Mount Gnomon Farm

Sanity saver

2011-12-28T10:49:00.004+11:00

I remember being disappointed a few years ago when I went to visit a local organic guru’s garden.

I had imagined a potager with beans climbing up wrought iron teepees, tomatoes tumbling onto a gravel path and garden edges as straight as a draftsman’s ruler.

It was smaller than I expected, and the tomatoes were restrained behind recycled tree guards. There was no sparkling gravel, but a weedy lawn, and something had been nibbling the silverbeet.

I kick myself now that I’d been so silly. A love of gardening doesn’t simply translate into a picture-perfect patch. This was a garden that was real: squeezed on a suburban block, weeded hastily at the end of the working day, and at the mercy of blackbirds, slugs, and the neighbour’s cat.

Gardens are incredibly personal. They’re like a teenage poem that you’re secretly proud of - but if you showed anyone you’d die of embarrassment. You’d make excuses about the messy writing, the misplaced apostrophes, and the lazy grammar… how it’s only the draft, something you just scribbled down in the night.

And even if you are proud of your garden, other people often don’t share your excitement. When I lived in town before the farm, I would drag my visiting mum into the backyard every second day to tour the garden.

“But I looked at it on Monday,” she’d say.

“Yes, I know; but you didn’t see the flowers on the tomatoes then, and I’ve put in some carrot seed too. And the beans have grown at least an inch.”

In the current patch I’m battling wild radish and clover. I reckon the neighbours who walk their dogs past our place wouldn’t even know I had vegetables in there, but for me startling them with a fork and a wave.

The rows of onions aren’t straight and the snow peas have chosen to sprawl along the ground rather than climb my artistic tea tree support.

We’ve been so incredibly busy with Christmas hams, farmers’ markets, shearing, water problems, and shorting electric fences (oh, and the day job too… almost forgot), but I’ve still been out there on dark pulling weeds and picking peas.

And while some people would say I’m a glutton for punishment (‘why don’t you just BUY your veggies for once’…) they don’t understand what I’m like when I don’t spend time in the garden.

My head gets sore from too many things to remember, I feel anxious when I see my piles of gardening books, knowing that I’m not keeping up with Peter Cundall’s planting list. Stress chemicals circulate through my body, caught in a maze with no gate.

All I have to do is pull a few of weeds and I’m fine again. My mind suddenly empties and I start reflecting on conversations I’ve had, things I’ve heard on the radio, and my creativity returns.

And I love looking at my hands: nails ripped, skin scratched, and deep parallel lines along my fingers that hold on to the red dirt, however hard I scrub.

Summer garden from Eliza Wood on Vimeo.

Guy considers wife-swapping

2011-11-09T18:55:00.003+11:00

Would you trade your sow for a wife?

The question came up this week during a farm visit from a group of Papua New Guinean farmers and researchers.

They’re in Tasmania for a pyrethrum conference, and they’ve also been touring Tasmanian farms to get ideas to improve their agricultural practices. And they wanted to see a pig farm.

Pigs are worth a lot of money in PNG; a large mature breeding will cost you about $A2,000. They’re also considered legal tender, and you can trade pretty much anything if you’ve got the right number of pigs.

Apparently several large pigs and a few thousand dollars cash will buy you a wife, and the bigger the pig the better. The sow and money goes to the wife’s family with the largest pig for your bride’s father. The better the girl, the more pigs she’s worth, too.

However, don’t give away all your pigs for wives, as you can also use them to buy land. One mature pig would allow me to get about five acres and start a farm with a new wife. And if you have an enemy, a pig as a token of peace calls off the war.

If you have a herd of pigs you can buy multiple wives. But some families don’t accept pigs, and insist on cattle instead.

I began to do the sums and worked out that with our couple of hundred pigs, 50 cattle and 60 sheep that not only would I have something that could match most PNG families’ demands, but I could potentially buy a new farm and have about 20 wives.

But my excitement and plans to ship our menagerie to PNG were short- lived, when I was told you have to ask permission from your first wife before you can gain another, and so on.

If you do decide to go ahead and get a second wife without permission, it’s common for your house to be burnt down and then you have to trade more pigs to get another house.

A look from Eliza indicated that a burnt down house would be the least of my worries.

The visiting farmers asked lots of questions about our free range pig system, with the hope of taking some different ideas home.

In PNG pigs are often kept on a lead or chain that’s moved around the farm so they can work the ground. Others are kept free range where they scrounge for sweet potatoes and edible plants.

Pig farming has come a long way in the past 20 years: pigs now have their own shelters - previously it was traditional for pigs to share a house with the farmer’s family, with the pigs getting one half and the family the other.

One of our close friends Graeme Stevenson spent time working in PNG several decades ago, and recalls using a long drop toilet and hearing the sound of pigs cleaning up the mess.

There have been close ties between Tasmanian and PNG ag scientists for decades. At the moment they’re working together to grow western vegetables to market to the expat community in PNG. It’s an interesting dilemma facing many developing countries as they are influenced by the appeal of western agriculture practices, plant varieties and livestock breeds.

The most common meat eaten by our visitors is not backyard chicken or pork, but lamb that’s been imported from Australia and New Zealand.

Western agriculture offers greater levels of productivity for farmers and could lead to improvements in nutrition, but at the same time it has the potential to displace traditional practices and culture. It can also lead to the extinction of local species and breeds.

Interestingly, the loss of cultural knowledge in PNG and the switch to western food has prompted another Tasmanian agricultural scientist, Bruce French, to develop an international database of edible plants.

Bruce and his team of volunteers are hoping that by identifying native edible plants and documenting their nutritional values, that they can assist indigenous people to overcome diet-related health issues and encourage them to continue using indigenous plants. It’s a fantastic cause and they have already successfully documented 18,000 plants.

When the farmers saw the size of our pigs their eyes lit up, “They are so much bigger and productive than our native pigs. We would love some of these pigs in PNG”.

I guess it would be hard not to be excited when large pigs like ours could give you access to virtually any woman.

While I’m sure the Wessex Saddleback would adapt to a diet of sweet potatoes and pasture, its size and productivity could quickly lead to the displacement of the indigenous local breeds.

That thought was a subtle reminder that it’s probably best to keep our pigs in Tasmania.

Contemplating compost

2011-09-27T20:31:00.004+10:00

There are two places that get me thinking about death: funeral parlours and compost heaps.

And I know which one I’d prefer to end up in.

Into a compost heap we put everything we don’t want - an apple core, yesterday’s newspaper, grass that reached beyond the mower blades. But, out of it comes something we do want: rich, sweet-smelling compost that’s good enough to eat.

I compost consciously twice a year, during spring and autumn. My compost heaps are contained within timber pallets and galvanised mesh, drawn together with blue baling twine.

I made my first compost bin when I came back from uni and bought a house in town. Dad and I scavenged the timber off a shed on a farm that had been ripped up and turned into plantation.

At 8am on my first Sunday in suburbia I was waking up my neighbourhood nailing together my bin.

It was hard in town to find the volume of materials to get the heap really heating up. I’d mow the neighbours’ nature strips just so I could get the clippings, and for two seasons in a row I got told off for nicking the autumn leaves off a footpath that wasn’t outside my house. I was too scared to go back a third time.

I’d visit my parents’ farm and volunteer to pick up horse manure, or clean out the chook house.

The last day I spent on the farm with my dad, before he died a week later in hospital, we scraped out his duck pen. Dad held open the bags and I wobbled the shovel above - piled with straw and sloppy, stinking poo - trying not to spill it over him.

Now we’re at Mount Gnomon my compost is a rich mix of life’s waste: piglets that disappeared under 200 kilos of sow, chooks fallen from their perch, and a hairless joey found on the road.

It’s layered with pig manure, and cow, sheep, duck, guinea pig, horse, cat and rabbit poo. There are spud peelings, rhubarb leaves, mouldy loaf-ends and forgotten left-overs.

I love seeing the steam rising from it on a chilly morning. I love seeing the worms bury to safety as I fork it into the barrow.

I know where I’d like to end up.

The perfect mix

Without getting too sciency, the secret to a good compost comes down to the carbon/nitrogen balance.

You don’t want too much carbon (straw, newspapers, cardboard, dried-up weeds) or you’ll end up with a dry, mulch-like material that won’t break down.

And you don’t want too much nitrogen (grass clippings, green weeds, kitchen scraps) or you won’t be able to go near the heap for the terrible smell, and it’ll be slimy and way too wet.

So, you want a bit of this, and a bit of that. Think of pork belly and the way the meat and fat are layered. (Think of pork belly often, just for the sake of it).

When I’m putting a heap together my layers are about 10cm thick, so I’ll have a layer of straw mixed with manure, then some green weeds, some torn-up newspaper or cardboard, rhubarb leaves etc etc. I sprinkle the ashes out of the fireplace thinly, and if I’m putting dead animals in I make sure they’re near the middle so they’ve got the best chance of breaking down.

I read an anecdote in an old Tasmanian organic gardening book about a keen composter whose heap exploded when they tossed in a chicken. Unfortunately nothing as spectacular has happened in mine, yet.

Falling for it

2011-08-24T14:10:00.006+10:00

In some ways I wish we hadn’t found it. Our elusive waterfall could have remained so.

When we moved to the farm over two years ago we were told there was a waterfall somewhere over the bank in the far south-west corner.

This is our bit of rainforest. You walk across our back paddock, climb through the fence and head into some partly cleared bush. The eucalypts are huge, and the weak-rooted wattles criss-cross the path.

As the ground slopes down, the bush changes: ferns appear, and wet rotting logs. The air is colder and when you breathe in you feel it deep in your skull.

