We breed owls. Barn owls. Not really, no...

But it feels as if we do.   When we first moved here we realised there was a nest in the roof over the verandah, which has a knotty-pine ceiling.   Some planks had rotted and fallen out near the gutter and that was where they gained access.

We hate rats and love owls, so the arrangement suits us well.

Then they moved away and weren't seen again for a few years and we thought we had somehow offended them, but not so.   Possibly one of the pair was killed or perhaps the owls that subsequently moved in were from a later generation, I don't know.   What I do know is that we haven't been without owls for most of the past five years, and a new clutch of four to five fledglings leave that nest every six to nine months on average.   That's a lot of owls.   We must be keeping the valley and surrounding mountains well stocked.

It is totally delightful when the young ones fledge, because they emerge not knowing where to go, what to do, or what they are looking at.   Sometimes they gently drift down to the ground like a falling leaf.   Seen here, they often alight on a window sill, and then take on threatening stances when approached from the inside.

This one started swaying from side to side, as if to say "bring it on..."

We spend a lot of time on the verandah or at the fireplace outside in the evenings, when we are privy to the antics of the new fledglings.   What makes it especially delightful is that the barn owl mom starts incubating the eggs as soon as she had lain the first one, although she may lay another four or five eggs over the two weeks following.   As soon as the first one has hatched there is increased activity as the parents take turns all night long hunting and bringing in rats for the growing family to devour.   They   hatch one after the other, with a few days in between.   As long as the food keeps coming all the chicks grow up in perfect harmony with one another.   The result is that we have a new fledgling emerging from the roof every few days for up to two weeks at a time, giving us a lot of viewing pleasure.

Because he smokes Jamie sits on the verandah in the evenings watching series on his laptop or engaging in other activities which he can do outside.   Because of this habit he has had the pleasure of getting up close and personal with the young owls on many an occasion.   One evening one alighted on the sofa next to him and turned its little swivel head to take a good look, quizzically swaying its head from side to side as owls do.   Jamie involuntarily started to chuckle, which made the little head move from side much quicker and the more Jamie chuckled the quicker the movements became and then the owlet decided it was possibly best to leave.

The other evening he had the closest encounter yet when sitting with his feet crossed on the coffee table.   The young owl dropped from the roof, spread its wings and gently flew towards him alighting on his toe.   Fortunately it is winter and he was wearing closed shoes because those talons are like razor blades!   (Spoken like one who has had the misfortune of close contact once).   Before he could swing his cellphone/camera into action though it sort of lost its grip and flapped a few meters away to the chairs (upended at night to discourage the dogs).

... when life exists not so much in breathing but in those moments that take your breath away ...

What I have learned about keeping rabbits you won't find in a book or on the internet.

What I found on the internet was a very informative and happy account of how wonderful it is to keep rabbits, how they produce 6 x the kilo's in a 2m2 hutch than cows on 1 acre of land, how much easier and relatively cheaper it is to produce this meat, and how they don't smell...   The latter fact was where it all fell down from the get-go.

Kept in welded steel cages (read batteries) such as one is 'supposed to do' to keep it 'practical' and 'commercially viable', they stink.   There is not a suitable euphemism for the phenomenon.   We cleaned the trays, we fed and watered them, we fed them green stuff and not just pellets.   They stank.   And the little ones died like flies.   I'm sure there are 'factories' which is what the article called them which work well.   Huge structures where the rabbits never see sunshine or feel the wind blow, that are super-controlled and not to make the author out to be a liar, perhaps they don't smell.   Perhaps they have systems in place because the business is big enough, to ensure total cleanliness, no smell and perfect record-keeping which I believe is necessary and where I fell down because I simply don't have all day to stand and watch when a buck has been brought to a doe to know when exactly "it" happened with the result I probably left them together too long just to be sure.   Also being semi out of doors there were other factors, eg rats running over the cages at night freaking out the rabbits.

Perhaps I didn't have the ultimate perfect cages, because the rabbits always sat in their food bowls and defecated there, and for some reason urinated in their water bowls.   The ideal would have been to have had those little water spouts where they have to put their mouth over to get the water out, rather than open water, but I just couldn't find them straightaway when I needed them.

