inner pickle

sixth generation farmer

 

We had a cracker of a weekend, highlighted by an out-of-the-park record breaking market day yesterday. Out of the park. 

We're overwhelmed by the support we receive locally and further afield, and were humbled by the droves of people that showed up yesterday and bought our pork, and chicken, and honey, and egg custard and liver pâté and every single bikkie on the stall. It was amazing. 

If you were one of those people, thank you. Occasionally we wonder if off-farm jobs would be the ticket. We come close to hitting the wall and we panic and wonder what the hell we're doing messing around with chickens. And then we have a stellar day like yesterday and it all becomes clear and we sit around cooking up new horizons. We're pretty inspired over here today. Thank you. 

Because ultimately what we're attempting to do is to hand over this little farm, solvent, to the next generation. To not be the ones to pack it in altogether because the value of the land is worth so much more than the value of the food we can grow on it. 

Today we firmly believe that's possible. Thank you, fabulous people! 

xxx

sheds and stuff

Every farm has sheds. Sheds that are full of stuff because as any farmer will tell you, you can't throw anything away. There is some significant hoarding going on round here. Fence posts in piles, insulators, bath tubs, old egg crates. You never know when you'll need them again. 

 

 

When I started the bikkie business I asked Dad if he had any old boxes I could use on the market stall. Did he ever! Old wooden egg boxes with my great grandfather's name stenciled on the side came out of a shed. Gorgeous old ammunition boxes appeared. Thank you, shed. 

Recently when we were changing our chicken brooder arrangements, we had a need for a tall, long flexible bit of metal. Ta da! Out of a shed came an ancient swimming pool we had as kids, built on one long bit of tall and flexible metal. Perfect. Dad had hung onto that for thirty years in case he needed it, and it was perfect for the new brooder. Lucky us.

Sometimes the amount of stuff intimidates me, I think if we need to clear out a shed for any reason (like finding a home for the pallet of egg cartons or something sensible) we'll go in and never come out. One of the unusual things about a family farm that never actually changes hands is that stuff really never gets cleaned up and chucked away. Behind this deceased trailer is another much older deceased trailer. It's like the bones of the farm are visible.

See this cement post on it's side? It's one of the original Buena Vista gateposts. Now a convenient seat for small people waiting for the motorbike to pick them up. 

Oh look. There's a long wooden box in case family farming gets a bit much for anyone and someone needs to be disposed of. 

This rusty thing below is a wheat cracker, which they used when they grew and cracked the wheat for the chickens. Cool hey!

And this is a corn shucker, which takes the kernals off the corn cob. I'd so love to see if we could get this working. 

Nothing goes to waste. You never know when a drum will need to become a dog kennel. 

 

Making do with what we've got.

It's one whole big adventure working out what that is. 

xxx

the organic market garden

 

It was only three days ago that I suggested to Ad that we Roundup the organic market garden. (How's that for full disclosure? No one's perfect. Least of all round here.)

We'd started so well. The pigs went in last Autumn. They dug it up beautifully. Then there was a delay in the completion of their new digs up the hill and after the kikuyu grass was all gone, the weeds came back. Pigs don't eat weeds. The weeds grew tall and lush. We're rookies when it comes to clearing and cultivating and I kept looking at those weeds and wondered how we'd clear the paddock. Oh, we had lots of advice. Mostly chemical. Because of course if we just slash it and mulch it we'll just dig those weeds back in. So we need to clear it by hand. When I say 'we', I haven't done much clearing. When I suggested Roundup, Adam was the most shocked I've seen him in ages. He said something along the lines of, sure, why don't we just become Monsanto reps while we're at it?  then, are you kidding? then, you're not kidding. Then, please don't ever suggest spraying Roundup again. We're farming organically. There's your hoe, honey.

And then he went out and hired some expensive labour.

I go on record to declare Uncle Adam is fired from striking enterprise bargaining arrangements with nephews or children. Or maybe I should just go work for him. Conditions were conducive to chatting. Although I have to hand it to them, they worked pretty hard (at times.)