There are magnificent blackwoods and manferns blocking the sun. Fungi pushes out from the dirt that’s dark and composty.

Guy decided on Sunday we were going to go looking for the waterfall that we’d heard, but never seen.

Neighbour Tom turned up in his bushwalking boots and I stashed a packet of dates in my camera bag. Bushwalking within your own boundary – we are so very lucky.

Guy found the top of the fall pretty quickly, and before I’d even managed to get my camera out he was heading down the bank, finding a way to the base.

Guy’s a much more confident bush adventurer than I: his feet rarely slip and he never comes out with a muddy behind. But I get nervous of the steep drops and take them all sitting down. It reminds me of when my mum broke her leg and could only get up the back step this way.

By the time I got to the bottom Guy was resting on a rock looking up at the spraying water and Tom was splashing through the creek, testing his new boots for grip and waterproof-ness.

While I pottered about taking pictures, Tom and Guy went looking further down the creek.

And what did they find? Another waterfall, and the entrance to a cave.

We walked out of the bush as the sun was dipping, and we reflected on how truly magical it was to be able to sit under a waterfall one minute, and then be back among the pigs in the next.

Duck season

2011-08-15T16:11:00.013+10:00

It’s a challenging and busy time at Mount Gnomon. The days are gloomy and recent rains have made a pair of gumboots an essential item for feeding the menagerie.

But spring feels like it’s not too far away: we have only a couple of ewes left to lamb and we’ve had our first Belted Galloway calf.

The biggest indicator that the days are drawing out and the weather is going to improve is the onset of duck season. I don’t mean the shooting variety - I’m referring to the time when our large flock of ducks begins to lay.

I’ve long had a passion for ducks: it was my responsibility as a child to be the duck herder. Every night I’d call our Khaki Campbells with “dill, dill, dill” and they’d come in for their feed, and I’d shut them up so I could collect the eggs in the morning before the crows got them.

Eliza also grew up with ducks, and proudly tells of the time she took hand-reared Jimmy to the North Motton Pet Show on a lead.

The first ducks we bought for Mount Gnomon Farm were Indian Runners. Tall, upright, and elegant, the Indian Runners are great foragers and have earned a reputation for being the ideal garden slug and pest eradicator. The colours we have in our Indian Runners are classified as rare - in fact any colour other than white and white-and- fawn are rare and need support.

We have cinnamon, fawn, apricot, mallard, blue fawn, trout, and harlequin, and as a collection they make a great spectacle.

Indian runners have more of a herd mentality than any other duck and while they’re a bit scatty, they’re easy to train to go into their house at night. About an hour before dusk they run as a group to the shed entrance and wait to be shut up, away from our healthy population of quolls and devils.

The safety of the shed also protects the eggs from being pinched by crows each morning. Indian Runners are prolific layers and if fed a good laying ration can rival most chooks with their egg-laying capacity, often producing over 200 eggs in a season.

We have about 24 Indian Runner hens and when they all start laying it’s quite possible we’ll have to find a home for over 12 dozen eggs a week. We’re not sure what the market is like for ducks eggs, but we’re soon to find out.

Duck eggs are quite different to chook eggs. The yolk contains more fat and the white is higher in protein, and as a result if they’re eaten like a chook egg many people find them too rich. With their high protein levels they also require gentler cooking. However, the protein makes them perfect for baking and you can freely substitute chook eggs for duck eggs in cakes, biscuits, custards etc.

The high protein levels also mean that the whites will whip up better, so your cakes should be lighter and higher (and the richness of the egg yolks makes the cakes even richer).

Due to the relative scarcity of duck eggs most people haven’t cooked with them or are hesitant to give them a go. We’ve been told we’ll have to find some older country-style chefs that learnt to bake at a time when duck eggs were more common.

We would love to hear from people who have a particular use for duck eggs, or a favourite duck egg recipe, or know of someone who is after a regular supply. If not, our pigs can look forward to some special duck egg treats.

Shopping for Shrops

2011-07-30T20:36:00.011+10:00

“I don’t eat anything unless it’s got a black nose,” says Neil Neilson, third generation Shropshire sheep breeder from Victoria.

Neil’s in his mid-80s and still farming the unforgiving soil at Baringhup, to the north of Ballarat.

“When we have visitors and we have a roast they all say, ‘oh that’s the best roast we’ve ever had - it’s so sweet’, but it is.”

Neil’s family has had Shropshires since around 1860, when his grandfather bought 20 of the first ewes introduced to Australia from England.

Once in Australia, Shropshires took off, particularly in Tasmania. In the 1890s three ‘elite’ Shropshire breeders immigrated to Tasmania with their flocks.

The Shropshires had a big impact on the sheep meat industry. Before 1900 about 20,000 lamb carcasses left Australia each year. Ten years later there were several millions, and 70 per cent of them were sired by Shropshires.

The boom in popularity was unfortunately followed by a sharp drop after the First World War. It seems European housewives wanted smaller joints as they balanced their budgets, and the Shropshire was too big. Neil Neilson says he can also remember the Shropshire hides being unpopular because they had black skin around the head and legs.

There are now only about 10 registered flocks in Australia, and after many months of planning we have bought a little flock and reintroduced them to Tasmania.

We bought 27 ewes from the Neilsons, and we sourced a ram and another ewe from Fiona and Nicholas Chambers of Daylesford, Victoria. We carted the ram and single ewe home on our ute on the boat, and had so much pleasure telling the other passengers about our special cargo. A couple of months later a transport company brought over the rest of the flock.

Neil has been reminding us how important it is to keep the sheep pure, and cull the ones that aren’t up to standard.

“My dad always used to say to us, ‘if you want to keep something pure you’ve got a big job. You’ve only got to make one mistake and introduce one ram that’s not as good as it should be, and you start back to scratch again’.

“We’ve all been very careful with the Shrops and we’re proud of that.”

He says it’s hard to find pure flocks in Australia, and many have been crossed with other breeds. It will be a challenge for us to source rams of good type.

We feel a deep sense of responsibility now we’ve got the Shropshires. It’s raining at the moment, and the sheep are out in the paddock sheltering their young lambs. There are a couple of ewes still with bulging, low tummies waiting to give birth.

We have a responsibility both to the breed and the Neilsons. This is the first time they’ve sold a group of their ewes as a flock. It’s such a credit to them that they have kept their stud going for so long.

“They seem to have a better constitution than most sheep, and that’s really why we’ve stuck to them,” Neil says.

“They seem to be able to turn their tucker into fat and meat quicker than anything else.”

Listen to Neil tell the story of when he almost lost all his Shrops, and see the photos of our new lambs.

The reality of farming

2011-06-20T12:38:00.006+10:00

For the past 24 hours I’ve had my hand up a sow. She’s been in labour so long the piglets are dying inside her. My hands are raw and ripped from trying to drag out one of the piglets by its teeth – the only bit I can catch on to.

The sow’s on her first litter, so we call her a gilt, and the piglets are simply too big for her. She’s worn out from pushing and her muscles have seized up from the strain.

I pulled out the first piglet yesterday, it was breech, but livened up pretty quickly once it was out and rubbed with a bit of straw. I thought that once the first one was born the rest would follow easily. Sometimes you just need to clear the blockage.

But as the day progressed nothing else appeared. And then over a couple of hours we pulled out two dead piglets. They were huge. They could have been a few days old. Gilts typically have smaller litters, but ideally the piglets are small too.

Before bed last night we went out for a final time to see if anything else had shifted. Guy’s hands are too wide for a gilt, so it’s my job to go digging. I lay on the straw, pressed into the spilt birthing juices, breathing in the unique smell of a farrowing sow.

With my arm fully in, I could just wriggle my fingers to feel a snout. When I put my finger in its mouth it bit down hard. Piglets’ teeth are incredibly sharp. I could feel its tongue moving about.

Over an hour I drew the piglet back and forth through the sow’s cavity. Countless times I had it within a handspan of the exit, and then it would be sucked back in by powerful muscles. It fell back fully out of reach after 11pm and I was spent.

Inside I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror: puffy and red-eyed, snot bubbling at my nostrils, blood spattered on my face. I was exhausted. And I knew that the piglet that was struggling to be born would probably be dead by morning.

This is the worst part of farming. A town-living friend said to me once that farming just seems to be all about life and death. Every day we’re confronted with it. Yesterday we killed nine roosters for the freezer. A week ago a quoll took some of our chooks. In the same week two litters of healthy piglets were born. In a fortnight our sheep will start lambing.

Neither of us wanted to get up this morning to check the sow. The piglets would either be dead beside her, or there would be nothing, which meant they were dead inside.

There was nothing.

I can feel a dead piglet just past her hips. She can’t push it through the last narrow bit, and I’ve been trying all morning to catch hold of the piglet long enough to drag it through.

The vet says there’s nothing we can do but let the piglet decompose and pump the sow with antibiotics every 12 hours to keep her alive. We’ve no idea how many more piglets are inside.

Reality shook me as I strained one last time to reach the piglet. I touched its flaccid tongue hanging between its teeth, and its brother - the sole survivor - nuzzled my shoulder, looking for a teat. Farming really is about the cycle of life.

Chestnut crunching for guilt-free crackling

2011-06-11T20:58:00.015+10:00

Tasmania has only one commercial chestnut orchard, and our pigs are fortunate we know the owners.

About five years ago I met chestnut growers Colleen and Daryl Dibley. Their orchard is at Preolenna, up in the hills 20km south of Wynyard.

Preolenna used to be a prime dairy farming area, but now it’s a dark monoculture landscape of tree plantations.

The Dibleys are one of the few property owners at Preolenna still trying to make a living from the land.

