarily fallen, but am getting back on the wagon right away. I had a smoke or 4 yesterday, big mistake.

It has been a very hard week with 3 little kids all sick, and they still won't go to bed and sleep it off like I would!

There is a lot to say just starting out, so I will start with a little history:

Since I watched the tv series "The Good Life" about 20 years ago, that has been my dream. To produce as much of what I need as I possibly can myself. Since buying my own place wasn't an option, I had to rent.

When i left my 1st husband, taking my daughter with me, I found a small property to rent near a tiny town called Cambrai in South Australia. It was 5 acres and a house, near my parents, not my ex. I had great expectations for this place, but every attempt seemed to fail.

Even though this place was near the Adelaide hills, it didn't rain there much at all. That meant that for much of the year the ground was bare and grew nothing but weeds, if that.

Since it was just me and my daughter Ashlea, there wasn't really much that I needed to do. We got chickens right away, and after years of trying to grow veggies, it was a dismal failure.

I met and married my current husband. We had 3 kids, all only 13 months apart (1st 2 planned, the third a little surprise gift from God). Now we needed to suplement the budget by producing something. The years of failed gardens was put together to come up with a plan. We built a garden area, starting with tonnes of composted pig manure and straw from the piggery down the road (to try and improve the sand), corner posts, then a fence of iron, to keep the rabbits and wind out, chicken wire above that to let air and sun in all covered with bird netting to keep the magpies and galahs off the seedlings. having done that I could only grow plants that were tollerant of the fairly brackish bore water. We did have a good season with enough tomatoes, cabbages etc.

Then with a lump sum tax bonus thing we went and bought a Jersey cow (in calf) from a dairy, she was only producing 13 litres of milk a day and not enough for them.

We found and bought 1 ram and 3 ewes, they are self shedding and require little maintainance.

That was about 2 years ago, everything was looking up. After the 1st week of trying to milk the cow by hand, we were both novices (me and the cow) we saw an add on the shop notice board that someone had a single cow milking machine for sale. It had to go on the credit card but a godsend all the same. After getting new parts and haveing someone come out and fix it it was up and running and a great relief to me and Rosie.

YAY we were finally producing something!!! Milk, cream, butter and icecream. I bought a cheese making kit from an online cheese supply place. I made heaps of yoghurt, cream cheese and sour cream. I attempted cheddar, but only had one success. The house we lived in was too small to use for this kind of thing. It takes a long time to make the hard cheeses and I didn't have the kitchen space to leave it sitting around.