With Niall staying for a week after New Year it seemed like a good opportunity to knock off another item on Karen’s to do list - new yards. Much like the stables, I think once these are done we’ll find a lot more uses for them than just putting horses in them now and then.To that end I’ve used 5 150×50 rails (6×2 for those in the US) on 1.3m high posts at close spacing. They should contain the horses just fine, but also cows and sheep if they need to come in.

There are four 4m x 4m pens opening onto a working area. Here they are without fronts.

And a larger 12m x 7m holding pen for mobs or mare and foal etc.

Finally, the pens with fronts, just awaiting their gates. Once they’re finished in the next few days the yards should prove quite handy (and much more convenient than the old cattle yards down at the front of the property).

I couldn’t resist some gloating over these. The Xmas ham was pretty tasty. BBQ ham steaks? Sensational.

Having neighbours you can trade stuff with is great. We needed to get a race widened and smoothed out, a neighbour needed some hay - a solution presented itself. Last year when getting our hay raked we discovered the contractor couldn’t get through this narrow spot, so wider it goes.

Here’s the finished product after a couple of hours work. It looks much more passable and now I can get the rest of the fencing through this area done.

To get some grass growing on the bare earth as soon as possible, I spread half a dozen bales of last season’s hay over the ground. The seed drops out in the process and the hay acts as a mulch keeping moisture in and birds off the germinating seed.

It’s great that hay paid for the work to be done and provided the replacement grass seed too - all to make this year’s hay cutting easier - a nice circle.

With so many family and friends visiting over the holidays we thought it smarter to cut our ham in half so it would last longer. This turned out to be a wise idea once we started eating it. This is the 2nd half of our 8.4kg ham from our own pigs. It tasted as good as it looks.

Knowing that we gave our pigs the best life possible and a dignified end made the ham taste even better. Here they were a few months ago.

We’re looking forward to another exciting year on the farm, filled with discovery, fun and delicious food (shhh, don’t tell the cows). We’ve still got a way to go before our lifestyle is truly self sufficient, but the journey is certainly proving to be enjoyable.

I came out to the garden this afternoon to find a swarm conveniently hanging on a tree lucerne branch. Bees usually swarm around Spring/Summer for a lot of different reasons but in this case I was just happy to have them so close and easy to capture. It’s a small swarm - maybe 3-5000 bees.

Before bees swarm they gorge themselves with honey so are actually very docile (despite the term swarm). I was wearing my bee gear just to be safe, but I managed to remove the branch and drop it into a swarm box without a single bee coming away from the swarm.

Here is their new home for the next few days until I can merge them in with the smaller of our two hives. I filled the box with new comb for them to live on and removed the branch. You can see workers already starting to forage.

I had to make up a sugar feeder to keep the bees fed until they had gathered enough honey for themselves. Because they were on new wax foundation they will take a good few days to build up enough space to store honey. I wasn’t expecting a swarm to arrive so this MacGyver feeder is made from two takeaway lids taped together with one end cut away. It will sit on top of the frames in the swarm box.

Here are our two hives on a sunny day with very busy bees foraging and returning to the hive. It can be a bit daunting if you’re not used to bees, but these gals (workers are female) are far too busy foraging to bother about a human standing nearby.

A couple of months back I was lucky enough to win an Arduino starter kit from the folk at Mindkits. With the Christmas break upon us we’ve finally had some time to get our first project underway - a wireless water tank level gauge.

Our main water tank for the farm is out of view of the house so a visual water level gauge wouldn’t be much use. Most of the time we can only tell when the tank is empty the hard way, although I’ve added some plumbing to the tank so we always have some water in reserve.

The first task was to find a simple, robust way of physically measuring the water level. I got an idea on this blog about using a string of resistors on a pole that short out below the water level, giving you a variable resistance that can be read by the arduino. In theory, all you needed was a long enough string of resistors running down a substrate, with a return path for the current.

Here’s Dave with the first prototype to prove the concept - resistors soldered together and hot-glued onto a piece of polybutylene plumbing pipe. There is a piece of nichrome wire hot-glued on the back to complete the circuit.

Dave and I breadboarded this prototype and it worked! By worked, I mean we got varying numbers returned by the arduino as the gauge went up and down in the water. We still had to determine if the numbers meant anything, but I felt that part of the process sat more with Dave as the software guy than me as the fabricator :-) The arduino is the little PCB attached to the blue USB cable.

The next step was a full-size prototype (although it will probably become the actual gauge). Once the tank was measured I cut some aluminium channel to length and mounted a longer piece of polybutylene down the channel. 20 1k resistors got soldered together and hot-glued down the length of the pipe. This should give us 5% increments of water level. I added cable ties as a backup to the hot glue in case the water in the tank made it too brittle to stay attached. In this picture you can see the leads attached for easier testing.

The final step in the prototyping was to take the contraption outside to a water tank near the house to test and calibrate the gauge in a real situation.The resistance varied as the gauge was submerged more or less in the water. We collected values at 0%, 25%, 50% and 100% submersion and the resistance values that came back are very close to a linear relationship (close enough to assume it’s our measuring that’s out). This means we can interpolate a fairly granular level of  water measurement from the resistance levels returned.

There are a few more steps in the project now:

Wireless comms - we’re looking at using the farm’s existing 802.11 wireless network to send data from the gauge approx 200m back to the house.

Solar power - the arduino will happily run on 12v DC so a small solar cell and a car battery should keep it running 24/7

Software - Dave has volunteered to write a web app to present the data in a prettier form.

Phase 2: once we’ve got the gauge running well, we can look at future features that go beyond passive monitoring like alarms based on water level, auto-starting the water pump, calculating flow rate and tripping alarms or a shut-off servo if the flow is too high for too long (indicating a pipe break) - the possibilites are endless.

We are in the middle of a scheduled power outage thanks to our lines company. The last “planned” outage for maintenance we were supposed to have never happened, so I was a bit blase when the letter arrived announcing today’s outage. Someone new must be in charge because at 1:00pm exactly our power went off.

Thankfully things haven’t changed too much this afternoon. We still have the range going to cook lunch, make cups of tea and keep us warm.

My laptop has been going for an hour and a half so far on battery and still seems to have plenty of juice left.

Our little UPS is doing admirably and with only the small load of our router and wireless internet dish it is still going strong 90 minutes into the outage.

So all in all - a good test and a nice reminder that life without electricity (for a short while anyway) is quite bearable.

I don’t usually get so excited about a bit of fencing but this one has been on my to-do list since we arrived. No more will helpers (or us) need to climb the electric fence to get to the back garden.

Here’s the before pic of the fence line we used to traverse regularly.

Like most projects, it ends up being more complex than planned. I had to re-strain and secure all the existing wires to the new posts. The line of shade cloth keeping the chickens out relied on good fence tension.

I snapped this little guy this afternoon on one of the tree lucerne. There are vast armies of bumble bees collecting pollen at the moment and very few honey bees. In fact I’ve seen exactly one honey bee so far this Spring. That will change when our new colonies arrive in November but until then I’m glad someone’s making use of the flowers. Check out the very full pollen sac on his leg.