Unfortunately this year’s been a bit of a fizzer. Chestnuts are wind pollinated, and the rain during January weighed down the flowers and meant the pollination failed.

But the upside of that has meant there have been plenty of reject chestnuts for our pigs!

The pigs love them, so much that when I take a bucket out to the paddock I have to be quick on my gum-booted feet to avoid being knocked over. The pigs eat the chestnuts shell and all.

It’s been known for centuries that pigs fed on chestnuts taste better. And there’s plenty of science out there on the improved meat and fat qualities. Chestnut-finished pork also has high levels of unsaturated fat, including heart-healthy oleic acid.

In Europe pigs have played an important role each season by cleaning out the chestnut orchards after the main harvest, eating the diseased and over-looked fruit. Chestnut-reared pork is cherished and commands a higher price.

You probably won’t notice a huge difference in our pigs this year, since they’re only getting small quantities as part of a broader mixed diet, but it’s nice to see the pigs enjoying themselves, and making a racket, crunching on such a delicacy in Tasmania.

Personally, I like them roasted with parsnips, beetroot, pumpkin, garlic and rosemary, and doused in olive oil and golden syrup.

Two years of hard work and satisfaction

2011-05-25T07:07:00.006+10:00

It’s our farm birthday this week – two years at Mount Gnomon Farm!

It’s been a busy and rewarding year and a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Over the past 12 months we added two more rare breeds of cattle to the farm, a rare breed of duck, a couple of rare breeds of chooks and we reintroduced a rare breed of sheep to Tasmania. It was also a year that saw us double our number of Wessex Saddleback pigs, encouraging us to find new markets. Last Christmas we somehow managed to survive the distribution of 200 hams and while it was stressful, it was a great thrill for us to see families enjoying something that we produced, on one of the biggest days of the year.

One of the highlights was being invited to Sydney by chef Alex Herbert who manages and operates the award-winning restaurant Bird Cow Fish. Alex is a big supporter of ethical food and was keen to hear our story and help us establish connections with other restaurants in Sydney. Alex gave us room in her fridge for our samples while we travelled back and forth from appointments with places like Tetsuya’s, Four in Hand, District Dining, Marque Restaurant and Quay. The response to our product was fantastic, but the realities of actually supplying some of these restaurants on a regular basis hit home. A place like Quay, where head chef Peter Gilmore has a signature pork belly dish, goes through 30 pork bellies a week. That’s about 15 pigs’ worth, or 90kg. In Tasmania the restaurants we supply use only a couple of week. There’s a lot to be said about population and running a booming restaurant business.

In November we had enough spare produce to have a stall at the local farmers’ markets in Burnie, Devonport and Evandale. Despite the early starts (a challenge for me, not so much for Eliza who’s used to it), we’ve really enjoyed the markets, as we get to talk to our customers and raise awareness about farming free range and the plight of rare breeds of livestock.

While it’s all been pretty exciting, farming has a way of quickly bringing you back to reality. The same day our first box of pork arrived at Tetsuya’s restaurant, one of our sows lost 9 out of her 10 piglets overnight. We went to bed after Marybelle had given birth to 10 healthy piglets who’d all had a good feed and looked content. But we woke to the horror of finding all but one of the piglets had lost so much weight in a few hours that despite our best efforts to feed them with a dripper we couldn’t save them. Piglets are so small and fragile and need to be fed every couple of hours to survive. In this case their mother had developed mastitis and stopped producing milk, and before we could treat her it was too late.

While the loss of piglets is an emotional blow for both the mother and us, it also hurts our small business financially and six months later puts a dent in our ability to supply our regular customers. Marybelle has made it up, fortunately, and is currently rearing bouncy litter of 12.

At Mount Gnomon we’ve begun to realise that in farming some things are beyond your control. Just recently we lost our second sow to a snake bite. When we choose to run our pigs free range next to the bush we have to accept that sometimes snakes will come in contact with our pigs. As nature-lovers we respect that snakes are native to the environment and it would be wrong to harm them or remove them. And since they’re territorial the removal of one snake will only see another snake take its place.

The biggest change this year came when I resigned from my job with the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research to take on the role of managing our growing menagerie and developing the business. After nearly two years of working full time while establishing the farm, it was a big leap of faith. If you buy a farm and have a big mortgage, you really have no choice but to work off-farm as you purchase the necessary infrastructure to get the business going. First we bought the animals, then the water infrastructure, pig housing, fencing, a four-wheel motorbike for feeding, a ute for taking the pigs to market … the list goes on. A farm is certainly a great way of spending money. Our accountant mentioned to us that at some stage we’ll have to stop spending and start making some money (Eliza’s mother agrees).

Giving up the luxury of regular payslips was a big step, and when I rang my grandmothers to discuss the move, they thought I was a bit crazy: “You’re giving up a good job to become a pig farmer?”. Both my grandmothers have spent most of their lives on farms and are aware of the struggles facing Tasmanian farmers today. While we might have a reduced cash flow, we’ve now got the time to expand our business, do our own packaging, shuffle the dreaded paperwork, and show more people around the farm. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t have a group descending on the property for a sticky-beak. The biggest highlight for me this year was having more than 35 people accepting our blog invitation to plant native trees to create shelterbelts on the farm. People travelled from all over the state to work alongside each other, and as a result of their community spirit 600 trees were planted in just a few hours.

Thank you for your continuing support of our adventure.

Sourdough obsession

2011-05-02T19:58:00.002+10:00

You’d think there were enough mouths to feed on this farm, but I’ve added another one to the menagerie.

Fortunately this one only needs feeding once a week. It’s wild, but hasn’t escaped yet.

About three years ago I went to a sourdough-making workshop at a friend’s house. I came home, inspired, with my little jar of frothing flour and water. Some months later I found that jar in a forgotten corner of the fridge, containing a dark green slime swimming in black liquid.

But a couple of months ago I started thinking again of wild yeasts when I was flicking through a bread-making book. The thought of capturing my own yeasts, and keeping the starter like a pet, inspired me again.

Guy says I’ve been neglecting the blog since I’ve been bread making, and I apologise. He hasn’t, however, suggested I stop baking.

I began with an incredibly simple mixture of organic wholemeal flour and water – one cup of each in a plastic honey bucket with a tea towel over the top. I let it sit for a couple of days on the kitchen bench and it started to bubble.

I fed it another cup of flour and cup of water, and it bubbled again. I’ve read that wholemeal is the best flour to get a starter going - it’s the most vigorous fermenter. I’m also planning to make a rye starter for a different flavour.

After the first feed you need to throw out half the starter (in the compost) and feed it again. When the starter is in its infancy you should do this every day for a week, and you’ll notice the smell becoming richer and more complex.

It’s great getting to know the habits of your starter. Now mine’s established I keep it in the fridge in the garage (putting the starter in the fridge slows down the fermentation, but you still should feed it once a week). When it’s hungry it’ll look flat and won’t have many bubbles. It might even have a bit of darkish liquid on top called hooch – it’s a by-product of the fermentation. After you feed the starter it comes to life in about six hours: it bubbles and rises a couple of centimetres, happy again.

My routine now when I’m baking is to take the starter out on a Friday night and mix a big ladleful of it with 600ml of warmish water. I then stir in 500g of flour (any sort you want, but I usually do this stage with white) and I leave this gluggy mix overnight covered with a plastic bag. Some books call this the ‘sponge’.

Next morning the sponge will be really bubbly and light. It’s like you’ve given your starter a massive feed. Now I add 600g of flour – I’ve been experimenting with mixtures of white with wholemeal or spelt or rye (don’t be too heavy-handed with the rye though, it’s pretty dense) – and 25g of sea salt.

It’s important to rest the dough now, and let the flour soak up all the water. After half an hour I knead it for 5-10 minutes. I’ve read lots of complicated recipes involving long kneads and lots of re-shaping, but for what I’m doing, it’s really not necessary.

The wetter the dough is the bigger the air holes will be. It’ll also spread out more sideways than up. If the dough’s drier it’ll keep its shape better while it’s rising, but it will be denser.

I’ve been splitting the dough in two and shaping it into rounds. Then I leave them on trays covered with cotton cloths and flour for about six hours. That’s enough time to get heaps of jobs done on the farm, or a full day of brass band practice (we competed in the Nationals at Easter!).

Close to cooking time the dough should have just about doubled in size. Your oven needs to be really hot. I crank mine up to 260 degrees Celsius. There are all sorts of fancy baking stones and ceramic containers you can bake in, but at the moment I’m just using a couple of pizza stones. I pre-heat them too.

When the oven light’s gone off I slash the tops of the loaves with a bread knife, down to about 1cm, and then I spray with water.

Then comes the bit where I get a bit stressed: I worry about losing too much heat out of the oven while I’m mucking about getting the dough off the trays and onto the stones, but I’m getting quicker as I become more confident.

Bake the bread for 10 minutes at this high heat, and then check to see how it’s browning. If it’s looking pretty dark I turn it down to 170, if it’s only a little bit brown I’ll keep it at 180-90. The rest of the cooking takes about 30 minutes. It’s ready if it sounds hollow when you tap it.

Problems I’ve had so far that I’ve managed to solve:
- Starter not rising after I fed it – I was being too stingy with the feed and it was a bit too watery. Boosted the flour ratio.
- Not enough air holes in the bread – made the dough moister. I think the holiness has also improved as the starter has matured.

So far I’ve made different combinations of white, wholemeal, spelt and rye breads. I’ve also made a tasty combination of quinoa and spelt. I made an accidental ciabatta too, but so far the Turkish bread has been the biggest hit.

