Rainbow carrots are back!!

Hooray for the very first bunch of rainbow carrots of the season.

I know they are small and not all that impressive but we are thrilled!! This bunch got three cheers. We've been waiting a very long time for our own carrots this season and because of all the floods they are two months later than usual.

Late but still delicious. This bunch were gobbled up less than a minute after the photo shoot.

Actually, that's not entirely true...some were set aside a few minutes to decorate lunch.

The top orchard.

Ten years ago we bought this farm off a guy called Tom and his wife Lois. When Tom and Lois first moved here about 15 years before that, they hadn't been too sure of what to do with this place, so Tom made an orchard up near the house and planted one of every fruit tree he thought might do well and then watched them to see what would happen.

He planted a few varieties of plum, lots of different apples, some pears, a quince, cherries, apricots, lemons, mulberries and peaches.

After a few years he saw that this area is not suitable for growing peaches and apricots and lemons because it gets too cold but he also saw that the apples thrived.

So Tom set about planting an apple orchard and while they lived here he grew and sold certified organic apples.

In the ten years since we have been here we have planted about five hundred more apple trees and lots of other fruit trees too. These apples are the working apples. The farm fruit trees. But the top orchard is a bit like the home orchard. It doesn't always get as well maintained as the other orchards and often the fruit doesn't look as good and the birds and kangaroos get a lot but its always worth a walk through in Autumn to see what's around.

Today we found lots and lots of apples. Most are spotty and starchy still but we'll keep checking them now and pick them as they ripen.

We picked the last of the plums, including this love heart one.

A crate of quinces.

A crate of Pepper.

Jazzy upside down fruit.

And loads and loads of pears.

Its been a horrible year for the farm apples with the humidity and mould, but somehow these fruit trees on the top of the hill haven't done too badly. I'm not going to question why, I'm just going to enjoy them.

Have a wonderful week.

Puppies.

I know I haven't posted on this blog for a month, far longer than I had intended.

But do you mind if I start from here? Is it OK if I skip over the past few months that should have been full of vegies and harvesting and colour and excitement but weren't and start again from now?

The puppies are almost twelve weeks old now.

At six weeks old they moved from our back deck to an enclosure on the other side of our house. A couple of chooks and then some roosters were introduced bit by bit.

And then when their Mum Willow looked exhausted all the time and couldn't escape them, they took their first car trip down to the paddock and joined their Dad Nick and a flock of 500 chookies.

They have been running and chasing and playing and wrestling ever since.

They are getting a bit rough for Miss Pepper though, bowling her over and scratching her face. They must sense that we call her Puppy and want to play and wrestle with her too.

But for now its safer to play from this side of the fence.

The first puppy to leave us last week was a girl. The new owner is a ten year old boy who has started his own chook business. he decided to call her Joey which made me happy as that's the name we gave her sister when she was first born.

Its exciting and a bit sad to think that one day the others will be off on their own Maremma journeys. I hope when the time comes there will be less tears from the Farmer girls than last week.

So that's it, I'm back.

See you soon.