Putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here on the farm with Rohan on holidays and the advent of spring. It seems like we’re always busy though, and I do sometimes wonder how we will continue to keep on top of all the work that needs to be done. In the meantime, it’s one foot in front of the other and keep ticking things off the to-do list.

One of the items on the to-do list has been there since we moved in and is: Find the Septic. We made an attempt when we first arrived but with no luck and then a couple of weeks ago a letter from our local Shire arrived to say that they were conducting septic audits and trying to update their records as so many people move into properties and, not surprisingly, want to know where their septic is. We too had done this and been given a handdrawn map. Clutching it like an ancient treasure map we began to dig, leaving little holes across a patch of green grass, until….. at last we struck concrete! Our poo treasure was uncovered as we peeled back the earth to find the inspection plate lid of our septic. I can’t tell you how excited this made me and as I type this I wonder who the hell I am and what has happened with the real Sharon? If this is how my friend Leah feels about septics, no wonder she loves her job as an enviornmental health officer! So far the septic has been working perfectly and I figure all those little bugs have reached a happy, optimum state as they munch through our waste matter, but  when I didn’t know where the septic was I was having trainspotting  like nightmares of sewage going everywhere.

Having started with some digging we continued as we tackled the roots of the prickly pear row. It had been there for quite some time and while we’d flirted with the notion of making prickly pear wine, neither of us really got further than me buying the wine yeast and putting it in the fridge. The actual business of wearing sturdy gloves to harvest the prickly pear just seemed too much to fit in and so we’d left the fruit to the currawongs who seemed happy to pick at them. While I’d been in Daylesford eating at my favourite restaurant Mercato, Rohan had decided it was time for the prickly pear to go and had chopped off most of the leaves and large parts of the stem, throwing them in one of our pits of despair. I grabbed the mattock (is it meant to feel that heavy when you first pick it up?) and began working on trying to dig out the roots. I felt like I was in some sort of prison chain gang as I began picking my way through the earth. Sweat was rolling off me, and my arms and legs shook as I swung the mattock back and forth through the air. Rohan had put on some chain gang music in the studio to keep us company as we dug. By the time we came to the last, original root, I was spent. I could have thrown myself on the prickly pear leaves in the pit and considered it a comfy bed. Rohan, however, was not going to admit defeat and was determined to rid the earth of all remnants of prickly pear. He swung and dug until the last root finally gave way and then he rolled it into the pit, it’s final resting place. I’m sure the previous Italian owners probably offered up a groan somwehere as their prickly pear patch came to an end. We meanwhile, fell into the spa. I’d been suspicious of the spa when we first came to the farm, but after days like this, I was quick to realise what a joy the spa can be for aching muscles! Now the challenge will be to stop the prickly pear from growing back and bringing that patch of soil back to being part of our vegie strip. In the meantime the view from the studio to the olives is much better without cactus and netting.

Next on the list was our solar hot water something we’d been wanting to get installed since we moved in and discovered that the previous electric hot water system was chewing through power. Last week the guys turned up and installed the new tank and solar system and we now have the lowest electricity usage we’ve had since we moved in.

The next step was to get some bigger water tanks installed rather than rely primarily on our bore. As we all know tea tastes better when made with rainwater! Rohan got 13 tonnes of rock dust delivered from the quarry down the road and began his next lot of chain gang work by shovelling it behind the sheds to make the tank pads. Getting the dust from the quarry was something we hadn’t known we could do until our neighbour let us know. He also told us that the previous owner had decided to spend a significant amount of money getting a second bore rather than tanks as he considered tanks ugly. I can’t quite get my head around this given the fact that he obscured the beautiful view of the mountain by closing in the back verandah. I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder…

In preparation for the water tanks we needed to ensure that we had over 5 metres clearance from all the pine trees so the truck can get in, and that meant  it was time to do some more serious pruning. It smelt like Christmas out there with pieces of pine tree coming down, needles and cones smattering the ground. Rohan spent yesterday chopping the bigger branches into logs that can dry out in the wood shed and will make perfect kindling for the winter to come. With yesterday’s 25 degree weather it felt odd to be thinking about winter, but the dried out cones and wood will be invaluable when winter returns. Smaller bits of prunings went through the mulcher, along with some more olive prunings and we still have the bigger pile of prunings in front of the hay shed to mulch as well. We weren’t sure what was under there, but when Rohan investigated it’s mostly orchard prunings that can easily be mulched. I know lots of people around us are burning off branches that they have cut down, but there’s a good feeling about mulching  the prunings and returning them to the soil. It’s a nice cycle and reminds me to think about what we use, what we waste and what we throw away without a second thought.