Photos from top:

- Rye and white

- Rye and white cross-section

- Established starter

- Turkish bread

- Quinoa and spelt

- White (decadent!)

Taking on turkeys: 2

2011-04-16T08:58:00.007+10:00

The turkeys went too far. They killed two of our roosters, albeit they were headed for the pot too.

We found the turkeys leaning over the bodies, pecking at them. How they actually carried out the murders we don't know, but there are no other suspects.

So, what do we do with five free range turkeys that are now in the freezer?

Roast turkey, obviously, but I'd like some other ideas too... keeping in mind that because the turkeys have been running around outside they'll have leaner, darker meat.

Any suggestions?

Taking on turkeys

2011-03-13T10:38:00.015+11:00

My mother hates turkeys. Which is probably why Guy decided we needed to get some.

On a Saturday morning a couple of months ago we were at the Burnie Farmers' Market. Guy had been relaxing reading the paper ("I just get in your way behind the stall anyway...") and I was serving customers, when I heard Guy on the phone, "we'll take the lot".

"We'll take the lot of what?"

Well, you know the answer.

Fortunately by the time we had a chance to drive to Kimberley to pick up the turkeys "the lot" had lessened significantly and there were only 18 left. Only.

These turkeys are just your common white ones, and we're considering them trial turkeys before we source a rare breed.

Fifty-three per cent of the world's turkey breeds are actually at risk of extinction. Almost all turkey meat you buy comes from one breed alone, the Broad Breasted White.

The turkeys weren't a problem when we first got them. They stalked around shyly and kept a good distance. Ten disappeared one night, probably taken by quolls or devils, but not a feather was left.

The remaining eight are now into everything. My car is covered in huge, muddy convict-like prints from bonnet to boot. There are black, smelly messes across the yard - and down the gravel road to our neighbour's house where she kicked them out four times on Friday.

They climb and try to balance on everything. They've eaten my kohl rabi seedlings. They're harrassing the ducks. And this morning there were heavy noises on the roof.

There is one thing I don't mind about them: they make so many different chortling, guttural, peck-peck-peck sounds, and it's quite comforting to hear them chat away as they ambush the other animals.

And in the evenings they climb onto the stable roof, wobble forward and back at the peak, and watch the sunset.

But what I'm really looking forward to is a free range roast turkey. And it won't be long now.

Simplicity in a sheep's innards

2011-02-10T08:52:00.006+11:00

I remember being mesmerised by sausage-tying as a child watching a game show on the ABC.

It was a program where school-aged contestants were shown by the experts how to lay bricks, or tie sausages, and then had to do it themselves in front of the cameras with a clock ticking.

We had our first go at making sausages at home this week: boning out pork shoulders, mincing, seasoning, encasing and ultimately tying.

Our bookshelves are crammed with books on meat cooking, charcuterie, and old farm skills, but I decided to keep it simple the first time, and followed a DVD, Pig in a Day, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh’s a chef, writer, and smallholder in the UK on a mission to enthuse people to grow and cook ethical, wholesome food.

I watched as Hugh demonstrated the right meat to fat ratio coming through the mincer. I watched the adding of oven-dried breadcrumbs, of salt, pepper, mace and other spices. I concentrated hard on the even-filling of the sausage casings, and the elusive sausage tying. I rewound the frames and watched again.

And then it was my turn.

I’m not sure about the breadcrumbs. I added the proportion Hugh said, but I think it was too much. Our butcher Neville at the abattoir says there was no need for breadcrumbs, so I think next time I’ll try without.

And more fat - there wasn’t enough sizzle. I think I’ll save some up from our bacon.

And salt, not quite enough salt.

But they look alright don’t they? And how about that sausage-tying in groups of three for a first time?!

*Top picture: Neighbour Tom enjoyed the mincing, but wasn't so keen on filling the sheep intestine casings.

Gnawing on a tail

2011-01-13T16:21:00.002+11:00

Start collecting tails and try the recipe.

Saving the Dairy Shorthorn

2011-01-07T17:05:00.000+11:00

What does a rare breed farmer get for Christmas?

More animals!

We have been incredibly fortunate to source a small herd of endangered traditional dairy shorthorn cattle from Western Creek breeders Betty and Warrick Holmes.

Western Creek is under the Western Tiers behind Deloraine, and Betty and Warrick are reluctantly selling their animals and farm so they can move back to New Zealand to be with family.

The dairy shorthorns are absolutely beautiful beasts, with quiet and gentle natures, and we are so pleased that the Holmes’ have entrusted us with their care.

They’re a dual purpose breed which means they’re good for both milk and beef, and they’ve been around for about 200 years.

In the early 1900s the dairy shorthorn was the main breed of cattle in Britain, and was called the “farmer’s cow of England”. It fitted in well with the routine of a mixed farm.

But in a similar story to the Wessex Saddleback pigs, as farming intensified, the breed began to be lost.

Farmers were looking for either high milk production, or heavy carcass weight, and it’s hard to soup-up a cow to do both.

Around the world the dairy shorthorn genetics have been altered to focus on either of these traits, but we’re lucky in Australia there has been a concerted effort to preserve the original dual purpose genes. There's also good old stock in Ireland.

In Australia traditional dairy shorthorns are on the rare breeds list under ‘endangered’, along with traditional herefords and traditional angus.

Aren’t their coats lovely? Ours are mostly roan (red sprinkled with white) but we also have a pure white cow and a few white calves. They can also come in red.

We think they deserve to be held back from extinction because they're perfect for the smallholder wanting to milk a few cows and produce a decent beef animal for the freezer. They're also docile and calve easily. Dairy shorthorns were the foundation stock for many other red breeds, including illawarras and ayrshires.

Neither of us drink much milk, but Guy's already making plans for a small milking shed, and Eliza's digging out her cheese books. It'll be great to have our own yoghurt, butter and cheese to go with our homegrown meat and vegetables.

Warrick and Betty Holmes say goodbye to their cattle

2010-12-27T14:42:00.002+11:00

During the chaos of packaging and delivering Christmas hams last week we received a box in the mail from Fran in Corinda, Queensland.

She knits animal tea cosies for charity and recently designed one for the Wessex Saddleback. When she saw us in December's edition of Country Style she couldn't resist posting one to us - teapot and all.

She wrote, "Treat it as fun, or treat it as kitsch, I hope you enjoy it!"

And doesn't it go well with Guy's new Christmas mug?

Thank you Fran!

Bringing the country to the city - agricultural shows

2010-11-27T15:29:00.019+11:00

The Devonport Show's on this weekend, and this year there's a real focus on bringing the show back to its roots - agriculture.

In an effort to get more kids through the animal nursery, the coordinator got school classes from the local area to adopt an animal from the nursery and create artwork and projects about it.

The grade 3/4s from Devonport Primary adopted the Wessex Saddleback and have been investigating rare breeds and the idea of having to eat bacon to save their bacon (some struggled with this idea!).

Guy and I visited the school with a couple of piglets and a bottle of milk to round-off their studies.

Here's the beautiful work they came up with:

Milking in motion

2010-11-03T21:51:00.005+11:00

Watching a sow feeding her piglets is mesmerising. It’s a show of sound and movement, of chaos and rhythm. And it shows that, in this case, milk is life.

When a sow wants to feed her piglets she calls them with a low, repetitious grunt. If she’s near other sows they’ll all start grunting too. In the wild this collective grunting makes sure that all piglets in the area can get a feed, even if it’s not from their own mum.

The sow doesn’t let her milk flow till she’s relaxed, and you’ll see a change in the piglets’ behaviour – suddenly they’ll stop bashing her boobs and just settle in for the feed.

These piglets are just a couple of days old and are still getting the hang of who goes where in the drinking line-up. In another couple of days they’ll have their own teats, a bit like having a coffee mug with your name on it.

Our piglets spend their first week in a straw-filled stable, with access to a heat lamp to snuggle under. Tasmanian nights are pretty chilly, and we believe this is the most humane way to bring them in to the world.

Generally the biggest and strongest piglets get the sow’s front teats which produce the most milk, and the smaller ones get the back teats. That’s why the runt is always the runt (except occasionally when they’ve got a touch of Small Piglet Syndrome and they defy nature and take over a front teat).

We let our piglets feed from their mothers for six weeks, and then we wean them. That’s about twice the time of pigs reared in intensive systems, and it ensures their immune systems are well-developed. And milk’s free, too.

Rationing the rillettes

2010-10-31T18:54:00.000+11:00

There's a jar in my fridge that I gaze longingly at every time I open the door. It's packed with slow-cooked soft pork, salt and pepper, and the flavours of rosemary, thyme and garlic. Seams of pork fat fill the spaces between the pork.

I have surprisingly good self-control when it comes to food, and I've been spreading this batch of pork rillettes out for weeks. Also, because it takes about three kilos of pork belly to get three tiny little jars. But it is one of the most delicious pork dishes I've eaten.

My recipe is a combination of ideas from Maggie Beer, Matthew Evans and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Their rillettes also include rabbits and ducks, but we don't have rabbits at our place (except for one massive pet buck, who is not going in to a jar) and I'd have to use about 10 Indian Runner ducks to get enough meat off them. But we have easy access to pork.

Take a pork belly - a whole one will weigh about 3kg - and cut it in to good-sized chunks, a bit like toast soldiers. I've tried two different cooking techniques: firstly in the oven at about 120 degrees. This batch had little crunchy bits through it, and a bit more of a crackling flavour. Secondly, I've used a slow-cooker. No crunchy bits, but a much smoother texture.

Choose which method you'd prefer, and whether you want to clean your oven or wash up a cooker. Chop up a couple of cloves of garlic and some rosemary and thyme sprigs and put them in with the pork.

