Now that I have told everyone they have to read our blog, I’d better get my A into G and update it! Thanks for the reminder Neen 
We’ve been really busy on the farm and with Braedyn. Gene’s done a lot more fencing, and has increased the shock at the front of the farm from 1.2 to 8.1! So you can certainly hear the moos moo if they touch the fence.
Environment Waikato visited last week. Before those of you who are farming start swearing about them, they were INVITED. Yes, you heard right, invited! We asked them to assess our river boundary for funding for fencing and planting (to keep stock out of waterways, prevent nitrates & phosphate getting in the river, and stop erosion of the banks). Fencing means our cows won’t visit Pete and Skin over the river, saving us paying a truck to go and pick them. And it saves anyone seeing the scary sight of Gene in the river. EW may use us as a pilot study for the lower Puniu catchment too, which would be quite good.
We started planting the riverbank with the flax the “digger-man” pulled out of the effluent ponds. Gene carted them down to the river, and it took us both 2 hours to plant about 30m x 5m. We have approx 850m of riverbank to do, varying from 1m to 5m wide. So it is going to take a long time, and a LOT of flax. We barely made a start on the flax plant we started splitting, so at least they go a long way!
The cowshed work has continued with trenching in a powerline on the tanker track and removing the overhead line. It was a $3K exercise, but had to be done as we are putting the vat where the power pole was. The other option was to relocate the pole, but that was only slightly less price-wise, and you could see that the overhead lines had already been hit by trucks before.
Braedyn has been a delight – I’m only getting up once during the night. He is giving us lots of amazing smiles now. Plunket are useless, and we miss Michelle and Lasa our midwives! Apparently Michelle misses us too and is going to call in sometime.
