Slow News Day??!!!

Rural news must be a bit slow around here lately because our group has featured in a news article again last week.  We had just had a meeting to see how our last minute preparations for the Ball were coming along.  I think the newspaper is going to be there on the night to take photo's, so we'll be featuring in the Daily Advertiser again soon!!!

Preparing for Ball in the Hall

Our fundraising "Year of the Farmer - Ball in the Hall" is this Friday night, so this week our group has been busy preparing the Hall to looks fabulous!  

 First there was 60 tissue paper pompoms to fluff!

Then we had to decide how to decorate the Hall using whatever we could find around our farms - metal chooks and barbed wire balls.

We have about 130 people coming for the night!

There were windmills, old boots and camp ovens!

Hanging the barbed wire and fairy light "chandelier" that Jo made which will be used on the night then auctioned off to raise money for our Kiva programme, Birthing Kits Australia and the Hall to build a new kitchen!

A couple of brave souls volunteered to man the scaffold to hang the chandelier and pompoms!

Another update after the next working bee at the Hall on Thursday - then it's all systems GO for a fantastic night of celebrating being a farmer!!!

Overnight Trip - Windmills and Truffles

August 22nd & 23rd 2012

Ag n Chat had their annual overnight trip.  As usual it was another fantastic learning experience for our group.

Our first stop was to visit Origin's Cullerin Range Wind Farm near Gunning.  After visitingOrigin's Gas Fired Power Station at Uranquinty earlier in the year, a seed was planted that we all wanted to know more about wind energy.  The Wind Farm is an amazing sight to see and learn about how they work.  The turbines are 80m tall and the blades are 45m long!  The 15 turbines on the farm will permanently power 15,000 homes.

We had a lovely overnight stop at Schonegg Country Guesthouse in Murrumbateman.  I can highly recommend this accommodation - it has a wonderful quiet, country atmosphere and Evelyn our host was just amazing.  It would be a perfect base for a trip to Canberra because it's only about 30mins drive from the capital and well away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Our next stop was to visit French Black Truffles of Canberra.  No one in our group had ever experienced truffles before - never smelt or eaten them.  Sherry, the owner of the truffle farm was a wealth of knowledge and an extremely passionate woman.  The weather was horrendous so we couldn't go out in the paddock with Sherry and Snuffle her truffle hunting dog and experience a hunt, but we listened to Sherry's experiences with awe for over 3 hours!!  We all had a smell of a fresh truffle (the 3 month truffle harvest had just finished) and came up with some amazing similarities of what they smelt like - molasses, red wine, earth, smoked oysters?!!  They were definitely very different smelling, but quite pleasant, so we all can't wait to actually experience eating some one day.