Our Sunnyside Farmstead



We are blessed to have lived at beautiful Sunnyside Farm since January 2008 when we moved from the city.  Our only qualification in taking on this endeavour was a love for the country with its wide open spaces & an ingrained desire to produce as much of our own produce as possible.  Sunnyside Farm is a 240 acre property in South West NSW, Australia.  We are dryland farmers which means we rely on the Lord for all water & don't have the ability to irrigate our crops.



Since moving there has been numerous challenges ~ some due to inexperience, some due to the lack of knowledge & some due to the Lord's Will.

We have cropped different paddocks throughout the years.  Our cropping season is over winter & spring, so sowing happens in April or May (autumn) & harvest is November or December. Our intention is to grow our crop as naturally as possible using biological methods.  We have grown triticale & barley during various years.  Our aim is to improve all pastures so we often undersow with clover or lucerne. We crop to provide grain & hay for use on the farm.





We love our animals & have rather a collection here at Sunnyside.  Most have an intentional purpose, although they often fall into 'pet' catergories :)







COWS:
* Bessy ~ she is our hand-raised Jersey cow that we got as a sweet little calf & bottle fed.  Her role at Sunnyside is our milk producer! She is quite opinionated & is certainly the boss of the cow paddock!  She loves affection & will even allow me to hand-milk her in the paddock.  She has had one calf which was sadly still-born, but she made a great adoptive mother to Beefy (who became 2014 meat)!  Unfortunately we had to have her put down in November 2015.  This was a sad loss to our farm.

*Milly ~She replaced Bessy as our jersey house cow.  She came with a calf, Scotch, at foot.  




*  Chocco ~ half Jersey, half Murray Grey.  Chocco is our meat breeder & being half Jersey I attempted to milk her. Sadly, she held all her milk up & wouldn't let down no matter what we tried.  Chocco's calf Cadbury became our 2015 meat!







PIGS:

*  Delores ~ Our sow.  We first got Delores ( & her mate Boris) as piglets & raised them.  Delores' role is to produce piglets for meat.  She has produced one litter & is expecting again!  We know when she goes into heat as she runs away from Boris providing some of the more entertaining adventures of the farm!



* Boris ~ Our boar.  His only role is to get Delores pregnant ( hard life!).  He is a very gentle boar & loves a chat.  Boris is happy as long as Delores is with him, he has plentiful food & some mud to role in!


* Miss Piggy & Pompei ~ two sister pigs who were added as breeders. 

*  Piglets ~ We usually have various numbers of piglets around the farm which always makes things a little interesting! 




CHICKENS:

We have an ever changing assortment of chickens that call Sunnyside home!  We primarily keep them for eggs & entertainment purposes, although we have butchered  excess roosters at times. We regularly hatch our own eggs in our incubator. This makes for an interesting mixture of breeds in the henhouse!






CATS:


Over the years we have had numerous cats.  Originally cats were added to the farmhouse during the mouse plague of 2009.  We have only ever kept a maximum of two at a time. The children love them & the parents tolerate them!  We currently only have Moonlight (who is the kitten in the photo). 

*  Moonlight ~ our kitten that we found in the garage motherless & we bottle fed.  He is so cute & sweet & loves to cuddle up purring loudly!


DOG:

We have had three dogs over the course of our Sunnyside journey.  Unfortunately none have worked out until we got Bolt in 2014.  He is a kelpie & is a much loved member of the family!  He is relatively good in the sheep yards, but is a terrible paddock dog! Every child who has lived in our home has fallen in love with Bolty!


SHEEP:

We have various numbers of sheep on the farm depending upon the time of year.  We provide old merino ewes with one 'final fling' before the inevitable.  They are bred with Border Leicester rams.  These produce lovely first cross lambs.  Lambing season is July & August so it's generally quiet on the blog during those months!  We always have numerous poddy lambs during that time and all our children are masters at bottle feeding 'babies'.  Our lambs produce the nicest meat I've tasted & we regularly get some butchered for our consumption!





I also love to garden, although my husband does tease me about my variable success rate:)  I am slowly learning how to garden in this climate that is so very different from the one I grew up in!  We are blessed to be able to garden year-round providing a constant supply of fresh produce to our table!  For some strange reason I have a gift in growing herbs, so our herb garden continues to produce abundantly!!


We have been busy planting fruit trees to eventually provide us with our own fruit supply.  Established on the farm were two orange trees & a grape vine when we moved here.  We have successfully added 4 apricots, a lemon, a mulberry tree & two apples.  Numerous others have been attempted :)

We have been abundantly blessed here at Sunnyside.  We thrive to be good stewards of all the Lord has placed in our care.  We know that all comes from the Lord for His Will & Purposes!  

Welcome to our farm!!
Blessings

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