Of cows and medlars

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy as we reach the end of term for Rohan and end of semester for me. We’re both in need of a holiday and waking up in the night, to do lists running through our heads. On the farm though, things still demand attention.

As we drove past other people’s paddocks and saw calves tottering around on spindly legs eating grass, we were more keen than ever to get some cows for our back paddocks. Maryann said that Chris can help us out with the mathematical formula for working out how many cows to get given the space of our land so that we won’t have to purchase feed for them if they munch through all the grass. See, who said maths has no application for the real world?

Friday night I headed home to Warrnambool for a very belated mother’s day and Rohan headed to the pub in search of cows with Dave. Victory ensued when he beeped me to say he’d lined up a couple of 18 month old heifers from a local and as I type this, we’re waiting for our heifers to arrive. Yesterday we headed into the nearest paddock past the olive grove to clean up around the gates so we can more easily open and shut them, and inspected the fences, checking to see how likely it is that the bull next door could leap through and impregnate our girls, as I don’t wish to pay for semen I haven’t asked for (does that sound as wrong as you read it, as it sounds as I type it?).

Meanwhile Jane sent me an email last week linking to an article in the Epicure section of The Age which mentioned medlars. Oh strange fruit that they are, it was a timely reminder that I needed to get out there and get them harvested and on their little hay beds. I’d seen a tweet from the Royal Mail in Dunkeld earlier in the week that had rows and rows of medlars lined up on hessian sacks, waiting to be used for a dessert. Meanwhile I reminded myself of the process by checking out this website:  http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2012/11/medlar-jelly-recipe/

So before work one morning as the rain tumbled down, I grabbed my gumboots and raincoat and headed outside. First stop was the hay shed, to grab some hay and I went to the studio and made a little bed of hay on our trestle table. Next stop was the medlar tree which had lost its leaves, leaving only the fruit hanging on stark brown branches. I picked them and headed back to the studio where I lay them out on the hay to ripen in a process known as ‘bletting’. Now we wait for the fruit to turn to some sort of sticky, squashy consistency where it kind of resembles rotting and then we can use it for making jelly or perhaps some sort of alcoholic beverage. Who knows the fine line between ripe and rotting though? It could be that we make something that tastes god-awful, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

The olives turn darker each day, resembling tiny dark plums that beg to be picked and munched on. Despite their enticing colours, I’m not falling for this trick. Rohan, however, decided that they couldn’t taste that bad raw and picked an olive the colour of night the other day. His face, the spitting and the swearing that followed, suggested that they could in fact taste that bad and perhaps even worse than anticipated. Next weekend we’re going to have a bash (literally) at picking some, but we still haven’t worked out what to do from there. I’m reminded again, how much I still have to learn about farming olives!

So while I work out what to do with the olives, the phone has rung heralding the arrival of the cows. Better get moving and welcome the girls to the farm!

Olive preserving failures: Number one.

We’ve had some wild and windy nights here on the farm. As the trees blow all through the night, I lie inside wondering if any branches, leaves or olives will be left by morning. After the first of these wild nights, I went out the following afternoon to see the base of the olive trees littered with green olives of various sizes. My beautiful olive crop lay on the ground, glistening with rain that had fallen during the day. I grabbed a green shopping bag and began picking them up, discarding those that seemed too bruised, or which looked like they might have already been pecked at by the birds. Indy wandered along beside me, off lead, munching on olives and spitting out the pips- who knew dogs were a fan of olives straight from the tree? (I had done some frantic checking online to make sure I wasn’t poisoning her).