Meanwhile we can continue to hatch plans for what we will do next. Rohan’s taken down one of the fences blocking off the orchard and plans to build a wider fence that runs down past the sheds and will give Indy more space to run outside. We still need to finish patching up the pizza oven shed and then we are going to move our ancient hills hoist and pave the area outside between the pizza oven shed and the house. We can picture a table and chairs out there, the door open, pizzas cooking and friends and family feasting. The trout need to be moved from the original tank into a new trout pool that will back onto the orchard and where the aquaponics tanks will sit. That means we can also pump some water onto orchard to give the trees and hopefully get some fabulous fruit. Once the fish are moved we can then begin work on turning the old square concrete tank into my ‘plunge pool’. The plan is for a wooden decking up the side of the shed leading to the tank, some steps, some tiling, a filter and come hot weather we can plunge into the pool and float away while looking at the view of Mt. Bunninyong. There’s a lot to do before my pool, so I figure it might not be this summer that I’m plunging!

Still, this is part of the beauty of living here, the ability to dream of what you would like and to begin working towards making it happen. It’s not about wrestling the land into shape, but of seeing what will work with the land and the existing infrastructure. The longer I live here the more I become aware of what we can grow and of what we can recycle and reuse. When we first moved here I wrote of wanting to give it a year to live through all the cycles and it’s nice being here in spring when everything is ‘springing’ into life. Sure I have a permanent job on the mower and the grass seems to grow as quickly as I mow it, but seeing the trees in the orchard full of blossom and the vegetable seedlings all getting fuller and taller is beautiful to behold. On beautiful spring days the dryness of summer and the crisp cold of winter seem like a lifetime away. Each day brings a new dream for what we could do and we pull on our farm gear, take a step and move towards making it happen.

Inking our stories

In the paddock my foot kicks over a horseshoe rusted brown with age. It lies on the top of the soil, the wind having blasted the surface layer away exposing its rusted fragility. I pick it up and ponder about the horse. I put it back, leaving it there to rust some more.

Friday I went to a workshop hosted by Public Records Victoria and held in the Trench Room at the Town Hall. I love ascending that staircase to the Trench Room, the ornate carvings, the ceiling roses, the walls painted in Heritage colours. The Mysteries of Dr. Blake is filmed in this building and in watching it I am able to return to times past, which is also the purpose of my visit here today. The workshop is called ‘Getting around the block: property and land research’, and on first glance it might seem a topic that doesn’t inspire fascination, but as the morning unfolds it opens up a treasure trove of quirks and intricacies from our local history. I’ve come with a dual purpose: one- to see if I can find some keys to unlocking more about our property’s history; and two- to see what ideas I can take away for my teaching, or even research.

I’m instantly hooked when they begin talking about how the sources we will explore today will give us an ability to build a better picture of the past, and therefore, of the present. I love this notion of continuity and change, of looking at tangible artifacts and seeing what we can glean from those about the less tangible aspects of our heritage. I’m the youngest person in the room by years and I wonder if this is because it’s a Friday morning and I have the ability to integrate this into my work day, or if it is because it is only when people are older that they have the time, space and perhaps even, inclination, to pause and wonder how things came to be as they are.

I’m soaking up resources I haven’t used before – Niven’s directory of Ballarat, the Sands & McDougall street directories, the list of Parish maps, the links to wills and probates, to rate notices, to township plans. As we learn how to dig through the archives holding over 170 years of Victorian history stored in Ballarat and Melbourne, I’m becoming seduced by the notion of leaping off the edge of the present and into the past. I wonder why I never took my history studies further than my undergraduate degree – this idea of sleuthing through carefully inked records is wholly romantic. Perhaps in real life it’s less romantic, more a series of hits, misses and dead ends that can lead to disenchantment. Here in this room though, I see how each archive reveals a new piece and each piece contributes to the making of the whole. I often talk about my love for Tasmania as being comprised of the fact that when I’m there I can feel history breaking through into the present and in this workshop I’m reminded of how Ballarat can be the same. Perhaps looking into history is like looking at those 3D image puzzles, once you stare long enough and find the picture, it is impossible to ‘unsee it’ – every time you look at the puzzle, the picture emerges almost unbidden. Perhaps history is the same, once you alert yourself to the horses that rattled down the road, the women who ran private hospitals and pubs, the men who left their daughters hotels and a ‘set of bees and honey’ so that they could live ‘independently of any man’, once you find and listen to their stories, you cannot walk down the streets of your town without seeing history flashing through the fabric of the present.

I depart the workshop, a set of keys in hand and I come home ready to use them to unlock the past and continue the journey. We are all each of us already and always in the process of making history, of inking our own story into the fabric of existence.

