We had a nice Xmas. Xmas Day itself was incredibly lazy. Our Xmas dinner is usually a very lavish affair planned with military precision. This year we were having, for the first time ever, home grown goose (more on that later). As usual there is no telling what the weather will do on the day. It may be so hot that having the oven on for a full roast is out of the question so salad and the BBQ would be the order of the day. Well Xmas morning we still couldn't decide what we wanted. In the end it was a bit of both. I was hoping that we could have our first feed of runner beans from the veggie plot but they were a few days off being ready. I made mango tiramasu as we had last year but it just didn't match the one we had in the bush at Lindani. Maybe it was the mangoes, I really don't know.
Xmas pressie wise we pushed the boat out and bought both the girls a netbook (mini laptops in case you don't know what they are). It was an extravagance but they really appreciated them. Harriette is off to uni in Feb and lugging her laptop around was really not going to be practical. We thought that we'd get her one and give Alice her laptop but that would not work as she would still need her laptop (the netbook does a lot less than a laptop), and, Alice uses Eric's laptop at home, which drives him mad. So, we pushed the boat out and bought them one each.
I bought Eric a remote controlled chopper. We had been to Paul (his business partner) and Jo's for dinner a few weeks before Xmas. Paul has one and it was great fun. Eric's is not working properly so I need to get it changed though. A job for the weekend.
I got a 16G iPod Nano from Eric. Now we had bought Alice one and when she had unwrapped it I looked at it and commented on how diddy it was and I much preferred my 5th generation (8G) one, though I had been saying that I should have got a 16G one when I bought it. Poor Eric, he listened to all this knowing he had bought me one. I felt like a heel when I unwrapped mine!!! However, I now love it! My only concern is it is so small I worry I'll loose it. Eric now has my old iPod so he's happy also. We tend to use them for listening to audiobooks. I am a great fan of audible.com and audible.co.uk.
I mentioned geese. Well, you may remember that we bought 4, many years ago, because I had been unable to get any goose for Xmas here. Well, they are not very good reproducers (I have blogged on the goslings in the past) but were up to 11 in numbers. Trouble is they were pretty feral, and had started grazing on the neighbours paddocks so we had to take action. I noticed that they had drifted towards the (long time empty) pig pens so I ushered them in and we had a couple of culling sessions (skip the rest of this paragraph if you're squeamish!). Rounding them up and catching them was easier than I thought. Armed with a goose we took them round the corner (I insisted they be out of sight of the others)and put their necks on a chopping block and chopped their heads off with an axe. I held and Eric chopped so I could looked away!! Trouble is, because I wasn't looking I did not take into account carotid arteries and direction of blood spurts! In fact, I had totally not even thought about spurting blood, so got a shock when it came at me!! I was better prepared for the next one. The next task was plucking. I had watch various Youtube videos on how to do this and we decided to wet pluck first time round. We had killed 2 first time and Harriette helped. I found goose feathers around the house for days afterwards. A few days later we did 5 and dry plucked outdoors!
The final result was rather skinny goosers. In future I think we will confine them and fatten before we kill. And we won;t be plucking on the 23rd December!!!
Another farming incident over Xmas was the arrival, and passing, of Freckles calf Merry. She arrived, (unassisted for the first time in 3 years) on 23rd December and was fine.
Saying Hello to my brother. (That's our house in the background.)
On 26th December we had Mom and Daddy over for the day. At lunchtime I noticed that Merry was still in the same position as she had been for several hours. I also hadn't seen her feed recently. I went down to investigate and found her listless and dehydrated. I came up to the house to defrost some colostrum to feed her and when Eric used the binoculars to look at her he saw an umbilical hernia (which was not there 5 mins earlier). I rang Richard and asked if I should reduce it and went down and spent about 40 mins doing the reduction. It stayed in place. I nursed this calf and got a feed into it. The next day I was sure it would be dead but it wasn't. However, it would not suck so I got a tube feed contraption from Richard and fed it. However, I decided later in the morning that I was not winning and got Eric to shot it and dispose of it down the offal hole (our deadstock home). All very sad. Funny thing was, Freckles, who is usually such a good Mom, just did not seem bothered! Almost like she knew she would not survive. Richard is convinced that Freckles udder will not cope with future calves so has recommended we dispatch her to market :-( I'm afraid he is right. It will be sad to see her go. Freckles was our first calf and Harriette's calf club calf.
On a happier note, and finally, (I must get up and go for a run before it gets too hot), Eric went fishing off Kawhia just before Xmas. Kawhia is the west coast whereas normally he fishes of Tauranga (east coast). Well, what a difference. They got their maximum catch in 2.5 hours. We have been enjoying kawai, snapper and gurnard since.
