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! 

Taking pleasure in the details

Last night the wind was howling in between the rows of olives, swirling around the base of the pines and rushing through the gums. This morning when I woke the rain was tumbling down and chestnuts lay sprawled over the ground in the corner of the yard ready to be picked up and roasted. Grey cloud hangs heavy around the mountain and the birds pick over the soft, chocolatey soil. It's a perfect beginning to the last day of Rohan's holidays and my easter break.

One of my favourite films is Reality Bites and I love that line where Ethan Hawke says 'So I take pleasure in the details. You know...a quarter-pounder with cheese, the sky about 10 minutes before it starts to rain, the moment when your laughter becomes a cackle'. Last night a friend posted about the 100 happy days challenge on Facebook and asked who was going to do it with her. I said I would as it reminded me of that line from Reality Bites - the idea of taking pleasure in the details. The idea of the 100 happy days challenge is to take the time to pause and appreciate the happy moments of life, rather than letting life rush past. It's not about putting on a facade of happiness in the face of soul crushing unhappiness, something that is akin to putting a band aid on a gaping, festering wound. Instead, the thing that appeals to me about this challenge is the notion of taking the time to pay attention to the things that make you happy and to catch yourself in a moment of happiness, to press 'pause' on the play button.

I'm not good at signing on to things though, so I'm not doing the official sign up or taking on the challenge to instagram every  moment. Instead, I'm just going to put 7 images for the week on my blog here - one a day, 7 moments that represent a pressing of the pause button and the catching of the moment when a laugh becomes a cackle.

The details that matter

Maybe it's the fact that I was struck down with a viral bug and had spent 3 days sleeping that made me overly sentimental. Maybe it's the fact that on this farm, I feel history alive all around me, with each footstep I make in a paddock seeming to reverberate through the ages. Whatever it is, I found myself swirling with thoughts of connecting and stitching the past into the present.

I'd been reading a wonderful book 'Saving St.Brigid's' by Regina Lane in which she charts the fight of a local community group against the might of the Catholic church as they battled to save their local church and community hall. The Lane family lived down the road from where my parents lived at Tower Hill and where all my siblings spent some of their early years. I never lived there but I've got the ghosts of memory imprinted on my brain from their tales, and as I read Regina's book, names, places, incidents seemed like ones I could have been there for. In the book, Regina also finds her connection with her place again, and there are pages of her book that I've dog-eared so breathtakingly beautiful I find the sentiment within them. Lane writes:

Facebook and Skype might have made communication easier, but with the pace of our lives, you don't share these seemingly meaningless, but telling, details. And in the process something is lost. When you live the restless life, moving from one place to another, you learn to detach yourself from these things - from the details of the everyday lives of those you love (p. 155).

And in this paragraph ideas were thudding through my head - a social media junkie from way back, I wondered how I substituted it for the meaningful connections with those around me. Here, at this farm, we have begun stitching more meaningful connections with family and friends as we share in the journey that is our growing to understand more about this land and our life on it.

Knowing the details that matter is important and so this week I sat down, wool and crochet needle in hand and began making a baby blanket for a friend. Her mother made a blanket for her first baby, and with her mother no longer here to craft a blanket for her second baby, I take up the needle. I crochet in rounds, stitching a blanket for her, for the baby to come and for a way to keep her mother's presence alive. It's easy to laugh off knitting and crochet as passe, old-fashioned skills that are out of place in our modern, disposable world. Yet, in these ancient forms, there lies a narrative and a history much bigger than our own.

On Saturday afternoon, I wandered out to the peach tree where branches hung heavy with fruit. A few weeks back the fruit looked like it would be no good, sap pouring out at gaps on the rounded flesh. A friend told me they thought they would still be okay, but I was doubtful. In the last couple of weeks though the peaches have taken off, bigger, rounder, plumper, the sap holes healed and the flesh ripe and juicy, pock-marks the only remnants of what had been before. I couldn't eat them all in one go though and set about searching for a guide on how to preserve them. On the SBS website I came across Matthew Evans and a guide on how to preserve peaches. Jars sterilised, I tenderly placed pieces of flesh in, covered them with water and sugar and set them in a pot to preserve. I sent my mum a photo and she sent me an email saying that I must have my Nan's talents for cooking. In those days the act of preserving would have been commonplace, but now, I become one of many who seek to reclaim some of these connections to the past, to ways of eating, saving and storing the food we grow.