I don't know whether they feel happiness or not but those rabbits didn't seem happy to me.   Perhaps it was just me being unhappy for caging them so but the point is it was not working and the babies kept dying, most of a litter being dead within three to four days.   I decided they had to get out of the cages.   So I took them into a facility with a cement floor where they couldn't dig and gave them wooden hutches placed far apart to crawl into that would be nice and dark, cosy for moms with babes.   The does were all together in a large room and the buck in a smaller room adjacent.   My totally unprofessional method would be to open up between the two rooms for a week or so, and then separate them again until all the does had dropped and weaned their litters, when the young ones would be removed and the process started again.

It seemed to work well, until one morning there was a dead doe on the floor with some fairly large pups lying dead as well.   I asked a helper to reach into the hutch and see if there were any live ones left, and all he felt was a snake.   A very large snake, none other than a black mamba which proceeded to emerge from the hutch hopping mad and with tell-tale bumps where the rest of the little ones had been swallowed.   We killed and measured it, more than 3m in length.  

This happened on three different occasions, each snake being between 3 and 4m long, and try as we might we simply could not stop every last hole in that shed, the snakes always found one we had missed.   Or they came armed with their own wire cutters and hammer and chisel, I don't know.   We lost about 30 rabbits big and small to those mamba, which was substantial given that we only had four buck and about six doe to start with when we moved them there.   They were breeding successfully, but the snake issue was a huge one.   It was simply too dangerous for us humans, let alone the losses in does and pups we were experiencing.

I drew on the experience I gained as a young mother, keeping rabbits for pets for FJ and his sister when they were little.   We dug around the perimeter of the new cage 1m deep and placed concrete blocks close together in the trenches.   Each rabbit was going to have at least 2m2 with the trays from the original cages to serve as a roof where they could hide from rain.   They were going to be able to dig their burrows and do their ablutions in or on the ground, and make their own nurseries underground such as rabbits do.   The difference was the pets were all kept together, and here I was going to separate the rabbits inside their own smaller enclosures.   Double gates and bird netting see to it that no rat and no snake gets in there.

I'm happy to say they have been in this new facility since November and I haven't had to clean it once.   It does not smell of anything and yes, even if it is perhaps my imagination, I swear they look happy!   Moreover, they are doing what rabbits do best...

 Let the pictures tell the story.   These three pics were taken around Christmas...

   

And these were taken last week...

I have just finished a new facility along the same lines so this is the last day they will all be together - we don't want to hear complaints about overcrowding now do we?

A pumpkin story to keep me humble ..

.. happened when two years back I decided to plant pumpkins right alongside the house to keep an eye out for the monkeys which made it impossible where I had them before.   I was so in love with my pumpkin patch I couldn't stop taking pictures of it.

The leaves became like the seat of a chair so big, and eventually one couldn't see these stakes, the plants were so huge... but I didn't take a picture then because I was devastated...   Not a single pumpkin was developing on it...

Last year on the other hand, I decided to make camps in the chicken enclosure because they had decimated the entire camp although it was way bigger than the prescription for free range chickens.   The camps they didn't have access to quickly recovered and seeds left there from our kitchen scraps developed in the loose soil where they had also left their droppings which fed the soil.   This is half the crop of pumpkins we harvested there, where we hadn't cleared, hadn't planted, hadn't driven stakes into, hadn't done anything whatsoever to deserve the harvest ...

I think there's a lesson hiding in this tale somewhere....

I always believed that I couldn't grow vegetables.

Having been a successful grower of ornamental plants for many years, I had been unsuccessful with vegetables most of my life.   Some years back a neighbour's pensioned father worked here at the farm, and seeing my dismal attempt at growing a few veggies offered to do it for me, which task I gladly relinquished.   I observed what he did, and then the penny dropped.   He majored on compost.   Well-aged horse manure (any other would also do) was mixed into heaps of broken down humus found in the compost heaps on the farm.

