Lots seems to have happened this week, from trying to rescue wildlife to attending The Rusty Rattlers event at a local race course. Rusty Rattlers are a group of old farm machinery enthusiasts, they collect and eventually restore tractors, stationery engines and well any old farm machinery. Once a year, over a weekend, they invite anyone who has an old tractor to take part in a tractor trek which involves 3 hours of driving around quite country roads... can you imagine this happening in the UK! Followed on the Sunday with a tractor pull, also on offer a sausage sizzle, car boot and a quilters and spinners shed. The later was (not surprisingly) very inspiring, beautiful hand made items for sale, along with locally spun alpaca wool, all of which made it very difficult for me to leave the shed once I was in there. The ladies were also offering a chance to have a go at spinning... well how could I resist and anyway I think it would have been rude to refuse. They were very patient and in the end I think I managed to produce quite a fine looking fairly smooth thin dread lock!
This has inspired me to get my act together, dust off the wheel and make contact with the local spinning and weaving group... more on that to follow shortly.
Back to the real rusty rattlers, All of these tractors and dozers had a go at pulling a sledge loaded with weights.
As Wallace would say 'It was a grand day out' and so nice to sit in the sun, listening to all these old engines and the oily smells that go with them. I bet when these were new no one could have even imagined the comforts that would come with our modern farm machinery, GPS, air-conditioned cabs complete with radios, amazing.
On our way home I was amazed to see a stubble burn, something which has been banned in the UK for a very long time. But here at the end of the fire season some farmers still carry on the age old tradition of clearing the land.
And so to the block........
Our beautiful Nerines have started to make an appearance... well there have been two lots of flowers and now the leaves are on their way. So hopefully this time next year the block will have them coming up all over the place.
I've spent some time with my Veg Bed, weeding, encouraging the veggies to grow and sitting on the bench beside it. I noticed quite a lot of aphids and a lonely ladybird doing its best to reduce the numbers and decided these lovely predators needed a shelter.
So cut the ends off of one small water bottle, cut some bamboo to a slightly smaller length, drilled them out and firmly stuffed what was left of the bottle with them. Wired the whole thing to one of the posts... now fingers crossed the ladybirds will find it an attractive DesRes.
It was while sitting on the bench I noticed (well it is very hard to ignore the loud squawk) three Sulpher Crested Cockatoos drinking from the nearby water trough. One of them was very fluffed up and and quiet and seemed to be being looked after by the other two. A little while later I noticed they were feeding the fluffed up one.
But something was not quite right, it seemed a little on the large size to be a youngster. After a call to the vets and with instructions to bring it in Rick donned the heavy duty leather gauntlet gloves, armed with a sack and a box slowly made his way to the poorly one. It was by this time on it's own and seemed very vulnerable on the ground. Without much bother Rick first covered it with the sack (great way to quieten birds) and then very gently put it in the box.
The vet said they'd keep an eye on it over night and if it fared well they would hand it over to a rescue group who would nurture it back to health and then release it back into the wild. Sadly it got worse and they had to put it down.
I find it quite remarkable that the bond between these cockatoos is so strong they try and look after their sick ones.
Life is always a circle and nature is always in balance......
The next day I stumbled across these very strange looking things, I first thought they were some sort of native plant and asked Rick if he'd ever seen anything like it. As it turned out they were what was left of the chrysalis of a very large moth... we think it is a Lunar Moth but we're not certain.
And then I spotted these three basking in the Autumn sun and thought they'd be a great way to finish this week.
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