Our not so wee foal posing for the camera. You’d never know she had knee surgery or weeks of physio.

You can tell it’s organic – there are weeds in the background. We had this with a delicious cheese sauce for dinner about ten minutes after this photo was taken.

We had spent the afternoon planting and the wind was picking up so I put some straw bales on edge along the row to protect the larger bean seedlings.

The smaller seedlings were quite happy nestled down in the wells we created in the mulch.

Karen is quite pleased with this harvest – mainly because she got to it before the chickens did.

Daniel and Kelly helping out in the (so far) chicken proof garden.

Karen showing one way of planting basil seeds between the tomatoes. I’m sure there are others, but they wouldn’t be as fun to photograph.

Here’s the end result. Half the beds planted up, composted and mulched. Off to a promising start for Spring.

I asked the butcher to leave our bacon loins whole this time so we could slice our own. Sometimes you just need stupidly thick slabs of bacon-steak. Now we can slice it how we like it, thanks to a smart TradeMe purchase by Daniel and Kelly. This piece is about a third of the loin, cut into a more manageable chunk for the slicer.

And the sliced bacon, proving it wasn’t all sliced into half-inch steaks.

We had blazing sunshine this morning, now it’s snowing this afternoon. While living in a winter wonderland is lovely, it’s quite cold right now. These pics are taken from inside – if you want exterior shots feel free to come over and grab them yourself :-)

The lawn and surrounding paddocks.

The car in the process of disappearing.

The back garden…snow peas anyone?

You can tell it’s winter on the farm because the old and precious ponies get pampered in the stables at night. This is early on a sunny morning as I come to take them out to their paddock for the day. Daemar and Simone have it pretty easy if you ask me.

Here’s the pile of sawdust we’ll get through this winter. The reward for my shovelling sawdust in and poop out is a huge pile of compost for the gardens. They’re not really pooing in my clean stables, they are producing a valuable resource. That’s what I tell myself as I’m mucking out in the morning :-)

These ten beauties are our new beef calves. They are Angus Charolais cross and should prove to be both chunky and delicious in another 12 months or so.

I was hunting through the recipe books for potato recipes as we seem to be eating them for every other meal to get through the glut (it’s a tough job eating seasonally and local, but someone’s got to do it). Frittata caught my eye and as I worked my way throught it I realised we had every ingredient grown right here. Potatoes, sprouting broccoli, eggs, spring onion, parsley and even feta all from the farm. Here it is just before going into the oven. We’ve started measuring these meals in food metres, not miles.