 

 Thanks, fellas. Weeds were chipped out. We're on our way. 

 

xxx

part of something

 

You know we've been kicking along here on the farm for a year, running the market stall for six months ahead of that. We're having a good go at figuring it out, making a living farming on a very small acreage, rather than just homesteading and living sustainably which frankly would be cheaper. 

A lovely lady who is in charge of the meat puchasing for an organic buying club contacted me recently about chickens, and she and her friend and six children between them showed up today to pick up an entire batch of freshly processed pastured free-range chickens. 

We had a walk around the farm and chatted about sustainable food and small farms and chickens and pigs and coffee. It was lovely. And for the first time (maybe I'm really very slow) I felt part of something bigger. When we started here we were so busy running to try and keep livestock alive and figure out what we're supposed to plant when and baking baking baking that I never really articulated our reason for being, you know? Yes, we wanted to grow and raise clean food for our own family but now we're raising it for lots of other people's families and that is super cool. I felt a little bit proud of that for the first time today. 

Because instead of just complaining about the supermarkets which I've done a lot of, we're actually offering an alternative. Little bit proud.

 

 

It's school holidays. While Adam was at the abattoir we weeded self-seeded tomatoes out of the carrots and picked all the green beans in the house vegie garden. We cut back the basil (dramatically) and made a lot of pesto. 

You can see the bottom of our menu board here. Here's the whole thing:

 

I never intended to blog this board otherwise I might have subconsciously put slightly flasher meals on this week. This board is mainly for Henry who always likes to know what his next meal is. Sometimes people edit it - I think Dad rubbed off the green beans on Friday when I had a sudden mad desire for wombok salad with the trout. The board works well. I get a lot of feedback from the smallies about it. 

I can tell you for sure there'll be basil pesto all over next week's menu. Pesto and beans. Seven different ways. 

Thanks for hanging out with us on this ride of ours. I appreciate your company.

xxx

oh honey bun

 

This farm has always had beehives. Well not always always, but Dad was maybe twelve when he got his first hive? That's some years (due respect and all.)

In the bee stakes I'm a bit of an observer, not because I'm not riveted by the wee things, I think they're awesome and I'm a huge honey fan, but bees were something Adam particularly wanted to do, so he does the bees. 

A week or so ago, we... er... they robbed our hives for the first time. Dad had sold his hives and honey extractor to someone before we decided to move down here. That someone turned out to be an awesome chick called Sharon who we found by accident and totally love. She's hilarious. Turns out Dad's hives are kinda cranky, maybe because they're elderly and established. They're safely housed in Berry and in Shaz's capable hands - they only occasionally get knocked over by a sheep - and our two new hives have been humming along peacefully here since September. 

Sharon returned Dad's extractor to us though, which was truly awesome because it's a little bit of farm history. And it still works well. 

 

 

See Adam's right hand in the photos above? Quite swollen? Three bee stings, right on top of each other. Wasn't bothering him at this point but by evening it was incredibly itchy and pretty sore. I went to the chemist and got him some antihistemine to help the itch. I'd forgotten, and so had he, that he really shouldn't take antihistemine. It knocks him out. 

I was cleaning up after dinner and heard a loud thump and discovered him in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. I tried not to panic, he looked completely unconscious, but he was very zen, said he hadn't felt a thing, he had just thought he was at the bottom when he had about eight steps left to go. Generally unharmed, just knocked out. No worries, put some honey on the sting next time. Or crushed garlic, or lavender oil. And no more antihistemine.

There's always a wee traveller!

 

 

Honey on a croissant, anyone?

Thank you bees. 

xxx

 

offline

Hello! Sorry if you've called in here over the last couple of weeks to find us out, we've had a technical shocker. 

Internet service isn't as reliable on a farm, even when you're on a main road, than when we were in the middle of the city. And faults just seem to take forever to fix. 

It's not fixed yet unfortunately, although we're cooking up alternatives with temporary fixes. We've got chicken to sell!

