• With a few piglets to sell I figured Gumtree.com was the way to go. I put together a beautiful advert, explaining our meat-raising philosophy and the benefits of the animals we raise, spanning several painstakingly written paragraphs. Nothing. I changed it a little to hit more selling points. Nothing. On Linhda’s advice, I dropped it to 20 words – pigs, age, breed, price, location. All sold inside of 24 hours.

  The moral? Know your target audience…

• Had a HUGE farm weekend. Sold all of our excess weaner piglets in one go to a guy who didn’t even haggle. Got The Patch almost totally set up for our warm-weather crops, including wrestling our giant rotary hoe across half of it, setting up growing frames and irrigation, and getting lots of it planted out. Also got treated for a horrible spider bite, which included having a huge ulcerated blister cut out of my hand. I did manage to use that to prove that duct tape fixes everything, including trying to keep a dressing on a wound while gardening.

   Yay for big farm weekends, and a double Yay! for duct tape!!!!

• I have a couple of live-capture traps in the roof for rats. There’s a whole rat/roof story which would take too many words, even for me. Anyway, there was a noise in the roof and I check the traps. We had caught one AND she’d pulled insulation through the bottom to make a nest AND she’d given birth to 6 babies. Inside the closed trap.

   I’ve always had mad respect for our little rodent brothers and sisters, and it just went up tenfold. Seriously, how tough is that?!

• I discovered two things today. Number 1: I freaking LOVE daylight savings. Being able to get a full day in at work, and then still two or three hours in the garden afterwards makes farm life so much easier. Number 2: Using a tractor instead of a wheelbarrow is both easier and much, much more fun.
• I needed a hammer to hang something on my wall this afternoon, but didn’t want to take the time to go to the shed. The solution? I used the hilt of a sword to drive the nail in.

  I want to call that Farmgenuity, but I’m not sure that farmers normally have swords laying around their living room…

• Dedication is watching a piglet spend 5 minutes rooting through a fresh cow pat to eat all the good things it could find, having it come over for some affection, and still loving up on it. Seriously though, it was gross.
• Just found a freaking HUGE dead rat. He’d tried to get into one of the chook runs through the chook wire. His head and shoulder must have just made it through, but his giant butt got stuck. After that I imagine it all became quite unpleasant for him…

   As cool as that all is, my quandary now is that I need to remove him. The only way I see that happening is in two parts. /shudder

Miss October