Sitting in the clouds

It turns out the land we are building on is in a cloud forest. How cool is that? In the evening after a rainy day the clouds settle and disperse over the hills and it looks amazing. At the moment it is quite mild so you can just stand outside and breathe in the atmosphere. This is Steven enjoying the view:





(those are our barn poles waiting to go up in the foreground). And this is my lovely husband:



We've started a new fence that stretches across the top part of the land. The idea is that it marks a boundary between our house area and then other/farm area below. You can just see the fence posts in the image below. Rhys from next door put them in using his tractor, with Steven's help. Infact you can assume from now on that any tricky farm type work that takes place on the land has been done by Rhys. Even if you thought that it was me who put all those fence posts in...



Okay this is slightly freaky. I'm new to owning chickens, and our chickens seem perfectly normal and healthy in most respects, but surely all chickens are not this needy. This is what happens with ours - I feed them (in their coop) in the morning, then they peck about a bit, I go inside the tent... and they stand outside. For as long as I'm in there. And they don't just stand around - they STARE at me. All day. Is this normal? Sometimes I look around and they pretend to be cleaning themselves. Otherwise they just stand there.. and stare in:



Shooing them away or throwing things at them doesn't work because they just pop right back - they don't seem to learn like dogs or cats. Oh and the other day it was pouring with rain, and rather than go and hang out in their coop, they stood outside staring at me IN THE RAIN! They were soaked through. I felt guilty which was silly because they are there of their own free will!

Very odd. When I'm gone they behave like normal chickens and peck about at things. And I probably need to point out that I'm gone most of the day doing things.

Last weekend we hired a rotary hoe to dig our vegetable garden. I assumed as a machine I would simply stand back and let it do all the work. Its the 21st century after all! Unfortunately that wasn't the case and you need arms of steel to operate the hoe for more than about 10 minutes. Which was as long as I lasted. Luckily Steven came to my rescue (after a morning of pouring concrete into the barn pole holes), and he spent the next 3 hours rotary hoeing our veg patch. I was on hand with my camera to record things. Oh, thats Steven in the far distance doing all the work. And on my head there you can see my makeshift cap. It was soooo sunny on Saturday.



This morning I made up for my lack of work on Saturday - I had to empty the barn pole holes (that the giant corkscrew made) of all the rain that had filled them up over the last few days before the council inspector arrived. Steven has a new job in town. I tied some rope to a bucket and hauled out the water and did that for about 3 hours. There are 17 barn holes and each hole contained about 10 bucket loads. Ow! luckily we passed the inspection, possibly because I looked so bedraggled by the time the inspector arrived.

I'll leave you with a photograph of Steven looking out over the sea at the peninsula on Sunday. Its either pouring with rain, stormy or very very sunny here!