The lack of backyard chronicles of late in no way reflects a lack of action, lovely chaos, yet more explosive growth and motion that is happening in the real world… this real world of the big backyard and the bigger backyard beyond this here farm… I was clearly premature in announcing a settling down of energy and a return to the routine activites of farmlife post Camp Camp in my last update.

Since then there have been yet more visitors (the lovely Neha from San Francisco is having a surreal rural life experience with is for a month), a trip to the Big Smoke (wild country grrls go nuts in the Big City), road trips with crazy storms dogging our every move… camping in the rain, eschewing camping in the hail for the questionable relative comfort of a cabin in a dodgy caravan park, swims in hot mineral baths and driving driving driving. Kate, our lovely farm caretaker, caretook dogs, poultry, goats and cows in the unceasing rain that is our lives. It is something of a big deal to be able to get away from the farm to consume Other Culture, the other one that we came here from…

The going away from it and going back as a visitor to it makes the experience of the inner urban environment new and fresh in it own grimy kind of way. Meeting new people who are doing the city in a Different way is refreshing. We stayed at a large sharehouse that spawns great community activities like bike clubs and community cafes and queer events like queeruption and makes spaces in the city for hanging out and doing *stuff* and the urban gardening glitter faerie will be making her home and garden there… she’s talking about making a herb spiral in the central part of the yard, which is currently inhabited by many many bikes in various states of dis/repair, a trampoline, some overlooked plants, a large table we found on the footpath in glebe, many couches, compost in the shade, some wormfarms that need an overhaul and other odds and ends, leftovers of projects past and ongoing. The trampoline is the hub of all social and solitary activity. I want one on the farm. Charlene is brave and wild and jumps very high and does all configurations of gyrations on it…

So I feel after the heady heights of trampoline fun in the city like i’ve crash landed back into Life.  

Right now the grass is thigh high and there’s a kind of grotesque and abject fecundity everywhere, worms crawling around inside, the really blood red ones. Whole cities of termites building inside a cupboard full of sheets, where there was not a one just a week ago. Mold growing on surfaces that I never imagined could support mold growth. everything from outside wants in. Rats, flies, crawlies and creepies, frogs and beetles, cockroaches in their millions… and the usual quota of fucking huge spiders…

Everyone is talking about it. The weather. Small talk has become big talk. Predictions of the Big Flood to come, bigger than ‘54. Due February 12th apparently. The Bureau predicts rain for the forseeable future. I am going crazy.The animals are bedraggled. Their bedding is an abomination and i can’t do anything about it til the rain stops, or relaxes, please! Tashi is standing on top of her copper mountain in the rain. Tippi (Dexter cow, Hinimoa’s daughter) has run away and won’t come home. The farmer next door cut her horns off. I think he plans to sell her. We went to see him to try and get his help to retrieve her but i think he was hiding inside his house when we called by refusing to come out. I believe he was in there. We left a note asking for his help but so far we’ve heard nothing from him. We nearly had her home this afternoon but she’s got the spooks and tosses her head and runs off if we try to force her to go anywhere. It’s this inch by inch process of luring her with lucerne closer and closer to the bottom gate, which we can hopefully shut behind her… Hinimoa is a bit beside herself and lonely and calls Tippi from the fenceline… Mamma chook was nearly killed today. She’s living in our bedroom in a cardboard box with food and water and towels for warmth and lots of quiet. She won’t uncurl her feet to stand properly and is doing a little bit of falling over on her side, which is disturbing. I hope it’s all just shock and that tomorrow morning we’ll find her being normally chook-like and she can live out her days scratching in the dirt and having dustbaths (tho *dust* does seem like a far fetched concept in this endless wetness that is the world… ) I could not allow an ignominious end to such a stalwart broody… The calves, Little Grrl and Frenchie, are just beautiful. There is more grass than they could ever dream of eating and they are fat and happy, growing into the most beautiful creatures, and so lovely, living just close by us all the time, nudging us with their noses, gentle big doglike things… They have not a care, and the rain does not bother them one bit.

My gardens are inpenetrable. The cucumbers have exploded. The corn is done. The tomatoes are rotting on the vines. There are greens, but they need sun. The beans are vicious, tendrils reaching out to grab you as you walk by. I can’t find the spinach in the projectile lateral explosion of nasturtium growth, so recently well decimated by the Dome chooks…

I realise this is a chaotic post, but i guess life feels a bit like that sometimes, and that isn’t all bad. Despite fences and neat cornrows and delineations between animal and human, between wild nature and a kind of civilised world (I have a farmhouse and i live behind its doors. Nature is beyond the doors), sometimes this all just defies containment. At the moment these fickle physical delineations are all a little blurry (we are all of the earth anyway), as the rain falls inside the house, as wood cracks and swells and doors rot away, and nature moves inside and we move a little bit outside.

I’ll leave my wild ramblings there for tonight. Sense may return at a later date, but hopefully not.

See you in the backyard again soon.

Love feral farmgrrl V xx

EDIT:

I almost forgot… there will be some changes at the farm. Beginning on February 11th Matiatia will no longer be running a guest facility. (I think i spoke about that aspect of the farm in the very first post…) So there will be new farm family moving into the previously guest-inhabited cottage and the into the bails, which is the renovated old dairy. This will make a considerable difference to our lives, we think. It’s odd having guests in your home all the time, ones that aren’t friends or family… Zhane, who is previously pictured in the unusually sunny backyard, will be living in the cottage, and a writer called Jax will move into the bails. Their lives will become part of the backyard, and they may pop up from time to time. Our old housemate Deb, who’s been in the UK since the backyard has been up and running, will be back home by the end of February, and our raggle taggle farm family will be complete…

FROM THE BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY (The BOM’s distinctions between rain, chance showers and rain periods are lost on me, since it NEVER FUCKING STOPS!):

NORTHERN RIVERS

Warning summary at 0948 hours :
Flood warning for the Richmond/Wilsons River.

Lismore:      Rain.

Lismore:       Rain periods, chance thunderstorm.

Lismore:       Rain periods, chance thunderstorm.

Lismore:       A few showers.