As I write this, I'm sitting here staring out the window, watching the birds. Wattle birds, rosellas and currawongs feed at our makeshift bird feeder. A wattle bird sails towards the one, lonely persimmon on the tree. Watch it wattle bird, you may be cute, but that one persimmon is mine, all mine. Suddenly I'm wrenched out of the past and back to the present :)

Falling for green

In almost the blink of an eyelid green is returning to the farm. After what seemed like almost endless days and nights of hot weather, the last couple of weeks have seen us waking up every day to the mountain shrouded in fog. Dew falls lightly from the branches of the pine trees, sprinkling my shoulders as I duck under them to take Indy out into the paddocks.

And then one Wednesday night, it arrived. Rain. Not just a light shower, but proper, tumbling down rain. Rain that you could hear tapping on the laserlight of the verandah and which pooled in hollows in the driveway. I woke up that Thursday morning and sat at the kitchen table, clutching a mug of steaming tea and gazed out at the endless grey, as the rain continued to fall. I don't think I can recall a time I've felt so happy to see the grey. Normally I complain about it and long for patches of blue sky, but I think there's been too much blue sky this summer and so it was wonderful to see some rain.

Within days, it seemed as if the farm was swooning, head over heels in love with the rain, the dew, the colder nighttime temperatures that allowed droplets of water to rest and soak into the ground. Between the olives where only weeks ago it was dry, cracked and brown; patches of green are emerging. In the orchard, fruit trees that were tired, lifeless and wilting under the heat, begin to come back to life, their leaves swollen and on the citrus trees, tiny buds appear. In these moments I begin to see the rhythm of life on the farm. The Indian summer which has stretched out and dried everything begins to fade away and the land breathes a sigh of relief as moisture starts to creep back in.

We grow accustomed to waking up with the trees and mountain shrouded in fog. Already it doesn't lift until after 10 some mornings and we begin to get a sense of what winter will be like - I'm beginning to think that by the middle of winter I'll be yearning for sun - but not yet. Out in the paddocks after the rain, I use my gumboots to dig under the surface and the ground is morphing, becoming a rich, velvety chocolate rather than a dry, dusty brown.

I begin to dream of woollen blankets, coats, scarves, gloves. On top of the fire in the kitchen lie a pair of fingerless gloves, with interchangeable mitten tops that I bought at a market. I bought them on a day when it was nearly 30, when the idea of wearing mittens seemed laughable. Now, I look at them and know it won't be long till I'll be dragging them on before I head out for my morning walk in the grove.

With the arrival of cooler weather and the return of green, comes a new list of work to be done. The mower which has lay idle since the great mowing incident (hmmm I don't think I ever wrote about that on here did I? I'll get to it one day), will need to be dragged out again and once again my weekends will consist of the meditative pleasure of mowing up and down the rows in the grove, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. As the trees spring back into life I need to give them some care and attention and to the side of the house a whole mini vineyard has emerged - tiny grape plants pop up out of the soil in neat, symmetrical rows suggesting that at some point they were organised, and tended to with love and care. We begin planning for their growth, the emergence of another secret from Innisfree, and a new lot of learning to be done.

In the meantime, we like the farm, are falling in love with this new season that is upon us. I stare out the windows watching the parakeets and rosellas picking at seed on the makeshift bird feeder and smile as I look beyond them to the rows of green.

Maiden Voyages

The long weekend glimmered like a beacon of hope after a busy but good first week of semester. I'd come home each day buzzing with enthusiasm about my uni teaching and the feedback I'd collected from students suggested they were enjoying the first week as much as me. Each night I came home exhausted and wondering when I would find time to sit down and do some of the writing my research and job demands. I'd even missed my regular Tuesday morning virtual 'shut up and write' session. Surely this week it will be easier to get some work related writing done? Here's hoping or it could be a lean year for research publications! 

After the promise of rain all week, some finally fell on Friday evening. Clouds drifted across the landscape until the house was shrouded and rain floated through the air in soft sheets. It was far from a downpour, more a light splattering of drops, but it was enough to give me hope that rain will come again. After letting the rain tap my skin outside, Rohan and I sat down to watch some House of Cards as it is our new addiction. Halfway through an episode and the power went out. We padded around the house in the dark, and with the moon hiding behind the clouds, there was no light to penetrate the inky, black darkness. Each time the power goes off I'm suddenly reminded of all the reasons why we need a back up power source and our new water tanks. With the power out we only have the water in our pipes if the bore isn't pumping and at the front of the property our electronic gate stays firmly shut. So it was an early night, but not quite an old fashioned one as we both lay in bed, the room illuminated by the glow of our iPads. 