An hour or so later I had over 3 kilos of olives and no idea what to do next. I figured I could use these olives as an experimental batch to try out different preserving recipes. About a week earlier, I’d had a conversation with one of my colleagues who told me some of her fondest memories of the first village she lived in were of olive harvest days. On these days, families from the village would send a boy as a representative of the family to pick olives with the community. As she grew up in a family of girls, her mother would send her and her sisters as the family representatives. She talked about picking the olives, filling bucket upon bucket and then feasting at lunch from tables set up in the grove with the other adults and children. She went on to say she left this village at the age of 7 in a time that wasn’t officially classed as war, but there was a push for territory, and a moving on of the residents of the entire village in less than a week. Anyone left after that time was massacred and killed. As she spoke, I was reminded of how incredibly privileged and safe my own life has been. We talked about my own plans to have people over for harvest, to share food, to talk and laugh, I said she should come to recapture some of those earlier memories and she promised to find out from her mother the recipes she uses for preserving her olives.

In the meantime I headed to my usual source of information, the internet, to see what I could discover. As I read, a sinking feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. ‘Don’t pick up and use ‘dropped’ olives – they will be bad’. Uh-oh. I had just collected 3 kilos of olives and now I discover they will be bad? Still I decided to persevere. What does the internet know? I reasoned. Anyway, technically these weren’t ‘dropped’ olives, these were olives that had been kindly harvested by the wind on a stormy night. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s all a science experiment.

So with a sink full of olives I began by washing them, scoring slits in them to allow the bitterness to leech out and then putting them into a barrel filled with a mixture of salt and water. The plan was that we would change the water each night for at least two weeks before putting the olives into jars with whatever recipe we decided upon. 3 nights later and we hadn’t changed the first batch of water. This wasn’t going well. Meanwhile, I was stricken by fear about what to do with the salty water if I was to dispose of it. What do people do with barrels of salty water? I can’t pour that down the drains on a farm, sending back it into the earth. I thought about collecting all the excess water and taking it back to the sea, pouring one lot of salty brine back into another. Why had I never thought about the environmental impact of olive preserving processes? Meanwhile 5 days had passed and I still hadn’t changed the water. As an olive preserver I was failing, and failing rapidly.

Salvation arrived, as it often does, in the form of a book. While shopping for presents, I came across a book by Sally Wise called ‘A year on the farm’. 

Wise moved from a home on Tasmania’s coast to one in the Derwent valley, sharing recipes and tales of her first year on the new property. She writes of finding traditional methods for preserving olives complex and time-consuming and then includes a method that seems much more my style. 5 kilos of olives, 500g of salt, 5 litres of water. Throw it all in together, seal the lid and leave for 3-6 months. Sure it might be a bit longer before you can eat them, but I like this idea of throw in, leave, forget and come back a few months later to see what happened.

Out in the grove, the olives have started to change colour, shifting from green to a deep shiny purple. 

They are stunningly beautiful and I’m getting ready to pick some and throw them in a container for preserving experiment number 2. Luckily I’ve got about 360 trees to experiment with, so my failures become just another part of my olive tapestry of tales on the 

You can tell a girl from Cork...

I’m sitting at the table staring out at the mountain with the clouds behind it, while the wood heater fan hums and on the local radio are Saturday morning footy and gardening shows. It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks and so having the time to just sit, stare and think, seems like some sort of luxury. The farm offers this ability to slow down, to soak in the beautiful view and to calm down from the fuss and bluster that normal life can throw our way.

So what’s been happening on the farm? Rain, wind and cold mornings have started to become more and more regular. The rain soaks deep into the soil and as the soil swells with moisture new treasures begin to emerge. In the deep, ploughed furrows just before the olive rows begin potato plants have popped up. Neat rows of plants, evenly spaced apart have emerged. Much like the neatly spaced rows of grape vines that popped up, the potatoes have appeared like magic, a muscle memory of the history of the earth and of what has taken place on the farm prior to our arrival. And why wouldn’t there be potatoes? This is good Irish country and as we were to discover last night at the pub, people have Irish heritage running thick in their veins.

