Autumn rains

We are heading into Winter quite quickly it seems. We have gone from light and warm and dry to wet,wet,wet in the last week. So much so that we have lit our woodstove to make the house toasty and to keep the place from getting damp.
The good news is that the drought is officially over. The river level down the road is slowly rising. Our dam has gone up by a few feet. The veggy garden is soaking in all the water and is becoming sticky again in places. The microbes in the soil can start breaking down all the mulch that has been sat covering the soil all summer. There is a satisfying mouldering smell in the air. Life's cycles that have been temporarily slowed, can once again turn and put old plant material back into humus. The grass has put on a spurt and there is knee high kikyu to wade through where I have not scythed it.
The beds in the garden are looking a bit sad, but the trick over here is to remove old summer crops and replant with winter veggies. The broccoli and cabbages are doing well. The broad beans are cautiously sticking shoots through the tilth. They are such an exuberant plant and the smell of their blossoms is lovely at a time when flowers are in short supply. Their seeds are good for the first few meals but then tend to be ignored because of their gassy consequences.
The chooks are doing their work of turning and scratching and shitting all over the straw that they live in. Every few weeks I scrape a load out and tip it on one of the beds. It makes great soil. We are getting a few eggs most days, but most of the birds are having a winter rest. I don't begrudge them that. We were given afew hens from town friends who had outgrown them. They had got some of them from a local battery farm. 3 of them integrated well with the existing flock, but one was in a bad way, with few feathers and a dripping back end. I checked it for a stuck egg, but it seeemed ok. She is now enjoying retirement walking around the garden free at last. I am not particularly sentimental about animals and don't have much time for animal rights, but I do not like to see an animal being mis-treated either. A food production that churns out chucks in the sort of condition that this one is in seems to be wrong in my book. We were talking about the price of dressed chickens at tea the other night and although $16 seemed expensive, in some ways it is not unreasonable for something that has taken quite a bit of effort to grow. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect to eat cheap meat every night if this is the cost?

I will try and remember to take my camera out and document some of the things that are happening about the place.

Not much other news really.