It isn't so much that I didn't know that, or that I hadn't tried it... it was the copious amounts of the stuff that he used.   And the age.   Everything had been aged very well.   The mix was placed mostly above the level of the soil, and watered and planted.   Our annual rainfall is high, so in areas with less rainfall and especially sandy soil, building the beds up so would probably be counter-productive.

The veggies grew and the harvest came, and then so did the diseases and insects and that was when we crossed swords.   My pensioned helper didn't care how poisonous a substance was, and whether I even knew he had sprayed it on food I might harvest that weekend or not, as long as his veggies looked stunning he was happy.   My stomach turned and I became very suspicious of everything, not wanting to poison myself and my family.   We had many arguments and he disdainfully dismissed my notion of wanting my veggies to be chemical free.   It led to the parting of the ways, but I had learned.   Lots and lots and lots of organic material.   Therein lies the success of growing vegetables, and the phrase 'organic vegetables' jumped to mind.   I had an epiphany, the first of many:   The concept rises and falls on the strata they are planted in.

I abandoned the tainted plot and moved the vegetable project into a tunnel that had housed plants before, and where nothing had been planted in the ground.   The luxury market of ornamental plants was failing to deliver and we needed to diversify.   Tractor loads of compost was brought in and beds built up above soil level.   The structure of the soil itself had been compromised with compacting feet and heavy plants for years

so I had no confidence in it, preferring to raise the beds above it.   The first seedlings went inand in spite of a number of prophets of doom, we had a measure of success.   When disease hit, if I didn't have an organically sound manner of dealing with it, the plants were removed and discarded, the beds rebuilt and fresh  seedlings planted.

The second year it seemed as if the plants grew better and were more resistant to disease.   We had also physically dug up and eliminated cutworm in such large numbers they seemed to have been beaten, with a little resurgence now and again.   This didn't go down without losses, because it is only when you see a plant lying flat on the ground with no roots, that you know the cutworm is there.   Checking the beds first thing in the morning became the norm, because that is when you catch them just there, resting after their meal.

We started selling at a monthly farmer's market,

and also boxes of fresh veg to our home town of Barberton.    We called it Farm-in-a-box.

By the third year I knew it was not my imagination.   The vegetables just kept on improving, growing bigger and better, and more naturally disease resistant.   The soil had been conditioned over and over again without the digging and subsequent damage to the structure.   The more I planted the more I learned.   Not only are there earthworms that aerate the soil, that we all know exist where organic practices are observed.   There are also micro-organisms that tunnel around, making it possible for the little hair roots of the plants to follow where they have dug, all of which comes to naught if the soil is turned and dug over, let alone ploughed (my personal bugbear).

During the three years we were doing our trials and selling good vegetables already, we had a kindly rep from a chemical company regularly paying us visits and trying to convince us that if the container says you can safely eat the vegetables after such and such a number of days, it meant there was no residue of that chemical left on that plant after that time, or it was so insignificant it made no difference and would certainly not poison anyone ingesting it.   We didn't bite - pun unintended.

FJ found our rep standing at the entrance to a tunnel the one day, just looking.   When they had greeted, he said to FJ:   "You know son, I have been growing vegetables for 30 years in this valley, but I tell you the truth, I have never grown vegetables this good in all that time."

He hasn't been back.

Friends at last

Given my dog Varkie's run-in with the bush pigs last month, I have been very wary of him coming in contact with little miss piggy.   Varkie sleeps under my kitchen table at night and whenever I bring piglet out to sit with me at the TV he gets very excited but I won't have him getting excited around us, not knowing what that excitement can escalate to.

Well I finally decided to trust him, with excellent results ...

First meeting

The next pic was of him rolling over to allow her to sniff him all over, but the movement was too much for the picture to be any good...

 Driving him ever closer to his bed...

She then proceeded to the table where his bed is and he quickly took on a defensive position but at no stage did he seem aggressive 

 Is he going to allow her...?

 YES!!!

I am a proud mom.   My dog who I call Varkie (Piggy) and my piglet whom I should call Doggy...(?) 

Bragging rights ...

... to those who have the ability to puff themselves up to twice their normal size and show off tails and colourful feathers, and make loud noises to go with it...