Saturday morning and Rohan was up early to go hunting rabbits with Nam (and I've got a vision of a Disney cartoon in my head now). I, however, had woken with one of those headaches that makes you feel like your brain is sloshing against your skull each time you move your head. Standing up was like running a marathon, and Rohan, the saviour that he is fed me toast, tea and painkillers in bed before he headed outside. A few more hours of drug induced sleep and I was up, slowly inching around the paddocks trying to get fresh air to cure me. David, Jane, Lisa and Neale were coming up for the weekend and I was desperate to get my brain in working order before they arrived. All the things on my Saturday to-do list lay untouched, and I was even more grateful to house guests who arrived with lunch, wine, herbal tea and good spirits. I felt like a terrible host though, drifting off in conversation, pressing my fingers into the point at the back of my neck where I could feel some relief and wandering around the house in a zombie like state. 

With my brain not working and a frantic week before I hadn't organised anywhere for dinner and so we headed to our new local a couple of k's up the road, the Shamrock, which had only opened the weekend before after a long period of renovations. I'd read some of the history of the pub and of the town it's located in, Dunnstown, which was named after James Dunn, a man who grew barley and made whiskey at a distillery located there in the 1850s. A once thriving town, it was populated by the Irish who fled the potato famine, and was popular given its location to the Ballarat goldfields. The distillery closed down and the Irish turned back to potato growing. 

At home that afternoon I'd tried to get my head together by reading the Britt family history book that Jane had lent us. Reading it I realised her family history is intimately woven into the landscape all around us, with the pub down the road part of her extended family's stories. Looking at the map of the area with the names of the families that owned parcels of land, I saw Irish name after Irish name. Some of them are names that are familiar to me, names that belong to Irish families who also lived in the south-west where I grew up. As we drive towards the pub I wondered what place it will play in our new lives? 

Inside it was busy and stories began to seep out of every brick. I recognised faces from the Christmas party at the community centre and while only a week old I had a sense that the pub would become a hub for the local community. The footy tipping chart hung on the wall, a few names (including Paddy O- can you get more Irish than that?) already pencilled in. At the bar we chatted with Shane, the publican and realised that even here we needed a booking for dinner! We ordered, thinking we'd eat at the bar, but got a table when Lisa did some hunting and some reorganisation. Towards the end of the meal, Shane got up and in ways reminiscent of a 21st thanked us all for being there, encouraged us to join the footy tipping and introduced the first of their sat night bands. I did some people watching, creating stories and lives for the people in the pub. 'There's a book in that pub', I said to Rohan Sunday morning as we lay in bed, 'I'll have to go back each week for research'. I'd sent Kat from work who has bought her parents house nearby an email telling her we'd taken our maiden voyage to the pub and she replied saying that her dad knows our property and knows about a whole range of the previous owners. He's keen to meet up at the pub to share a beer and some stories so I definitely have to go back now! 

Sunday meant coffee, wandering around the Mill markets for bargains and then we took a trip up to the top of Mt. Warrenheip and peered out through the trees to find our farm in the distance, our rows of olives looking neat and symmetrical from far away. 

Once our guests headed home, we decided to take our first off farm trip and headed to Warrnambool where we were picking up a load of kindling for our wood fire in the form of fence posts from where my folks had their fence replaced. Much as I love the olive groves and paddocks, I had been feeling a bit landlocked and was itching to hear the sound of the sea rolling in the distance through my bedroom window.

 In Warrnambool it was like an Indian summer was underway, at the beach a surf lifesaving competition was on, fishermen filled the bay and people lazed around tables at Lake Pertobe. For a moment, I could just imagine it was the start of summer and that holidays stretched out before me. On Monday morning I headed into Kermonds for a burger, where tired Port Fairy Festival goers lingered outside taking pictures of themselves outside the shop.

If you're not from Warrnambool, you probably don't understand what the big deal is, but all I can say is if you're ever in the south-west then you have to do yourself a favour and try a burger (with double sauce to pretend you're a local). With my fix of the seaside it was time to head home and there the olives were waiting. 

Tonight the rain has arrived, I sat at the kitchen table with Maryann who dropped in on her way home from work and we sniffed the air - that gorgeous smell of rain on hot, parched land. Indy and I wandered around the grove, rain falling while the sheep huddled under the trees. There, in the paddock, with rain falling on my bare arms, I was happy. A perfect farm moment captured in memory.