The idea is to cook the pork for so long that the fat melts and the pork falls apart when you touch it. In the oven that's about four hours. In the slow-cooker I kept it going for ten.

When it's falling apart drain off the fat (keep it!) and let the meat cool a little so you don't burn your fingers - or mouth. You now need to break the pork apart so the bits are small enough to be spread on biscuits or bread. You can use two forks, or, as I prefer, my fingers.

Break it all up and then add as much salt and pepper as you think necessary. You'll probably need more than you think. I squelch this in with my hands too.

Sterilise some jars (150 degrees for 15 mins) and pack them with the pork mix. Pour some of the reserved fat over the top and make sure it seeps into the cracks.

My favourite way of eating rillettes is with cracked pepper Savoy biscuits, but crusty bread or toast is pretty good too.

A time for ham

2010-10-10T16:18:00.013+11:00

When you look through our lounge window there are pigs as far as the eye can see.

But come Christmas that view will change.

It’s such a busy time of year! So first we must apologise for lack of blogs. We’ve been planting trees, fencing more pig paddocks, digging up the winter pens ready for turnips, planting berries, sowing veggie seed, and most importantly organising the Christmas hams.

We’ve been looking at the pigs trying to work out how to take the legs off while leaving the bellies and loins to run around a bit longer.

We haven’t found a way of amputating legs that meets our animal welfare standards.

So because of that, as well as hams we’ll have some extra fresh cuts available closer to Christmas – maybe a free range roast would suit the table?

We’re doing about 200 hams this year, in two sizes: whole back legs on the bone and small banjo or picnic hams from the lower end of the front leg.

We’ve also been busy sorting out packaging for our bacon. It looks a bit different to what you see in the supermarket, it’s from the rolled shoulder.

We’re also trying out streaky bacon from the belly for those who like a little extra richness. You'll start to see it in delis soon.

We’re taking orders now for Christmas fare. If you’d like to know more you can send us an email. We’ll let you know when we’re sold out.

P.S. We've had a major computer crash too, to add to the excitement. If you were on our distribution list, or would like to be, please send us a note.

Piggy love

2010-09-12T08:18:00.007+10:00

A farmer for a day

2010-09-08T16:20:00.005+10:00

There was a time when your ‘country cousins’ were actually blood relatives. They had a farm way out the bush somewhere, kept a few cows and pigs, and you went to visit them during the holidays when you were kids. You collected the eggs, played in the barn, and ate vegetables for tea pulled from the garden.

But with farms becoming larger and 85 per cent of Australians now living in urban areas, the chances of being related to a real farmer are pretty slim. Country cousins are now the tiny twigs of the family tree, and the gap between people from the city and people from ‘the bush’ is getting wider.

Does it matter if town kids haven’t visited a farm? Does it matter if they don’t know the difference between a boar and a sow, a heifer and a steer? Will their life be worse if they haven’t held a warm egg straight from a chook’s bum?

They'll probably still grow up to be good wholesome people without these experiences, but there is a thing called Nature Deficit Disorder – it describes the human cost of being alienated from nature. If children don’t get regular contact with the environment they can have trouble concentrating, get anxious, become depressed, and get fat. We all know that, but now there’s a name for it, and a movement to get kids playing more outside.

We had a great response to our request for volunteers to help us plant 600 native trees in a shelterbelt. More than 30 people rocked up, most we’d never met, wearing gumboots and carrying digging gear. And perhaps that’s an indication of the desire of people to get outside and get their hands dirty. One’s man’s work is another man’s novelty nature experience.

Guy gave them the full tour of the pigs, while Eliza cooked up pork shoulders and bellies, and as lunch was digesting the kids all had a cuddle of a piglet. Now that’s paddock-to-plate education.

One tree planter told us we’d ‘restored her faith in community spirit’, and it was lovely to hear the sounds of strangers chatting and laughing, birds calling, and stakes being hammered in.

Thank you to all our volunteers, we hope you can continue to be involved in the farm and watch your trees grow.

On a cold and frosty morning

2010-08-28T20:40:00.007+10:00

As the sun peeped out from behind Mount Dial this morning we met our first calf born on the farm. 'Licorice' had given birth to a heifer overnight.

Licorice (nee Allsorts) is a cow Guy reared a few years ago, and we saved her from being choppered. She's a cross between Jersey, Ayrshire, and Friesian - that means she's a super milk producer.

She's been teasing us for a few days: sticking her tail out, starting to make milk, and spending time by herself. All signs of an imminent calving. But she strung it out, increasing the anticipation.

It's truly amazing how much life calves have when they're born. This one was jumping around as I took photos, and wanting to investigate beyond the gate, with little thought of mum.

Puss also thought it important to meet the newest member of the family. She knows about piglets, but calves? They'll take a bit of getting used to.

The pleasure and pain of rain

2010-08-27T09:35:00.006+10:00

There's an amazing sense of security in a full dam - even though we don't use the water for anything.

We pump our house and livestock water from the spring that runs all year on the other side of the property. Last year our top dam filled in July when we had more than 100mm of rain over a weekend. Our neighbours, who have lived in the road for years, said they'd never seen it full till then.

This year it's overflowing again.

So far for August we've had 210.4mm, which is pretty reasonable. The weather man says the rainfall on the north-west coast this month has been average to above-average. It's funny how we forget what's normal. A couple of dry winters, then this, and we feel like we're on Noah's Ark (the rare animal breeds add to the illusion).

While it's lovely hearing the soil slurp up the moisture ready for summer, we're a bit sick of the mud. Even the pigs are getting a bit sick of the mud - really.

We're pleased the forecast for our tree planting weekend is fine, fine, fine.

However, with the soil as saturated as it is, the mud's not going to go away immediately. If you're coming to plant with us, don't forget your gumboots!

Sharing a love of shelterbelts

2010-08-22T17:58:00.009+10:00

Increasing biodiversity by using sustainable farm practices is one of the main aims of Mount Gnomon Farm. Eliza and I actually met when I was working as a Landcare coordinator, and she (journalist) interviewed me about different Landcare projects that were happening in north-west Tasmania. It was almost inevitable that a few years later we are putting into practice some of those things we talked about on our own property.

One of the main goals of Landcare is to find a balance between biodiversity and production. In my Landcare job one of the most rewarding things I did was develop a project on native shelterbelts. The project resulted in the printing of a booklet about the benefits of growing native shelterbelts, and some tips for farmers on shelterbelt design. It’s exciting to see farmers in the region now using the guidelines in the booklet and installing shelterbelts on their farms.

Last year we put in two of our shelterbelts: 600 native plants organised into three rows per belt. Each row has its own attributes. The first row is made up of small native shrubs like tea trees and needle bush (hakea). These plants will give lots of dense shelter, but they also make suitable nesting and feeding habitat for native birds. The mid row is made up of taller trees, such as eucalypts and blackwoods - trees that will reduce wind and provide shade. Eucalypts also provide feed for birds. The third layer is tall shrubs or mid-sized trees. This row provides more habitat, but also helps guide the wind over the taller mid row.

By having three rows of diverse and complementary local natives, a shelterbelt creates vital habitat for native animals. While there are healthy stands of remnant bush in north-west Tasmania, it’s often fragmented and bird surveys show that some species are disappearing from certain locations. Native shelterbelts help make a link between habitats – they’re a protective corridor. They also extend native habitat further onto farms, so more of the farm will see the benefits of birds eating pest grubs and insects.

Shelter on farms is really important for free range pig production, as pigs have limited ability to regulate their own temperature. While the temperate climate of the north-west suits free range pigs, in winter and spring the pigs need protection from the cold south-westerly winds, and in summer they need shade.

Shelterbelts will reduce Mount Gnomon Farm’s carbon footprint. The shelterbelts are 10 metres wide, the minimum width requirement for carbon sequestration and future carbon trading. Pigs aren’t ruminants, so they produce less carbon emissions than sheep or cattle, but our free rangers do root up the ground, which quickly releases soil carbon. Farmers have traditionally stopped their pigs from digging by putting a ring in their snouts, and while this would help cut the carbon emissions on our farm, we think that animal welfare should come before the environment in this case. Planting trees around our property is one step to balance this out.

This winter we’re putting in another two shelterbelts. We got more than 600 seedlings sitting in the garden waiting for somebody to plant them. While we enjoy planting trees, we’d love you to come and join us and learn how to install a native shelterbelt. We’re planning a big day on Sunday August 29. Eliza will cook a Wessex Saddleback roast for lunch with home-grown organic veggies for everyone ... plus some other treats I suspect too. If you would like to join us, send us an email, we plan to start at around 10am.

What sort of duck egg do you call that?

2010-08-18T19:05:00.009+10:00

Someone must be practicing.

A few of our Indian Runner girls have just started laying their first eggs this week.

If I was a duck, I'd want to start small too.

Chewing the cud

2010-08-04T17:29:00.013+10:00

It's my favourite time of day:

Backing the bike up to the barn, throwing down the bales, taking them through the bush to the cattle.

I stop the bike in the clearing and start to cut the blue bale strings with a curved, serrated knife I found in the inherited contents of my Grandmother's second drawer. Isabelle comes to take a corner of the bale, tossing her horns while I swing out of the way.

I spread thick biscuits on the grass, far enough from each other so the cows won't tangle their horns.

They lumber up to the hay, puffing.

Birds call in the bush, there is a slight wind. Pigs are grunting low in the distance. As I sit on the bike the metal tings, cooling.

From the cows, their jaws moving from side to side:

Munch...munch...munch

The hay sounds thick and wholesome, resonating in their skulls. It disappears in seconds as teeth slice it off for chewing later.

