I have been annoyed by the wise words in two recent newspaper articles about people moving to the country and setting up their idyllic “organic” lives with a lick, spit, and a wink. Again, they make it seem easy, and the articles are filled with smiling pictures of health looking people in their Sunday best.
It reminds me to remind you that this is not the truth. While living and working rurally is rewarding, it’s bloody challenging and frustrating.
When the pigs arrived on Christmas eve, they were housed in the chicken coop to start with. It’s a sizeable roomy affair with plenty of space for both species, which these days follow each other around like a well-oiled machine foraging for food.
Because the pigs moved into the chicken coop, the chickens, not liking this new community initiative by the “Ian City Council”, threw their eggs out of the laying stalls and protested.
They occupied the railing on the front deck and refused all attempts to be moved back into Chickencatraz. For nearly twelve weeks, different methods were employed to resolve the situation, during which time the pigs also refused to stay in their allocated area.
Despite the pigs being given a larger area to live and forage, Hutch insisted on busting through the fence time and again to get to the walnut tree. Of course, only Hutch is smart enough to get through, and Starsky is just smart enough to squeal at the top of his lungs to tell everyone it has happened and why the hell is he not allowed out as well?
Days pass with endless afternoon Zoom meetings filled with the background sound of screaming pigs. Add to this fact that I am trying not to die from COVID and, as such have not been to the Barber in town (a hotbed of sick school children, no doubt). I am starting to look like Grizzly Adams. I avoid mirrors.
I don’t know about you, but I always find this part of the year difficult. That somewhere moment between summer finishing or has it, and winter starting, oh no wait, summer is back, and then the clincher, daylight saving closing off.
Back to short, cold days, forgetting that winter itself is beautiful here, it’s the getting into and out of winter that sees endless grey days and wet weather. It’s depressing, and it’s tough to remain positive. Even the small things become far more challenging to start, though once you start, it’s ok.
Like the protests at parliament, the time comes for the rebel chickens to be returned to their coop. This is particularly true now that winter is coming, and the deck is no place to roost. Plus, the birds are messy. I swear they save all their shitting for nighttime.
If there is one thing that I have learned, anything you build on the farm never operates as intended the first time. This is a Farm Law. With this in mind, I reinforce the coop and then lure the chickens back in with food. I am sure that the chickens cannot get back in.
The pigs have other ideas. “Greedy as a pig” is an absolute truth, and they decide that a) that was their coop and b) they can see the chicken feed in it. Within two hours, I wander past to check, and sure enough, both of the fat bastards are in the coop, have eaten all the feed, and drank all the water.
There is no remorse on their part, and it takes time to get them out from where they must have just barrelled through the fence. Thankfully, the chickens appear to have missed the pig sized hole in the fence and are happily wandering around making chicken noises. I think they like the pigs because they dig up the ground and uncover the bugs.
After more running repairs and the overzealous use of stakes, I wait for the subsequent inevitable invasion of pigs or escape of chickens. Sure enough, the following day, while I am trying to get my head around another day of office work, a chicken wanders around the corner of the house.
Both pigs are back in the chicken coop and yelling at me because they squeezed in and can’t get back out so easy. I wonder about leaving them there as a life lesson, but I need to feed the chickens. After getting them out again, the walls of Chickencatraz are once again bolstered so that now it looks like I am building a replica refugee camp shack on a quiet lane in rural New Zealand.
The mice war escalated to nuclear weapons this week. The mice have invaded the house over the past few weeks, and despite now killing several dozen, they still seem to reappear magically. Freya, the hunting dog, has caught a few of them, and where the little monsters have eaten a hole in the wall under the kitchen bench, a stench now emanates. They also ate the dishwasher hose, which is currently inoperable.
Several traps are laid out behind the kitchen cabinetry, and I catch, kill two in quick order. K helps me get the nuclear option trap into the ceiling space. A gas-powered trap that kills a mouse or rat spits its carcass out, then resets for the next one. Of course, because it has technology in it, it keeps telling us that it has killed something even though it hasn’t. Technology is unreliable. But, when we were testing it, five mice were killed in quick succession.
