First Farm: First Day

Just as soon as I arrived I was wisked off to the first job. Peter was at their neighbors helping to clean the wheat they would buy. There was this great old machine, which I hope to get pictures of that had a few stages to clean the wheat. It blew out the husks with a large wooden paddle fan, then ran the wheat across a serie of gratings to remove the shell and grit. We ran 200 kilos through this ol' machine, which went suprisingly quickly, and it was my job to keep it full with new wheat to process. Pretty cool overall, if a little old and ineffective, some small stones made it through.
Then we got to the farm and I got a tour. I'll have pictures of the whole compound posted once i've both taken them and uploaded them. It's a really amazing little farm, that had been abandoned for around 20 years before Peter and Julie moved in and started work. There's loads to do, but they're making realy incredible progress, and they've only been here a little over one year.
Today I'll give an overview of the farm, saving more detailed stories for future posts.
They've got two awesome dogs named Willow and Hamish. There's 2 litters of kitten for a total of 12. They have 6 sheep an 3 goats, one of the goats is used for milking. There's a small pond where some ducks live, and they also have a dozen or so chickens and 5 geese.
They have a pretty good sized garden with the standard variety of vegetables, also some fruit trees mixed in. Alot of the agriculture technique they use is called companion gardenign, where certain plants help each other, with pests, nutrients, or support.
They have an awesome composting toilet system, that's probably one of the cleanest and nicest smelling bathrooms I've been in, period. There's also a 125cc Honda Rebel which they said I can take for a ride whenever I like, maybe tomorrow.
That's about that for an overview. This morning my project was to pick beans, and my best guess is that I picked about 4500 of them in 4 hours. Not bad for a days work, look for the picture of the wheelbarrow full of beans on flickr. My afternoon is now mine, and I plan to take some pictures and enjoy the beautiful weather.