Munch...munch...munch

Munch...munch...munch.

Twenty-one eggs for dinner

2010-07-30T20:06:00.011+10:00

Egg and bacon pie

15 Japanese bantam eggs

Pastry held together with bacon fat

Lettuce and rocket

Maggie Beer's Rice pudding with poached rhubarb and orange

6 full-size chook eggs

Winter-active rhubarb

Enter the egg zone

2010-07-27T16:55:00.018+10:00

I’ve got 65 chook eggs, 20 duck eggs, and 17 tiny Japanese bantam eggs in the house at the moment.

Some are in cartons, lots aren’t.

This is what you get when you have too many chooks.

And I know we’re in a perfect situation to have eggs and bacon. But even if we followed the Heart Foundation’s recommendation of six eggs per person a week, that still only gets rid of a dozen.

And we’re getting more than a dozen a day.

I shouldn’t complain, eggs were like gold during the war years. And I do genuinely feel guilty if I crack one.

I flog them off to the neighbours and work colleagues, but there are always some in the back of the fridge, on the freezer, and in the egg basket.

I’m constantly trying to make cunning plans to cut back the numbers:

If I make 12 batches of gingerbread men that’ll use 12 yolks. Then I could make three fruity pumpkin cakes with the remaining whites.

I know I can make custard with six yolks, and then turn the whites into a meringue. But I really don’t think we need two desserts on the go.

A quiche will use up two, and that’s two whole eggs, without the separation fuss.

If only the chooks understood the stress I’m under. I’m sure they’d cross their legs and hold on for a day.

I do think the bantam eggs are rather sweet, at only about three centimetres long. Do you think there could be a niche market for mini eggs? Baby carrots and beets are trendy.

The duck eggs are beautiful too, either an almost see-through white, or bluey green. And the yolks are cadmium yellow.

And the chook eggs come in all shades from deep brown to white. And they vary in size and shape depending on the age and breed of the chook. The young pullets are producing rounded brown eggs.

The pleasure of collecting eggs never fades.

One of us will always ask, ‘how many eggs did we get today?’.

We always leave the eggs if we know we've got young visitors coming.

And I love seeing Guy at the chook house holding up the bottom of his jumper, placing one egg at a time into his nest.

Snouts unearth soil secrets

2010-07-06T08:22:00.021+10:00

In Tasmania the seasons are distinct. Spring is unpredictable: windy and wet days interspersed with sunshine. In summer the days are long and it’s usually warm and dry. Autumn - which is our favourite time of year - is calm, mild and pleasant, but winter is the most challenging: cold temperatures, short days, and high rainfall.

It’s the time of the year when being a free range pig farmer can be difficult. Mount Gnomon Farm is up against the west side of the Dial Range, just south of Penguin. It’s already a high rainfall part of Tasmania, and being directly under Mount Gnomon we seem to get extra - even compared to our neighbours just a kilometre down the road. On average we receive over 1000mm of rain a year.

Fortunately, we have the north-west’s famous chocolate soil which has a reputation for being among the finest for agriculture in the world. It’s deep, well-structured, and free draining, and it’s one of the main reasons why this region produces some of the world’s finest food.

Not everybody gets excited about dirt, but the type of soil you have is extremely important if you want to farm free range pigs without ruining your farm. Keeping pigs on the wrong soil would mean a lot of mud and soil destruction. Some consultants say you shouldn’t keep pigs outside if you get more than 800mm a year. But because we’ve got this good soil, and we’re on the crest of a hill, we can farm our pigs sustainably.

The extra rainfall is actually good - if you can put up with wearing wet weather gear six months of the year - because it helps us grow more grass and forage crops for the pigs, which of course adds to their flavour.

The pigs are amazing ploughs. We don’t put rings in their noses to stop them rooting the ground, because it’s such a natural instinct for them to turn it over with their rubbery snouts. We recently moved some of our growers close to the house so they could dig up our future berry patch and clear up the twitch and other weeds. That’s better than having to get out there with a fork.

The reason pigs like to dig is related to their taste buds - they like variety in their diet. In Europe traditionally they would turn the soil looking for nuts, worms, roots, and of course truffles, which supposedly release similar pheromones to that of a boar.

When one of the big pig breeders from the mainland visited our farm she was amazed at just how much our pigs root. They don’t do that at her place, she said. But we’ve not seen a free range pig in Tasmania do otherwise, except when it’s bone dry in summer.

We think it’s perhaps the extra moisture and the fungi in the soil that encourages the excessive digging. Tasmania’s soils have extremely high and diverse fungi populations. It’s partly because we have limited numbers of termites, so fungi play a vital role in breaking down plant material and making nutrients available to plants. If you looked in our bush or explored the local Tarkine rainforest you’d find a huge variety of fungi. But whether it’s the lure of a truffle or a wriggling worm, pigs certainly get a lot of pleasure from using their powerful snouts.

The other good thing about the soil and its related biodiversity is that it helps our pigs build up their immune systems. It also gives them essential iron. In commercial piggeries farmers actually have to give iron shots to their piglets to prevent them becoming anaemic.

Our red soil has lots of iron in it, and the piglets start nibbling away at it when they’re only a few days old. We wonder just how much soil a pig actually eats in its lifetime, and we’d like to know more about how the soil contributes to the flavour of the meat.

The day of the rooster

2010-06-08T21:20:00.001+10:00

When Guy was a child he was banned from breeding chooks.

I can understand being barred from the biscuit tin, or taken away from the tv, but how often do parents have to sanction chook breeding?

At his worst Guy had 200 in the backyard. And pocket money wasn’t covering the feed costs.

I think it’s genetic. Guy’s brother Mark has the same trait - it just took a little longer to show. He was in his early 20s before he started to breed unusual numbers. He’s now got one of the best collections of rare breed Japanese bantams in Australia.

When we moved to the farm I was pretty excited that Guy came with chooks. I had pots and pans, a washing machine, two guinea pigs, and two Indian Runner drakes, but they didn’t produce eggs for my cakes and quiches.

However, I was a little surprised when the chooks took more than one ute load to deliver.

Our main types are Buff Sussex (a rare breed) and Rhode Island Reds.

Then we’ve got a few white bantam crosses apparently because they’re good sitters. Very good sitters. So good you think a bit of natural selection’s been going on (the bush is teeming with quolls and devils), then three weeks later they’re back from the dead with a dozen mongrel chickens under their feet.

We’ve also got a breed called “Guy’s Specials”. They’ve got an unusual combination of genes - they turn out grey and speckled - so of course we’ve got to keep them going.

One night I flopped back on a bale of hay, exhausted, and turned my head to the left to see a chook settled on a nest of eggs. I looked up at Guy, questioningly.

“They’re due out next week,” he said.

Right. So he’s deliberately and secretively putting eggs under chooks.

So why does Eliza let Guy get away with it?

Because she knows that every rooster that hatches will end up in her crock pot. And there’s nothing better than a roasted rooster, with thigh meat dark as lamb (see red meat vs white meat blog), served up with veggies from the garden.

When it comes to doing the deed, it’s obviously the man’s job to use the axe. And gutting, of course.

But why is it the woman’s job to take the scales and claws off the feet just because she has finer fingers?

I really should put my foot down.

Savouring pork belly

2010-06-06T10:40:00.009+10:00

Last night we shed our farm clothes and found some glitz at the back of the wardrobe to attend Burnie's Savour Tasmania dinner at Bayviews Restaurant, featuring Simon Bryant from ABC TV's "The Cook and the Chef". It was great that such an event was held in the north-west and it was exciting for us to have a high profile chef use our pork on his menu.

This is the moment when we snuck in to the kitchen to see our belly being prepared and Simon said, "Is this your pork?". We were so proud. We believe that it was the first time that Simon had used Wessex Saddleback, and he was pleased with the quality of the product. With him is Bayviews' executive chef Pat Sheriff.

The menu was six courses featuring green lip abalone, ocean trout, (pork belly), angus beef cheek and wagyu striploin, and a pepperyberry vodka chocolate parfait.

Pork belly - yummo!

(About midnight....Simon had been posing for lots of photos and it was well past farmers' bedtime.)

Celebrating 12 months on the farm

2010-06-02T07:42:00.012+10:00

It’s been a year since we backed a rent-a-truck up to the garage, unloaded our furniture, and lit the first fire in our woodheater.

And it’s a year since we drove a horse-float of sows up the driveway, and walked our boar Domino down the lane, past a pig-rooting miniature horse we inherited with the property.

(Sandy, 28, had an inbuilt hatred of pigs, apparently common in horses. He now lives with Eliza’s mum, for fear of a heart attack the pigs might provoke).

We thought it would be good to take this chance to look out the window and reflect on what we’ve done over the past 12 months - instead of just looking out and making a list of what we still need to do.

We’ve built our breeding herd from 10 to 20 sows and have been producing pig meat each week for the past seven months. It is amazing to think that with our small herd we are now the largest free range pig farmers in Tasmania, and we believe we have the second largest herd of Wessex Saddleback sows in the world.

With so many pigs breeding, we’re now seeing some of the genetic traits that we thought were lost coming back. Large litters are appearing on a regular basis. Phantom, our star sow, has got 13 piglets at the moment, and last litter she had 12. But while about half of our sows are having these big litters, we’ve still got ones producing only six or seven, so there’s still improvement to be made.

Thousands of metres of wire and hundreds of posts have been set up to keep in the growing number of pigs. The neighbours say we could keep in rhinos.

About 600 native trees have been planted in shelter belts to buffer us and the pigs against the amazing winds that come from the west and to increase the habitat for native birds. Why wasn’t there wind on the day when we came with the real estate agent? It blew constantly for six months after settlement.