I mentioned in the last post that chestnuts were beginning to fall from the tree and onto the ground, their spiky cases cracking open. Due to the long, hot, dry summer, rather than plump, juicy chestnuts ready for roasting, there were shriveled chestnut husks inside. So disappointing! I’d read somewhere that chestnuts are something like 80% water, so obviously a lack of water over summer meant that they didn’t plump up inside their cases as they hung heavy on the tree over summer. At least we know that next summer we will need to nurse the tree with water in order to get a better crop of nuts come this time next year.

Next to the chestnut trees, the prickly pear fruit has turned a deep red. The native birds fly down to peck at the fruit and at the last few figs on the tree. Those figs too, have suffered from a lack of water over summer and while they look okay from the outside, when you peel them open, they are dry or, they have flooded with juice from the recent rain, but lack flavor, the cells of their flesh plump with water but with no time to develop properly. The birds don’t seem to mind, eating them from the end and leaving figgy husks hanging on the stems. While neither Rohan or I are fans of the prickly pear- invasive creature that it is- we figure we may as well make use of the fruit rather than letting it all rot or be scavenged by the birds. The internet at our finger tips we began investigating recipes – I like the idea of prickly pear drops, but it was the notion of prickly pear wine that really caught our eye and I’m hoping we’ll have time this weekend to have a go at brewing our first batch of this wine to see how it turns out.  

This week we had a -1 night and upon waking, frost lay crisp and white in between the rows of the grove. Mornings now commence with the mountain wrapped in fog and cloud like a blanket, and steam rises from the fences as the day takes over from dawn. Inside the house warms quickly with the wood fire, and we’re fueling it with palings from mum and dad’s front fence which they had replaced earlier this year- thanks ma and pa!

Visitors continue to come and check out what we are both raving about, something Rohan and I both love about farm life. Last night Dave came up with Phil, who was over from New Zealand. I got home from an exhausting but amazing day running an embodied reflective practice workshop at Monash Clayton to find that the boys were checking out the delights of the Lal Lal pub.

Rohan and I had gone out on the motorbike a couple of weeks ago and come across the Lal Lal pub, opposite the railway station which was once a buzz of activity. According to the sign, in the  1880’s and 1890’s, 23 people were employed at the station, servicing the goods that came from the nearby iron mine, the lignite mine and the race course. Lal Lal falls was a popular picnic spot and we headed up the road to check out the amazing view over Bungal dam. We were keen to head down to see the old blast furnace from the iron mine, but the road was more a track and our motorbike wasn’t really made for it! The pub had caught our eye and so Rohan, Dave and Phil had gone on a reconnaissance mission to see what it was like. Once they returned from there it was back to our ‘local’ the Shamrock, at Dunnstown. Last night we met ‘Munga’ –short for mongrel as he isn’t good enough to be called mongrel according to him. Despite being three sheets to the wind (has there ever been a better expression?), he filled us on in on some local history – or the history according to him! His family, like so many others from this area, had come over here from Ireland originally after the potato famine and settled on land, growing spuds and continuing their Irish catholic traditions. He regaled us with tales of his trip to Ireland and when he discovered my family was from County Cork he said ‘you can tell a girl from Cork as you can’t tell a girl from Cork anything’ (is this me?), and patted me on the back as he talked about the demise of Pontiac potatoes as ‘housewives, no offence’ don’t like to wash their potatoes and don’t like having to cut the eyes out of the Pontiacs as he asked if I knew what the eyes were. Do I know what the eyes of a Pontiac are??? Listen Munga, I’m a girl whose family hails from Cork – I know about spuds and I know what the eyes are! I’m sure that we will encounter Munga at the pub again, he did promise that if he tells the publican he knows us that we’ll get extra chips on our plate. What’s not to love about an offer like that?

As we left the pub, we discovered that a Britt (from Jane’s family) played for Collingwood in the 70s, a picture of them hanging on the wall of the pub. Discovering more about that can be for the next pub visit. There was much laughter at the pub last night  - a huge thanks to Dave, Phil, Rohan (and Munga!) for providing the perfect ending to a busy week!