Spring awakenings

The last week of winter has arrived as an early spring. Each morning we awake to fog hanging low over the mountain but as we grab cups of tea and head outside to feed the fish, the sun breaks through the fog and blue sky heralds the changing season. It's an awakening that sings of possibility. Here, on the farm in the warming sunshine, all seems possible. Rohan and I are awakening from our winter hibernation, hatching plans for farm projects for the rest of the year. We rush home from work so that we can get out in the paddocks and soak in the air. 

The weekend meant time to get out on the farm and meet the changing season - we mowed, we had a quick lesson in pruning from Nam and I tackled the orchard, and now need to tackle it again when David called over and said we hadn't taken enough off! On the apricot and almond trees blossom is already starting to emerge, bringing promise of fruit to come. We made a barrow load of mulch for the compost with the prunings and need to make some more to under the pine trees where we will plant berries, with the acidity from the pine needles just what they need to help them grow. We replaced the door at the back of the studio that leads into the pizza oven and we are going to give that room a much needed makeover - we'll rip off the wood covering the window, plaster the roof and walls and give the pizza oven a new coating of concrete and maybe a coat of paint on the outside. With the flue attached and the makeover done, it should serve as a great outdoor yet indoor cooking area for pizza. 

As the farm awakens it reminds you of the things that are important. At work there is a pressure for me to take on a new position, one that brings hours more work and a heavy responsibility. When in the office, I think perhaps I should do it, but then my eye begins to twitch when I think of all it entails. I drive home, turning the corner into our road and the rise where next door's green paddock meets the blue horizon startles me with it's contrast and beauty. All thoughts of increased responsibility and workload disappear. This is what matters- spending time outside, watching green shoots grow taller in the sunshine, talking about plans with friends who've recently got properties of their own, taking trips to Melbourne or Warrnambool to eat and laugh with family. 
My eye twitching ceases as the awakening occurs. 

After winter, spring will come...

It's been a while between farm blog posts- winter descended on the farm, days grew shorter and colder, and nights dropped below zero. During this time the farm fell into an easy, quiet rhythm. Days began and ended around the fire, clutching mugs of tea, heads crowned with woollen beanies and hands clad in mittens or gloves, the fire and the kitchen became the throbbing heart of the house. In winter it is easy to see how the kitchen has taken centre stage in portrayals of farm life, for it is here that you return to seeking warming food and drinks after being outside in the bitterly cold air. Our first winter on the farm has seemed icily cold, but perhaps that is how it will always be here at Innisfree? Walking the dog in the morning, wrapped in layers and quilted jackets, my feet crunch over grass that has been snap frozen overnight. The heavens open and rain falls, making a persistent slush in the lower end of the paddock and near the hay shed. My gumboots are caked in mud and if you venture too far you get bogged, 4WD or not. 

The olives meanwhile slowly ripened and on weekends we went out to pick more, laying them in containers of salt. After a few weeks we put some in water to leech out the salt and tasted them. They were a revelation- richer and sweeter than any store bought olive I had tasted. After tasting them I donned my apron and went straight back outside to pick more. 

Weeks passed and still winter persisted. The mountain lay shrouded in cloud and for days not a glimmer of sunshine broke through the grey. I flew overseas for work, leaving Rohan home on the farm and arriving in London on a bright, sunny day. Lying in the bedroom that night in our apartment I was sweltering as I remembered the way London traps the heat and feels hotter than it actually is. The next day Rachel and I went for lunch on the rooftop at Selfridges, and, there in the sun, I got my first London sunburn. My pale, wintery skin was no match for the English sunshine and I'm embarrassed to even write that. So while I spent nearly 2 weeks in England in storybook sunshine, back at home winter was reaching out her gnarled, cold fingers over everything. Snow fell on the paddocks and open water tanks froze solid for days. As I wandered in sunshine through the fields next to Herstmonceux Castle where my conference was, Rohan sent me photos of the farm, white and crisp. I loved the summer sun on the other side of the world and my trips to the ballet, the theatre, and being in London. Each time I'm there I feel strangely at home, I wander down streets that are both foreign and yet strangely familiar after consuming a English novels like food.  Despite this part of me yearned to be home on the farm and when I saw photos of the cows sprinkled with snow, I wished I was home to be part of the story that is our first winter on the farm.

Rohan meanwhile was living through a comedy of errors as he bogged his car, and then had a neighbour bog his car and someone else's tractor in the paddock in an attempt to offer assistance. I commented that it seemed a bit like swallowing a spider to catch a fly... Our neighbour David came to the rescue, dragging all the bogged vehicles of various sizes and ownership from where  they lay idle and immovable. 

