Every year, we go away with a particular group of friends for the Australia Day long weekend. We’ve been doing it since I was pregnant with Hannah. We go somewhere different each year. This year, we decided to do a farm stay and chose Honeycomb Valley Farm as our destination.
We arrived to two immaculately clean cabins, OJ, milk, butter, jam, and bacon in the fridge, fresh farm eggs on the counter, and a bunch of different single serving boxes of cereal in a basket. I was kind of expecting the cabins to be dusty and farmish, but they get professionally cleaned after each guest leaves, and there wasn’t a bit of dirt of grime to be found. Our family got one cabin to ourselves, and our other friends stayed in the other one. No one else wanted to be woken up at 6am by little kids who don’t yet know the joys of sleeping in, no matter how tired they are or how late they stay up.
One of the goats at Honeycomb Valley Farm thinks it’s a person. She even came up on our porch when we first arrived.
We spent most of our 3 days there outside.
Daniel playing in a big hole in one of the paddocks.
Each morning, guests can (but don’t have to) help feed the animals. You can do as little or as much as you want, but we helped every day and the kids, especially Hannah, enjoyed it immensely. Farmer Andrew started with different animals each day we were there so that we got to experience something new each time. I asked lots of questions and learned heaps.
Selfie with an alpaca. She was very cooperative 🙂
The first morning, he took Hannah and I around some of the far away paddocks in a trailer (with a mattress in it for comfort) attached to a quad bike. Daniel was constipated (I guess he gets holiday poo shy just like me), grumpy, and didn’t want to go on the trailer, plus Aaron was minding our friends’ daughter so they could do a beekeeping lesson, so the three of them went back to the cabin for a nap/quiet time while Hannah and I had all the fun.
Chickens chasing the trailer we were sitting in
We especially enjoyed seeing the chickens that day. One of the flocks (is a group of chickens a flock?) anyway, there are a few of them. Andrew converts old travel trailers that were destined for the tip/scrap yard into mobile chicken coops and moves them around the farm every couple of weeks. During the night, the chickens are safely tucked into the converted trailer that has a wire mesh floor, and during they day they are let out to free range.
Hannah with the chickens in front of the “hens on holiday” moveable coop
Hannah liked collecting eggs and watching all the interesting, unusual breeds of chickens eat the kitchen scraps we brought them. Some of the chickens even laid green eggs! Some eggs were big, some were small, and one from an older hen was even quite wrinkly. All were delicious though.
Some of the different eggs we collected
We also got to see our friends in their bee suits at the bee hives. One of the other mornings, we saw the native australian stingless bee hives and the bee motel (where solitary bees lay their eggs). Then we walked up and down hilly paddocks with Daniel on my shoulders and Hannah on Aaron’s to get to the cows. We didn’t have to do that, of course, but we wanted to see the cows and there were too many of us to fit in the trailer since all of us were helping feed the animals that day. It was also good exercise, and practice for the Spartan race. A 7kg bag of sand on my shoulders while I trek up a steep hill is nothing compared to a 12kg boy on my shoulders for at least a kilometer.
The bee Motel
The morning feeding routine takes a couple of hours (at least), but Hannah didn’t get bored at all. When it wasn’t feeding time, we still had plenty to do. One day we went to the dam and rode the paddle boats. Aaron wanted to have a race but was flabbergasted when I smoked him. He claims his boat was faulty. HAHAHAHAHA if only.
Aaron and Hannah in one of the paddle boats
We were allowed to go in any of the paddocks at any time, so we spent lots of time just running around pastures with the kids. Daniel was quite fond of jumping up and down in poop piles.
There was also a solar heated pool to play in after all that running around, plus a swing set, balls to kick around, a fire pit and bbq area, and a kids pedal tractor, although the pedals didn’t work. They didn’t seem to care though, and pushed each other around in it, or got me or Aaron to push them.
The kids enjoying the swingset
Daniel on the pedal tractor
They have honey and tea tastings on a big covered deck attached to the converted shipping container shop.
Honey tasting
And Hannah got to milk a goat.
Hannah milking a goat. She was quite good at it. I gave it a go, but I failed.
Usually when we go away, we have to find things to do with the kids when it’s not nap time. Last year during the trip, we even went to a shopping centre just for something to do. At the farm though, we didn’t have to go anywhere else. We could have stayed another whole week and they still wouldn’t have been bored. We did end up going out one afternoon, but only because we’d never been to a winery before, and we were in the Hunter Valley. It would have been silly not to visit a couple, especially since they were only a couple k’s down the road.
Aaron and the kids running between rows of grapes in a vineyard
After the kids went to bed, we played board and card games with our friends. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of, or played Cards Against Humanity, but oh my, it’s hilarious. I usually end up laughing so hard that I cry when we play it. This trip was no exception, especially when I used the below white card in answer to the black one:
So wrong, but so funny. I won that round.
I am one of those weirdos who laughs at the very mention of the word fart. Or poop. Or anything of the sort, so with this one, I was pretty much on the floor laughing hysterically, and everyone knew who played the fart card as soon as it was turned over.
I was quite impressed with the farm in general. Though they are not certified organic, they do farm organically, and make a huge effort to educate others about conservation and farming responsibly. There is a huge solar oven that they make cakes and dinners in, plus a smaller one that they melt all the beeswax that they collect in. There are worm farms, a solar fridge, a shop made from an old shipping container (where we bought 3kg of raw honey), a native bee sanctuary, and they are even going to build an earthship (which I am particularly fascinated with and was shocked that they knew what I was talking about when I said something about them) shed.
Hannah riding a horse. Maybe it was a pony, I’m not sure what breed/height it was. It was either a big pony or small horse.
The kids didn’t want to go home, and Hannah keeps saying “when we buy another house, can we buy the one on the farm?” She wants to move there, and both kids are still talking about the farm. Pretty much every day, Daniel says something about how we went to the farm and saw all the animals.
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Copyright 2014 Sheri Thomson
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