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!