Anyway, HELLO! Lovely to see you. How about this for an amazing drawing, done for Adam, of Adam, by one of my dearest friends, the amazing Linda Evans. 

(Demonstrating the real drama of our offline-ness. Is that a chicken in moult or is it hen-pecked? Is it too early to plant the garlic? Are the pumpkins ripe?)

xxx

 

Helping hands

 

Our coffee harvest has always been picked by an army of Dad's mates. 

They show up in November and December in pairs and gangs and occasionally solo, they pick all morning, stop for icey drinks and bikkies for morning tea, then some kind of delicious lunch put together by Mum. They span out around coffee trees with containers strapped to their waists on belts, and they pick all our coffee. They talk. They tell bad jokes. It's extremely convivial.

Adam and I offered to run the pick this last year, but Dad declined. The coffee is his gig for now. His friends are happily up and down the rows. 

And afterwards, they're around the table for a big coffee-pickers dinner. It's a tradition, the pickers get bags of just-roasted beans and a big, social, end-of-season dinner. 

 

We're so grateful for their helping hands. 

This week we welcomed our very first Wwoofer (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). While we're not yet listed in the directory, Henry was wwoofing with our friends at Milkwood for the last two months, and seemed comfortable that we had no idea what we were doing, and keen to come and join in.

He's coped remarkably well with us, including being decked out "for a party" on his first night by the small girls who live here, with flowers and hair clips. He and Adam have done some awesome fencing over the last couple of days and we've fed him some yummy farm food. I think chicken processing is on the list for tomorrow. 

 

Our other terrificly helping hand around here is a ballerina, likely to show up in the top paddock (she moves fast) or anywhere where the quad bike it. She can hear it from a great distance through walls and closed doors. 

 

We're grateful for all the help we can get. 

xxx

 

 

a good day to be a farmer

 

Today we had piglets! Six of them, wee wiggly pink piglets, from a Large White sow and a Landrace boar borrowed from a friend. Super cool. 

They seem to be going OK but we're conscious of how much we don't know and how incredibly lucky we were last time, when it just all happened and the piglets all thrived. 

We're treading carefully and watching closely and hoping for the best. 

It's also raining. RAINING. Adam says if you put your head near the ground you can hear the grass squealing up out of the warm soil. You can definitely see the veggie garden growing! When it stops raining I'll take my camera out there. 

I risked the rain to get a newborn piggie shot, I couldn't help myself. 

It's a good day to be a farmer. 

 

 

xxx

fiasco farming

 

 

Mostly my fiasco farming posts are for giggle value.

They're a trawl through the many, many mistakes we've made in the first two years of this enterprise. Sometimes a bit embarrassed, always self deprecating, they're kinda the backbone of the book we might write one day when we're far enough in to be credible and far enough away from our early mistakes to make them into amusing anecdotes.

Some weeks though, they knock us off our feet. We just had one of those. 

It started with a delivery of day old meat birds last Wednesday. 

We'd finished processing the coffee for the year and we had a big bucket of parchment, which is the sawdust-like husk of the dried coffee bean. We put it into the big brooder pen as soft carbonous matter under the day-olds. 

Twenty-four hours later thirty of them were dead. 

In retrospect maybe it was obvious. Maybe it had tiny shards of green coffee bean in amongst it which the birds thought was grain. We don't know. It all happened at once, we figured it out, we got them off it immediately and the rest were fine. Big shock though. Really sucked. 

It was the middle of a 10-day-straight work week for me of baking, Schoolhouse and markets. 

Two days later was the Very Hot Day. 

It started out hot.

Adam misted the meat birds. Kept all the water for all the animals cool. Made sure everyone had shade. Gave the pigs a big mud bath. 

I was at the Schoolhouse and called to say I was coming home early. He couldn't speak to me because the laying hens were dropping dead one by one in front of him. 

We knew the meat birds were at risk in the heat but we thought the layers were OK. Turns out they weren't OK in mid-forties heat. 

We made a good effort to water them and cool them off, but in the end we lost about thirty birds overall between broilers and layers. 