Over the last couple of weeks there have been signs that the seasons are beginning to move towards change. In our kitchen garden planters the seeds that Rohan planted are beginning to germinate and tiny, green limbs begin to push their way through the chocolate soil. The grey clouds are beginning to clear and on some days, like today, the sun pushes across the sky leaving only whispy clouds. In the paddocks, the sheep are moulting, saggy pieces of fleece hanging from them as they rub up against fences, leaving tufts of white fluff behind. They begin to resemble balding, middle aged men, with tufts popping off their hides every now and then. 

With the advent of sunshine we become more active. The mower is retrieved and I begin my mowing meditation, gliding up and down between rows of the grove. We buy a new mulcher, needing a bigger one to handle the pruning that Dave has been doing and that we still need to tackle. In the concrete tank I'd pretended I would make a dipping pool, we now have 55 trout. The nutrients from there will feed our gardens and later in the year I'll be feasting on fat, juicy trout. There are fruit trees to be pruned and ash from the fire to be sprinkled around the cherry trees to save them from the cherry tree slug that munched through their leaves prior to autumn.

We still need to get chickens and hopefully in the next school holidays Rohan will have time to mend the chicken coop so that we can keep the chickens safe from foxes. On the radio I heard that is only 125 days till Christmas and so my kind turns to fire preparation- as always there will be much to be done to prepare for the ever present threat of fire come the warmer weather.  

In the meantime we need to call our local landcare who are working on a gorse eradication project - this will be perfect for us to become involved in and we can begin to tackle the back paddock which is suffering from an invasion of gorse. Yesterday we shepherded a koala that was heading to the middle of the road, making sure that he/ she found their way back into a tree alongside the mine rather than the middle of the bitumen.

There is much to be done but eight months after we moved in here I still cannot believe how much I love it. I think it is the open, endless sky I love most of all. It's an ever changing landscape: a sea of clouds; a pallet of muted pinks, oranges and reds; a rumbling, dark and threatening storm; and a twinkling, black map of the universe. 

Brandy, you’re a fine girl….

I’m not sure what this song has to do with olive picking, maybe it was the talk of brine that got me thinking of this song (the next line goes, but my love, my life and my lady is the sea…). Because olive picking time means salt, salt means brine and brine means I need a LOT of jars.

It’s been a gap between posts as we’ve both been at the business end of school and uni teaching semesters. Rohan is now on holidays and I’m about to enter my last week of teaching for the semester and even though I have a massive pile of marking to do, I’m trying to draw breath – 2 days of mental health first aid training reminded me again of how important it is to take time to stop and smell the roses, or in our case – pick the olives.

We began our olive picking experiment on the long weekend when Rohan had his family up for his birthday.

Happy birthday Rohan!

 Prior to sitting down to lunch everyone wandered out into the grove for some experimenting with the best olive picking strategies. Dave had given Rohan some olive picking gear for his birthday including some mini rake heads and handles and a big sheet of shadecloth for laying out around the tree. 

This was the raking experiment, where people clustered around and banged the olives off the branches onto the shadecloth for collection.

 I’d gone more old school and had bought a couple of butchers aprons with pockets on the front for some hand picking.  A couple of hours out there and we had well over 30 kilos of olives, from about 3 – 4 trees. With about 357 trees to go we were underway!

 1st Note to self: Must buy olive press.

The next step was pickling recipes. We began with a tub, some water and some salt – following a recipe from Sally Wise’s “A year on the farm” which recommends throwing all that in together, sealing the lid and walking away for at least 6 months. The leave and forget approach to pickling. Love it. So one beer keg and 12 kilos of olives later and we have an olivey tub of goodness sitting in the spa.

2^nd note to self: Must move olive tub to more sensible location.

The next pickling experiment was in a tub of salt. No water, just salt and leave the olives for about 4 weeks until they have created some sort of weird briney situation all of their own. Then you can jar them.

3^rd note to self: Must eat more jarred goods so have more jars for pickling.

 Today’s olive experiment was to find these beautiful black babies (here you can see that I don’t know my varieties at all, otherwise I’d name them). I picked them with my trusty apron and then began to follow a recipe from an Italian preserving book that Rohan got from Dave for his birthday. Step one was to drop them in boiling water, remove them and leave them overnight to dry. Tomorrow I’ll have to put them in a container with some salt and in 7 days I can jar them in olive oil with chili and commence eating. Express olives from tree to stomach!

4^th note to self: See note 1. Must buy olive press so have large quantities of oil for preserving olives in. I sense a catch 22 here. No press = need to preserve. Preserve = need for olive oil. Olive oil = need for press. 

Um Houston, we have a problem.

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!