Guy squeezed 40 fruit trees into the orchard, with Eliza telling him that if he was going to put them in that close together it’d be interesting to see what his pruning skills were like when they grew a bit.

The veggie garden is providing all our vegetables. Guy has agreed to leave Eliza to it, and not make comment about the ‘artistic’ layout or her extreme water efficiency.

The pigs are still digging up the future berry patch...

We’ve survived our first couple of Business Activity Statements. Just. A good hot meal, beer, and plenty of ham seems to encourage our accountant to wade through our lounge floor filing system.

And we think we’re making a bit of progress on the big goal – bringing back the Wessex Saddleback and teaching people about rare breeds, real food, and ethical meat production.

It’s rare for a weekend to go by without a chef or a family dropping in to watch the piglets run around and scratch a grunting sow.

We’d like to thank everyone who’s helped us on the farm, bought our pork, and heartily promoted what we’re doing. One of the main highlights of the past year has been meeting like-minded, passionate people.

While we’re proud of our first 12 months on the farm, we’re quite aware that this is still just the beginning of the journey.

Tips to warm up: eat chestnuts, shovel pig poo

2010-05-18T20:18:00.009+10:00

Evening itinerary:

Arrive home from day job as the sun sets.

Check last night's 13 newborns (when I watched steam rise from their wet, warm bodies).

Shovel out stables where mums and babies are, replace with fresh barley straw.

Pick grass for squeaking guinea pigs and sniffing rabbit.

Pick kale for hungry human (curly and red russian).

Roast chestnuts (from Preolenna, high rainfall area in the far north-west) under hot grill.

Invent kale fritters with chopped, cooked kale, buff sussex eggs, crumbly local cheese, and breadcrumbs.

Autumn is definitely here, there's no doubting it now. Speaking in short sentences also helps conserve energy for warmth.

A morning at funny farm

2010-05-01T13:34:00.016+10:00

Feather fascinator

This buff sussex hen was quite put-out this morning when a feather got stuck to her comb. A couple of hours after I took the photo she was still trying to shake it off.

Remember the sow with the funny tail that arrived on the farm in December last year?

We thought she must have had it trod on when she was a piglet, but it appears the shape is heritable. One of her nine piglets is not quite like the others.

We've got a lot of little piggies running round getting in to trouble at the moment. They're just the right size to slide under the electric fence.

So straight to the grain shed they go...

And from her seat on the rock wall outside the stable, Puss observes it all. What a farm to have been dumped at, she thinks.

(More on the cat, and the division she has caused, in a future post).

Taking it slow at Stanley

2010-04-22T16:35:00.007+10:00

Six courses, over four hours, with a showery autumn afternoon blowing outside.

We’re at Stanley on a lazy Sunday afternoon celebrating the season’s produce.

We were fortunate enough to have our pork on the menu at The Old Cable Station’s autumn ‘producer’s lunch’ – a slow food event that happens quarterly.

Charlotte Brown and Michael Whatley prepared a feast for almost 50 people, and this was the menu:

- Slow-roasted capsicum with ricotta cheese and vine ripened tomatoes
- Spicy Sassafras parsnip soup
- Mutton bird and duck terrine with a pepperberry and tomato marmalade
- Free-range egg fettuccine pasta ‘al funghi’
- Twice cooked crispy skinned Wessex Saddleback pork belly on parmesan risotto with chilli jam (that was us!)
- ‘Mile high’ apple pie with double cream
- And wines from Tamar vineyard Native Point.

You can already see it was about slow food…even the capsicum was slow-roasted and our pork was twice-cooked!

The slow food movement is all about food that is good, clean and fair. It’s about getting people to care about what they eat and where it comes from, and to realise that their food choices do affect other people and the environment.

Slow Food Australia has more than 40 branches, and across the world there are 100,000 members in 132 countries. At the moment they’re campaigning for cheese to be legally made from raw milk, and against urban sprawl on productive farmland.

We think our pigs fit the slow food philosophy pretty well. They’re slow growers to start with – they take almost double the time of an intensively raised pig!

But we also think we’re doing the right thing by them ethically. They can root around in the dirt, get in a mud bath, play with their piggy friends, and they’ve got sea and mountain views from their paddocks.

The slow food movement is also about preserving biodiversity, and thus our food supply. The varieties of fruit, vegetables and meat we eat have been boiled down to the ones that look good, travel well, and can sit in a supermarket cool store for months. Unfortunately taste wasn’t on the checklist during the reduction.

And it’s also about valuing the food we have, and the people who produce it. A farmer needs to be fairly rewarded for what he grows. If he’s not, animal welfare and the environment will be compromised as he tries to produce more to pay the bills.

We had a lovely lunch at Stanley, meeting people who truly value what they eat and who want to know the story behind it.

(Thank you to Kevin O'Daly for the photos ... scrumptious.)

In the cradle of change

2010-04-12T20:17:00.019+10:00

I grew up “going out for tea” at places where menus were dominated by five dollar parmies and roasts-of-the-day.

And frankly, on the north-west coast, there wasn’t much else for a family looking to celebrate a birthday or anniversary.

Guy’s family didn’t even go out for tea – it was never going to be as good as what came out of the garden.

It’s a region of contradictions here: from our office window I can see fertile paddocks running from here to the sea that have all produced high-quality, intense-flavoured food this season.

Our neighbours have boer goats that taste better than lamb, and our other neighbour has the healthiest murray grey cattle I’ve seen.

On our road alone there are two walnut orchards, a farmer who exports onions, and even a pheasant grower.

We’re surrounded by great food, but even at the bottom of our road, where country meets town, is one of those parmy places.

It’s a strange food culture here. The meals are about quantity, not quality. Chips and salad means a mountain of chips and one slice of hard-as-rock mainland-grown tomato.

Fortunately, the choice of good restaurants on the coast is growing, especially in Burnie and Penguin.

There are a number of places going out of their way to source fine local produce to do interesting things with. We'll bring you more information about them on the blog.

A night on a mountain

Over Easter we went to Cradle Mountain Lodge to try our pork at the Highland Restaurant – where the executive chef is Simon Cordwell.

Simon has been a great supporter of us in the start-up of our business. He’s passionate about sourcing local food, and knowing the full story behind it.

The first thing he wanted to do when he found out we had pigs was to come and see the farm so he knew they were genuine free-range and being ethically farmed.

It was so heartening to know that he would actually go out of his way – all the way down from the mountain - to check us out.

So, to our meal at the Highland Restaurant: as an entree Simon braises the pork belly and serves with shitake mushrooms and Asian greens. The recipe is on Simon’s blog and involves garlic, ginger, shallots, soy sauces, star anise, and cinnamon.

We also ordered the salmon plate, which has three pieces of salmon each treated differently, including cured with citrus. They were served with a dob of freshly-grated wasabi, and it was great knowing this came from our close friend Melina Parker from Shima Wasabi.

It’s always difficult sharing a plate of food with Guy. He comes from a family of five children so has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and I’m from a family of one, which may have influenced my sharing habits.

Never-the-less I’ve found that dividing shared meals in half from the start, and then protecting my half with raised knife and fork seems to work. Just don’t let your guard down for a slurp of wine.

For main we had our pork loin with maple roasted pear, sweet potato batons and grain mustard jus. Just beautiful.

We had been so excited sitting down in the restaurant and hearing other people order our pork, and Guy just had to tell our waitress straight away we were the pig farmers.

The fellow sitting closest to us was eating the pork belly entree and Guy whispered, “should I ask him what he thinks?”.

I said he should at least wait till the poor bloke had finished eating.

Two seconds later: “should I ask him now?”.

I thought he should wait till the plate had been collected, then we might hear him make a comment to the waitress.

Guy couldn’t control himself.

Turns out the fellow’s a chef in Launceston, and really liked the pork. Guess where a box got sent out this week?

Guy and Eliza walk off the pork belly on the Marion's Lookout track.

It's amazing how these plants survive through the incredible extremes of the highlands.

The leaves of the nothofagus gunnii (Tasmania's only deciduous plant) are just starting to turn.

Is that pork on your plate really white meat?

2010-04-02T16:55:00.010+11:00

It’s the season for eating white meat: chicken and fish have been flying off the supermarket shelves over the past couple of days. And in recent decades pork has also been marketed as the “other white meat”.

The pork industry has been promoting it as an alternative to chicken for families looking for a cheap, low-fat, and nutritious form of protein. But is pork actually a white meat and what is the difference between red and white meats?

We’ve been chewing on this a fair bit lately, as one of the biggest differences we’ve noticed about our free range Wessex saddleback pork is the colour of the meat – it’s a lot darker (and that’s apart from the extra flavour and juiciness). It’s particularly noticeable with the meat found in the legs and shoulders.

Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder cross section

So why is meat light or dark? It all comes down to two different types of muscles: slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Animals will have different coloured meat depending on what type of muscles they use and their ratio of slow to fast-twitch muscles.

The slow ones are used often, for extended activities like constant walking, standing or flying. They’re the muscles found in the shoulders of pigs or the thighs and legs of chickens. Slow-twitch muscles are slower to contract, good for endurance, and are the muscles needed to help a marathon runner go the distance.

They need a lot of fuel and they get this through the protein myoglobin, which stores large amounts of oxygen to support the long-term energy use. Myoglobin is a reddish colour, sort of like hemoglobin in blood, which is why slow-twitch muscles are dark. They’re also linked with more fat or marbling, as fat has to be kept close-by for the constant demand for fuel.

In general, the more exercise a muscle gets, and the older the animal, the greater the need for myoglobin, and so the meat’s darker. Slow-twitch muscles, or red meat, tend to hold moisture better, have more fat, and hence are more flavoursome and forgiving to cook.