I was trying to formulate a solution to make sure it never happened again, different shelter? different water system? when Dad reminded me it was officially the hottest day on written record in Australia and it would probably not be that hot again for another 60 years.

Let's hope so. 

And then. As we were sitting down to dinner, the much-antipated cool southerly wind arrived. The roof of our back verandah flexed. Henry announced he was taking his dinner inside, the wind was too noisy. We told him to sit down. Unusually, he got up, picked up his plate and said, you can stay out here, I'm going in, and the chicken caravan just blew away.

We all leapt up and looked over the back fence, it wasn't the chicken caravan thankfully, but one of the broiler shelters, cartwheeling out of the paddock and smashing down on the other side of the electric netting fence. 

Adam ran to attend to the most expensive things first: the windmill and the chicken caravan, and Dad and I ran to the broiler pen to survey the damage. Those poor birds had had a bad day. I don't think any were actually injured as their shelter went flying, as they were all outside of it anyway. 

We had an empty shelter which we moved in, and Adam repaired the torn netting fence. Henry quietly finished his dinner inside. 

We went straight into a weekend of a Saturday and a Sunday market, and they were spectacularly good market days. My beloved sister Naomi called me from Hong Kong to sing me a happy song on her ukelele right up until which I held it together perfectly. 

The fruit trees and the coffee trees took a hammering, but the veggie garden including the new pumpkin patch all look OK. 

I got my camera out late this afternoon to take some photos and it's been so long since I picked it up the battery was flat. I do, however, have an iphone. 

 

Shelter in need of repair.

 

Seven week old broilers in the paddock this afternoon.

 

Fixed yard hens with an open run behind them, White Leghorns and a few elderly Isa Browns. 

 

Chicken caravan hens crowding the fence to say cheeeese.

 

Teenaged Barred Plymouth Rocks all OK.

 

Super pregnant mama pig running at me for a back-scratch. Piglets due in under 2 weeks!

 

Veggie garden only a little bit worse off for the heat. NOTHING will stop those zucchinis!!

 

New pumpkin patch is, well, a bit patchy - but we'll have Hokkaido pumpkins at least!

 

 

It's incredibly dry, the ground is cracking and occasionally our sense of humour escapes us entirely. It's been a pretty awful week. But we've got our own amazing chicken liver pâté in the fridge, our own pork & fennel & sage sausages in the freezer and fresh zucchini coming out our ears and we get to wake up and admire these hills and it's not as hot as it was on Friday and we've got a couple of weeks off markets and as my Dad says, it always rains after a dry spell. 

Everybody here is fine. 

And soon there'll be pumpkin. 

xxx

 

therein lies my heart

 

See that? 

That farm stall is a dream. 

An idea tossed around for years before it became real. 

A farm stall for a farm bought and paid for by my great great grandfather (William) who worked it for years for a wealthy landowner called David Berry, paid his rent regularly, then rode his horse to the auction to bid on his own farm. He got it. That day it became ours too.

They were always dairy farmers, these family men of mine. Something I never intended to do because it looked like such hard work, not like piping eyeballs onto pig cupcakes at midnight, what a doddle. 

A farm stall that has a logo with my Dad in the middle of it, picking coffee (which I think he's doing in his sleep right now - it's coffee picking time) and hens, bees, pigs and a Holstein. (Although when we go looking for a house cow I think it will be a Jersey. These hills have a long history of Holsteins.) If I'd thought about it I would have pre-emptively included Indian Runner ducks. Very top of my Christmas list.

Today we took our own free range pork, fennel and sage sausages to the market (and sold out by 10am.) Today it felt like we were finally a farm stall, not just a biscuit stall hoping to be a farm stall. 

Adam put the supers onto the beehives. Next up: honey! Wild blackberry jam! Farm house quiche!

It was hard work getting to the market today but we did well and it's 8.15pm and the entire family is asleep apart from me and I'm thinking red wine and a movie. 

Cheers to you, William. 

I'm so unbelievably grateful to you.

xxx