1-13-09

Sheep Dairy/cheese - Museum in Kingscote

I visited a sheep dairy and ran through the ‘chute’. They take your money ($5.50) and then you go through the chute along with a bunch of other tourists in shorts and noisy little kids. After watching a short video with terrible sound you get to look in a dirty plastic window and see the sheep being milked.

go through another chute and you see the lower level where the guy is hooking up the mechanical milkers to the sheep tits.

Then it is on to the tasting room where we tried these as well as two varieties of yogurt. The cheese was good but the yogurt was as bad as all yogurt. The haloumi she fried up in a little skillet for us to try hot. She just flopped the little pieces into a dry hot skillet and then let us tast after they were browned.

The sheep waiting to be milked and the ones already milked. They milk between 200 and 350 sheep a day depending on time of year. They have green pastures 5 months (winter here) and the rest of the time they are fed silage and grain. They make 15 – 40 thousand pounds of cheese and 40 thousand pounds (that could have been kilograms) of yogurt. They use a mixture of several types of sheep and keep track of their production and select from that data the ones that they want to use for milkers and breeding stock.

The fields are bone dry. Evidently they are not having terrible drought on Kangaroo Island but it is normally dry this time of year.

Nice logo and name.

What the heck is this animal? I saw several on the road this morning and they sure did get hit last night by the cars. I have never seen a warning sign for these animals. 

There is a museum here in Kingscote and I went up to see what they had yesterday. This sure is a heavy single disk plow.

Timber Splitting Guns

Filled with gunpowder and then pounded into a log or tree and then the fuse is lit. I sure have never seen these before or even heard about them. must have something to do with how tough these trees are.

I have never seen an old iron bed with a back like this one.

The cover was amazing detail and texture. All hand done.

A Edison music player.

They must have grown hemp as well as flax here.

I had seen a few of these kangaroo stamped bricks and here is the stamp.

I guess this works something like a Servel but I have never heard of one using water.

Nice old washing machine

This is a wagon tire shrinker I think. Steamboat Jack has something like this that he uses to shrink the metal tire to fit on the wooden wheels he makes. (correct me if I am wrong Jack)

.A really old Howard Rotovator and the one below is like the one I have. I used it on my farm down in Nevada when we were doing organic vegetables for market. It is an amazing machine that was state of the art after the second world war.

I sure like the way these wooden boats were made.

I really liked this tractor. One cylinder and 44 horsepower. Now that is a real Thumper to ride. Check out that exhaust pipe.