This is the finished version of our new dam! It’s huge isn’t it? All the guys have to do now is to run the grader around the bottom, smooth it all out and viola! It’s finished …
And a PS: the dam was finished on Thursday afternoon and on Friday we had 18mm of rain. Its got about 50cm of water in the bottom of it.
Bring on a wet winter (sorry to all the croppers!) to fill it to the brim!
Well, we’ve started! The seed is in the ground, now all we need in a bit of rain to get it up and going.
The blue skies look a bit too summery for my liking, but since this photo was taken a few days ago, we’ve had 10mm! It’s not enough yet, but it’s a start. There’s still a few more hundred acres to get in before we’ve finished the seeding program.
We’re not big croppers, we like our animals, but we grow a bit of grain for our feedlot, deliver a bit to the silos and see what’s left over.
The rows are straight, which indicates Anthony is driving the combine, not me! I’m always all over the place.
If only the wind would go around to the south, I’m sure this massive cloud could drop oodles of rain on us!
However, with the wind from the north, it’s unlikely that there will be any rain on our place. The sea is going to get it all!
Well it’s freezing here at the moment! A whopping 9.9 degrees!
The wind has been howling and we’ve had rain! 25mm fell in our gauge, although I’m not sure how widespread around the Esperance Shire its been – some of our mates who farm a bit further north than us, only got 5mm, so we’re still praying for rain for them and more for us! Esperance town site got 35mm so it must have been patchy.
It’s been too cold to let the kids outside, so we’re onto the board games. Monopoly and Uno are the two favourites, although I’ve been trying to get Yahtzee in there too!
Even though both the kids are wearing short sleeves, it’s only because I’ve got the fire so cranked up, trying to ward off the winter chill, that it’s quite warm inside.
I was looking through my photo file since I hadn’t had time to take away news ones for the blog and I came across this one. You might remember, about six or so weeks ago, we had a huge deluge of rain over about four days.
The landlines, power and mobiles were all down, but I still had my camera! This photo was taken at the end of all the rain.
Check out all that beautiful green grass! It’s not quite as green now but hopefully, once the opening rains arrive, it will be!
We’d love for it to look like this as the calves and lambs start arriving! The mums then have big bags of milk and the babies are contented.
Our first calf of the season was born four days ago, so it won’t be long, and there’ll be off-spring everywhere, running, bucking and playing! It’s a beautiful time of the year.
This is the second fog we’ve had in a couple of weeks. It’s becoming apparent that autumn is well on its way. It’s cooled down in the morning, calm and magic.
Autumn is one of my favourite times of the year. We’re all eagerly awaiting rain and we start to watch the weather charts a bit more closely than over summer – or at least we look for different things – in summer we’re watching to see if we’re lucky enough to avoid extreme temperatures, or if it’s good fishing weather!
When the rains come, the smell on the dry earth is something that could lift you to the clouds! It’s the most beautiful smell in this world.
Then the tiny specks of green start to appear and after a few more days, the life giving green grass is well on it’s way to being tall enough to be eaten by the stock.
That goodness for Mother Nature – we’d be lost without her!
What odd weather we’re having. On Monday the mercury hit 48 degrees, even though the official reading was 45. What’s a few degrees when it gets that hot though?!
After sweltering throughout the day, at about 5pm, it was still 40, so I loaded up the kids and headed to the beach. A cool change came through just as we arrived and while the kids, Rocket and I splashed at the water’s edge, the thunder rumbled all around.
Then it started to rain and rain it did! From Monday night until Thursday morning it rained, rained and rained a bit more! (Not one break in the gentle, steady rain.)
100mm of rain later and today is looking still threatening. Part of this has come from Cyclone Dominique which battered the north recently.
The power and phone has been out for the past two days so our new friend has been this generator. We’ve had extension cords running everywhere to try and keep the fridge and three freezers going.
Even our mobiles have been down so we have well and truly been isolated from the world! But the kids have had a brilliant time playing in the puddles — it hasn’t been cold.
Hayden and I are off to feed the cows now. With all the rain, they’ll be starving and in need of a good ‘nosh’ up.
With recent rains, Red Dust Country is no longer brown and dusty! In fact it looks quite idyllic through these photos that my Mum and Dad took!
Amazing photos of watching the water just as it starts to run down the creek and long suffering sheep on green pastures!
It makes me wish I was back there for a while! The gum trees are just so majestic and the hills give such character to this timeless land. Beautiful!
Hopefully it will give you and idea of the sort of country that Gemma, from Red Dust, was running and the battles and isolation she faced.
Finally after 110mm of rain in five days, the sun has broken through.
We’re now looking forward to carting our hay and starting harvest in the next week or two.
We haven’t been able to get on the paddocks to cart the hay it’s been so wet, let alone put a header into the wet crops, but there looks to be a fine spell ahead, so there’s work to be done!
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Ah … the weather! It often sounds like farmers are complaining about the weather, but so much of our business relies on it.
It needs to rain in March/April so the ground is still warm enough to grow feed for winter.
Even though it rains (or at least it should!) during the cold months, the ground is too cold to grow much, so the feed that grows during March, may not last a long time!
At this time of the year we hope that it’s going to be warm and sunny so we can take our crops off. Not get 30mm of rain in 20 minutes like we did on Sunday!
A torrential downpour has now downgraded our crops but filled our dams that were very low and watered out a summer crop of sorghum, so we are grateful there was some good out of bad!
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