Dust, Stunts, and Feed on the Farm
As a performer, the more I scare the stunt-coordinator, the better - Zoe Bell
Hold on tight, readers. This is a stream of consciousness article, so god only knows where we will end. Probably not with a psychotic monkey wielding a bottle of Tequila, but anything is possible. I’m also drinking beer and listening to an appalling Spotify List called Country Rock Classics. I tried to get Spotify to play me songs about tractors, but that was just a disaster.
A lot happens in a week, so let me bring you up to date. Yes, I know you are curious about the stunt comment, read on, read on.
I took this picture last night; it is one of the weird weather phenomena we get here. It’s raining across the road, but not on our paddocks. You can walk over there and stand half in the rain and have out of it. We’ve seen it before, it is pretty strange, and it can go on for some time.
Needless to say that we were running out of grass pretty quickly with no substantial wet since December. This meant that we needed to start packing hay for feed and all the other supplementary bits you need.
We buy hay from a good friend who lives about 15 minutes away. He was baling Saturday, and we took the mighty ute with trailer and headed up there in the hottest part of the day. He was baling in one of his paddocks, and we set to humping bales in thirty-two degrees celcius (that’s about 90F for you people who drive on the wrong side of the road.)
Meanwhile, David was driving past us every minute or so in his tractor air-conditioned to a balmy eighteen degrees celsius. I’m pretty sure he laughed a couple of times at the gringos sweating their arse off in the heat.
Then, a slower drive back with a load of hay. Everyone stays away from you because the grass is fresh, and all the loose bits fly off and get stuck in people’s car grills. Saturday is overstayer (visitors from Wellington) day, and you could feel the angst as the line of traffic grew, but what the hell, there’s no rush.
Rinse and repeat the process, and you get the idea.
The hay lay flat for a couple of days because it sometimes builds up heat and spontaneously bursts into a fire if you stack it when it’s too fresh. No one wants that. We finished off the day under the trees drinking too much beer with a couple of mates, along with an experimental rolled lamb meal. By experimental, I had a recipe in my head that seemed like it would work, and I experimented on K and the guests. No one died, so I passed the test.
Of course, once you have got hay in, then the farm gods laugh at you and send rain. So today, we’ve had more rain than we have in the last two months. A storm that was due to pass south of us seems to have set its sights on the valley over the next three days with heavy rain warnings out. Honestly, this weather service is about as accurate as a Balinese watch. Even Ken Ring gets it more accurate, and he’s basically just a mad scientist.
Still, late last night, when the rain finally crossed the road into our paddocks, we went and stood in it for a while. This is a necessary sacrifice to the weather gods who want to ensure that you are suitably grateful for the rain.
The flip side of the rain is that project glamping will likely be set back from further work this weekend. As you will recall, most of the glamping site has arrived now and needs to be assembled. It’s sitting in a paddock, in the rain of course, and we had hoped to get started this weekend. But it’s going to be pissing down.
As I have written before, farm life is a series of decisions made in the moment dictated by whatever the hell the weather wants to do—and dictated by when contractors turn to work, who are in turn dictated to by the weather.
K fired the contractors this week. Gently. After being ghosted for two months, it was necessary. It’s now also essential for her to find alternative contractors, which, thanks to locals night at the pub, looks like she has secured. Never underestimate the power of drinking on Wednesday night in a country pub and the connections it makes. They are starting to become like family. Shame none of the farmer’s needs a data centre built; otherwise, we could trade equally.
We’ve agreed that we’ll do it ourselves if we can’t find someone to put together the outpost building in the next couple of days. That dear reader will be hilarious because I don’t know one end of a hammer from the other. But fuck it, that’s why we came here, to learn new things make mistakes, and K is far more practical than me. This means I’ll be the guy getting shouted out to pick items up, put them down, and hold them just so. Fine with me.
Now, on account of a paddock not performing its grass duties at all well this year, K has resorted to hard science and sent off a bag of soil samples to figure out what’s going on. This also necessitated buying a Special Tool, another weapon in the farm arsenal.
Seriously, if you buy a farm, you need a budget of $25,000 just for tools, I swear it. Probably a bit more. Good luck buying a farm these days; the banks won’t touch them with a barge pole, on the account that all their analysts live in Auckland and wouldn’t know a sheep if it bit them on the arse.
The paddock may need to be reseeded and K is doing a huge amount of research on what to put in there, who knew how many different kinds of grass there are? It needs to be something that complements the rotational grazing and tough, given how the climate here is rapidly changing.
We really don’t want to be using synthetics or chemicals, making the process no doubt more complex and more expensive. But grass is what you need, and this is another learning experience about what goes on in the soil.
As most of you know, aside from managing the farm, K is a stuntwoman. Work has slowed thanks to that virus we don’t speak about, but training is always necessary.
K is skilled in armed and unarmed combat, horse work, stunt car driving, falls, wirework, and a whole range of other mad skills.
I went to the last training days she attended in rural Auckland with Dayna Grant and had a ball. Dana runs a stunt school, and K was up there learning horse stunts, as then Prime’s Lord of the Rings was about to start filming.
K trained under Dana and Karis McCabe, pictured above, a member of the UK’s Devil’s Horsemen, the stunt team that did all the horse work on Game of Thrones.
Karis and K spent quite a lot of time together in the last training camp, roman riding, formation riding, and a host of other precision work. There is nothing like watching three half-tonne horses roman riding at speed, so close to each other, the rider’s legs touch.
Training days are all serious from the stunties perspective, while I saw a different angle. One training, stunties revert to this child-like state and watching them run around with wooden swords, bows, and leaping on (and deliberately falling off) horses, was entertaining.
I’m to be roped in as stunt coordinator here before she heads up in a couple of weeks. She’s back in training, blowing out the cobwebs, and Fizz (one of the horses) is to be coopted into some stunt work.
That’s for next week when the dry is back. Stunt saddles will come out, big fall mats, body armour, helmet, and safety gear all deployed. Fizz doesn’t know what he is in for.
No doubt, the spa pool will also be deployed to soothe the aching muscles and wash away the inevitable bruises. Gin as well has been known to help.
In other news, I have joined a programme through Substack, the platform these articles are written on, which joins together common writers for a month-long programme of work.
My group is a bunch from all over the world with commonality around rural life and environmental “stuff.” It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, they seem to look like a bunch of good bastards1, and I’m enjoying their articles.
I will list all their substacks in the next few weeks, but if you want a taste, I am getting a lot of amusement from RealBestLife.
Until next time, take it easy, turn your face into the rain, make sure you drink plenty of Double Brown and get your hay in for summer (when it comes back.)
PS The new contractor has arrived. And he likes Double Brown. Perfect.
This is a compliment my international readers, a genuine Kiwi one.