At 2:30 in the morning, Freya is going mad. It’s clear this is mouse playtime, and it is her job to remove the interlopers regardless of the hour. The mouse seems to have learned a new trick and one of the standard traps is missing come morning. Our theory is that a tail was stuck in it, and the mouse has dragged it off. Despite using a torch and looking for it, I can’t find it anywhere.
Unfortunately, I can’t use chemical weapons (poison) against the mice, or I am likely to poison the dogs. The conventional war continues.
With winter fast approaching, the glamping site is still not complete. It requires the iron laying in the paddock to be put on the roof. This does not seem to be a big job, but it is not something that we know how to do without potentially creating a second refugee shack-like structure on the laneway or creating watertight problems.
Nor does the paddock have a gate. Both seem like simple things to resolve, but they are not. They require someone who knows what they are doing and is there to do them. We’ve had another two weeks of downtime on the build, and nothing can be done until the roof goes on because shit will get wet.
The law of unintended consequences deals another annoyance to the work. A telecommunications cable allegedly runs through our paddock on the site. Despite removing the gate, which is a quick job, putting the new entrance in requires us to figure out if the cable is still active.
After signing up for yet another online service, where you put the location of your site into, and the system magically searches for underground services, we are absolutely none the wiser as to whether this is an actual cable or a decommissioned one.
However, something in this magical system notifies the local Council that we will be working on the roadside. We aren’t; it’s set well back from the road, and the Council informs us that we need a roadside safety plan approved by the Corridor Access Coordinator. THIS APPARENTLY CAN NOT BE UNDONE because I have used the magical system. I now need a traffic plan when I don’t.
There is no escaping this. After contacting the Council, I have to write a Health & Safety strategy and submit it along with the work’s dates. I don’t know when the contractors are coming back, so I make up some dates—the dates pass. The system demands to know when this work is starting. I make up more dates. The demands from the magical system are now up to once a day. It relentlessly emails me with threats every day. Every day I make up more dates.
And of course, because we tried to build something, it ended up costing twice what we wanted it to despite budgeting twice what we thought it would cost to start with. There is an imutable law of the Universe that says whatever you budget it will cost twice as much. We should have just started with a budget of two dollars.
I built a temporary gate from an electric wire and plugged it into the fence. It’s more to keep the dogs in when K is working on-site as apparently a family of race car drivers live at the end of the road, and despite a posted 40k speed limit, these rally drivers tear past at a great rate of knots. I would lose my mind if a dog were hit. Not to mention the regular farm traffic and large trucks that trek up and down.
Perhaps the Council knew something; maybe they knew that Possum Bourne’s spirit is alive and well at the end of Waihakeke Road.
I have to say, the Council have been great to deal with. If this were a significant metro city, it would’ve taken six months and cost $5,000 to get a plan over the line, no doubt.
K’s workload is now massive, and even though the days are getting shorter daylight-wise, they are long for her work-wise. Of course, my contract work has chosen to start getting busy (as it does in colder months), and my time is limited in terms of helping. Not that I have any idea what I am doing.
If it sounds like I’m moaning, I am. I have also chosen this time to give up smoking because a) it’s riotously expensive and b) despite all the challenges we are facing, I don’t want to die before I get to truly enjoy the fruits of our labour.
Sometimes, a break would be the best thing, but that doesn’t happen easily on a farm. It means someone has to come and mind it while you are gone. That costs money, and you have to find someone who knows what they are doing.
Now, if you will excuse me, they’ve been cropping down the lane all day, and because the culvert hasn’t had the stones placed on the edges yet, I need to see if the dozens of twenty-tonne tracks have destroyed that as well.
I promise I’ll be more positive next time. I’ll write about the beauty of autumn or some nonsense. How my organic chillis are doing wonderfully, and all the other projects I dreamed of starting when I moved here are making a million dollars.
We’re still learning, everything is healthy, and we have food. These are all essential things.
Right now, it’s time for the pub.
Starksky and Hutch...I chortled.