Skysong Farm

This site was last updated 03.05.2009

Latest News...

Getting colder now, as Autumn gets on. The leaves are turning, giving us a nice colour show of gold, orange and reds. We had about 65mm of rain in the last week and a half and the grass has greened and grown a bit, and even our roses have given a show of autumnal blooms!

Very sadly, we lost one of our foals in March. Night Sky became bogged in a dam, and broke her foreleg while she was trying to get out. We had to put her down as the bone had broken through the skin and was shattered. We miss her very much, she was a wonderful little filly, very brave and full of curiosity.

Kara, our Suri alpaca, is being mated, and we will have another baby cria around this time next year, if all goes well. We've also bought 2 more Suris - Topaz and Krystal - who are currently up in the Hunter Valley, and will be joining us around mid-Winter, I think.

The foals and ponies are growing thick winter coats - along with the dogs and cats! - and all the signs are currently pointing to a very cold Winter. Most of the weekends are now going to be devoted to cutting and splitting wood for the fire! The ducks and chooks are all doing well, 2 of the ducks are sitting on eggs, but I have a feeling that their ambitions are for nothing as they haven't managed to hatch anything yet. The new chicks are all grown up and are about point-of-lay so we should be getting a reasonable number of eggs over the next 12 months at least!

The 'gang' coming over to see what's going on! 

            

Above: Kara and Sasha. To right: Sasha at 6 weeks old.

Our beautiful palomino boy is still down in Sydney, haven't heard about him in awhile, so I hope everything's okay, but hoping to have him home in the next month and settled in for winter. By the looks of the mares, we might be having a full crop of Appaloosas again come Spring and Summer, but it's a wait and see game, and I'll just have to make sure that this time the girls are in with Rustler after the foals are born! Doc is obviously too quick for me!

That's about it for the moment, more coming soon and the foals' pages have been updated again with some new pictures.

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A Bit About Us...

We are a small farm situated between Goulburn and Oberon, and are currently undergoing renovations, restructuring, rebuilding and adding new enterprises to our little farm. Eventually we plan to breed and sell Dexter cattle, Boer and Angora goats, Suri alpacas, hazelnuts, lavender and, of course, gorgeous Appaloosa and Quarter Horses!

Although we are not attempting to obtain organic certification, due to its ridiculous expense and bureaucracy, we are nevertheless 100% organic here, making our own compost and focussing on remineralisation (ref: Pat Coleby) and Keyline (ref: P A Yeoman) techniques to continually improve the soils and deepen the topsoil.

We are breeding coloured Quarter Horses and Appaloosas, starting off small, with five mares of our own and two stallions - registered Appaloosa Fewspot/Varnish "Winato Doc Haliday" and registered Quarter Horse Palomino "Monstarr Peppys Rustler". (See Skysong Stallions for pictures and details of these two beautiful stallions). Our aim is to breed high quality, strong, versatile and beautiful coloured horses for pleasure, endurance, eventing and showing.

This year "Doc" has sired five foals from our mares, all of whom are beautifully coloured. See Foals 2008 for pictures of our new babies! Our other two foals are out of the miniature mares, sired (we think) by a QH colt who has since gone to a new Western home in Sydney. We've had an interesting mix of sexes - 3 colts and 4 fillies - this year, which I believe is related to the health of the mothers - but best of all, all uncomplicated births easily handled by the mares, even our two maidens.

We also have four horses agisted here, and our two riding geldings, and seven miniatures (including the two new foals). The minis were an unintended purchase, but have proven a great success with the children!

We belong to Help Exchange, an international site that promotes work-for-accommodation jobs for overseas and interstate visitors on farms all over the world. So far, we've had four visitors (in 2007) from France and Britain and we're looking forward to seeing more as we improve our accommodation. Help Exchange works similarly to WWOOF - Willing Workers on Organic Farms - but one doesn't have to be organic to join.

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The "homestead", still undergoing renovations!

The front drive, leading up to house and sheds. The big shed was a shearing shed, and has been flagged for conversion to a barn - with luck, time and money, it will become a 4-loosebox barn with feed room and tack room, somewhere in the future!

Above: Help Exchange visitors, Marion and Violaine from France are learning to ride and lunge.

We have been delighted with our working visitors to the farm. Even a small farm takes a lot of physical labour and time, and it's very welcome to have help on the endless tasks in our quest to create a sustainable and healthy environment.

Sadly, one of our ponies, Ernie, died of a twisted bowel. He was down in Sydney, getting his feet done as he was suffering from recurring laminitis. We're devastated by the loss of our little guy, he was a terrific pony, very easy-going and easy to do anything with. He is greatly missed.

Above: Ernie (left) with Whiskey, our mini stallion.

Please note the Photo Gallery photo albums can take up to 10 minutes to load. They will load eventually - with music, no less - but it's best to go and get a cup of coffee or tea while it does! The length of time seems to be related to low bandwidth for free sites, so it seems that there's not much I can do about it.

Above: Our foals, getting bigger and bigger. From left Bandito, Snowflurry, Warrior and Night Sky

Hope you enjoy our site, it's under construction, and more will be added week by week! We are planning to go fully 'commercial' in the next two months (our own domain name ... oh my gosh!) so it might improve then! I'll be busy changing all our links around and will email out details of the new name when it all happens (don't hold your breath too long)