Fast-twitch muscles are used for sudden bursts of quick movement – like the breast of a chicken to help it escape from a predator. They have smaller amounts of myoglobin and instead need glycogen for their energy. They’re the muscle fibre types that a sprinter develops.

Fast-twitch muscles, or white meat, tend to carry less fat and while they can be tender if cooked properly they tend to be dry and bland and lack the flavour of slow-twitch muscles.

This explains why the working joints of free range pigs are not only darker in colour but also have more flavour, because of the marbling. An intensive pig that lazes about and is processed at a much younger age will have less slow-twitch muscles and its meat won’t be as dark and when cooked it is usually dry and lacks flavour.

Over the years meat breeders have been selecting animals that grow fast, and so they’ve got more fast-twitch muscles – making the meat leaner and whiter. This is what’s happened in the pork industry, because of its desire to sell itself as the “other white meat”.

The real casualty has been the loss of breeds with a higher ratio of slow-twitch muscles. Fortunately we’ve still got some old breeds like the Wessex Saddleback that haven’t been influenced by modern genetics and the push for fast, lean growth. They have the unique property of a lot of slow-twitch muscles, marbling, and best of all, moisture and flavour.

So if you’re having white meat this Easter, you’d better stick to your fish or chicken breast, or, the loin of an intensive farmed white pig!

Compromise in the cabbage patch

2010-03-25T20:18:00.006+11:00

One of the things we aim to promote is the fantastic lifestyle that is based on growing your own food and being self sufficient. It was one of the values that brought us together and while it is hard work, it is so rewarding to have bought out own patch of Tasmania and to be able to source virtually all of our food from our garden and farm.

Both Eliza and I grew up on family farms in the hinterland of north-west Tasmania and had access to the most amazing home grown produce. Our family was the classic self-sufficient smallholding: we had a massive orchard, two extensive vegetable gardens and berry patches, and we always had access to our own lamb, pork, chicken, ducks, geese, rabbits and beef.

If you were hungry, you would go and pick a fresh carrot from the garden or raid the berry patch. If you had more time there were always enough ingredients to make a big pot of soup. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to have access to a freezer full of yummy, ethically produced meat or a garden and storage shed full of home grown organic vegies.

In fact, it wasn’t until I went to high school in the big smoke of Burnie that I realised not everybody experiences this sort of lifestyle. It’s funny looking back at being tormented about coming from ‘the sticks’. I clearly remember when we had a grade eight Christmas party and we had to bring a plate of supper to share. At the time Mum had forgotten to make something, so I was forced to take a plate of carrot sticks. The town kids thought that was pretty funny. It wasn’t until I travelled that I appreciated how lucky I was to have grown up in this environment.

One of the things that happens though when two passionate gardeners ‘shack up’ is working out who is going to be responsible for looking after the vegetable garden. To avoid conflict we have decided that Eliza will be the main vegetable gardener, while I will look after the orchard and berry patch. So far that has been working well and I have learnt that it is best to stay out of the vegetable garden and that friendly advice is not always appreciated.

Eliza certainly has passion for her garden and thrives on the garden-to-plate mentality. Every time she serves a meal, it’s like we’re eating at a quality fine-dining restaurant and it goes something like this: “Tonight, dear, we have from the garden seven home-grown vegetables to accompany our free range Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder. The parsnips have been roasted with garlic, sea salt…”

I think that since her trip to Hobart and eating out her service skills and product knowledge delivery have even gone up a level. I think she was inspired by our time at Piccalilly.

To help promote the self sufficiency lifestyle, I have been part of an enthusiastic team organising the Penguin Organic and Sustainable Living Festival. It’s a grass roots event being held at the Penguin Sustainable Living Centre on Sunday, March 28.

It’ll be a great day with an impressive line-up of guest speakers including the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison, SBS’s ‘Gourmet Farmer’ Matthew Evans, and agricultural scientist Bruce French who has put together a database of the world’s edible plants. He’s working in third world countries to encourage the locals to grow their native foods, rather than western varieties that do nothing to help their malnutrition problems.

For more information on the festival, have a look at the flier.

In the name of poo

2010-03-14T14:13:00.005+11:00

It’s a dangerous time of year to be out at dusk.

The dung beetles are swarming.

Just as the sun sets the beetles take to the air, at break-neck speed, looking for fresh manure to munch on.

They’re after the bacteria in the poo, and they’re also looking for a place to lay their eggs.

When they’ve found a pat that’s fresh and runny, they dive into the soil and dig tunnels ruler-length deep. Then they roll up balls of poo and take them to the bottom of the tunnels where they pop in an egg – which won’t hatch for maybe three, six or even 12 months depending on the season. The larvae’s then got a ready-made meal when it hatches out.

We’re seeing a lot of over-enthusiastic dung beetles on our barbed wire at the moment. You’d think with so much air above the fences they wouldn’t put their flight paths between the wires.

There are also quite a few beetles laying on top of cow pats, toes in the air, who I think may have over-indulged.

Dung beetles play a vital role on farms in cleaning up effluent. When they drag it down into the soil they’re adding organic matter, aerating the ground, and removing the temptation for flies.

They’re also good for the health of our animals. Within manure there can be larvae of nasty parasites like roundworm. But at 30cm underground the larvae can’t survive. Dung beetles can destroy 70 per cent of roundworm larvae in manure.

The type of dung beetle we see most often is the Blue Bomber, a Spanish species introduced into Tasmania 20 years ago by our friend Graeme Stevenson. We do have native beetles, but they’ve got more of a taste for wallaby and possum poo.

Graeme now collects the beetles and sells them to farmers on the mainland. A year ago I went on a trapping expedition with him. You can hear some rather funny audio from the trip here.

Over the next few weeks I suggest wearing a helmet and safety glasses if you’re out at dusk.

It’s the time of year when “injury by dung beetle” starts appearing on hospital emergency lists.

Tasmanian Gothic

2010-02-19T20:43:00.002+11:00

Apologies to Grant Wood (1892-1942).

A trip to the city

2010-02-15T21:43:00.008+11:00

We've been at Mount Gnomon Farm for nearly nine months now, and we've just had our first proper weekend away together. When you've got a farm you can't just pack your bags and lock the door. Going away involves organising pig-sitters, chook locker-uppers, cat-feeders and long lists of instructions (e.g....only let Eliza's ducks Roger and Dylan out of their pen for the night shift AFTER all the other ducks have gone to bed, otherwise they'll chase them...). Fortunately Guy's got a muscly and dedicated brother who doesn't mind lugging buckets of grain, and our 14-year-old neighbour has great attention to detail for all the little animals.

So we took off to Hobart and Launceston for a long weekend of catching up with customers and foodies. I think we ended up meeting more than a dozen people who we've been corresponding with, but never met.

It wasn't till we went away from the farm that we realised how busy we've been since we bought the property. Every weekend has been filled with fencing, moving pigs between paddocks, digging up lawn for the garden, planting trees and trying to work out the underground water system.

And that means wearing farm clothes every weekend that end up being soaked to get the red dirt out. So it was quite an effort going through the ironing basket and dress cupboard looking for "city" clothes for us to wear this weekend.

On Friday night we went to Piccalilly in Battery Point for dinner. No, actually it was a lot more than that - it was the eight-course degustation, of which one of the courses was our pork. Chef Iain Todd slow-cooks the pork and serves it with egg-yolk pasta, corn puree and bechamel and of course crackling. It was about ten o'clock when it was served - about three quarters of the way through the degustation - and we were so excited to be eating our own produce in such a fine setting.

The next morning we caught up with Hobart's food bloggers at Red Velvet Lounge at Cygnet. We gave our host Steve Cumper a sample of our shoulder pork, which he tested out later in the day (find out the verdict here). We also met prolific food blogger Rita, food tragic Stephen Estcourt and his wife Mary, food trailer Victor, and Reb of the Gutter Trash.

On our way back to the north-west we went to Festivale in Launceston. It had such a great atmosphere and genuinely good food. There was a 'produce to plate' section where you could try olive oils, wasabi pickles, chilli ginger beer, rhubarb drinks, beef, lamb, garlic, and talk to the people who grew it all. I think we might have to have a stall there next year so we can tell people what's different about free-range, rare-breed pork.

And it seems some of our piglets have learnt some very bad habits while we've been away...although Guy says he deliberately left the barn door open so that the piglets could get used to life away from mum, eating grain.

Kohlrabi - "cabbage turnip"

2010-02-03T21:01:00.010+11:00

Kohlrabi

Compost-fuelled spacecraft (hovering)
A leafy shot-put (for hurling)
Kohlrabi
Exotic-sounding
Worthy of a rolled "r"
A leader among vegetables
Kohlrabi
Purple inner-tube skin
Water-resistant
A bobbing bouy
Kohlrabi
Tastes like turnip.

- EW

The most interesting-looking vegetable in the garden at the moment is the kohlrabi, which is a member of the brassica family.

You mostly eat the big purple bit, but the leaves are pretty good too - I'd say sweeter than kale, and just as well.

The inside of the bulb is light green and quite juicy. It's very much like a turnip, but maybe a bit more fibrous. Although the earlier you pick them the less stringy they are. The stalks are strangely translucent inside, but good to munch on when you're cutting up the rest.

This season's the first time I've grown kohlrabi, so I'm still experimenting with it in the kitchen. Ideas very welcome!

So far the best thing has been kohlrabi rosti, with some chilli and ground ginger in it - this idea came from Farmer John's Cookbook - The Real Dirt on Vegetables, by US farmer John Peterson who runs a community supported agriculture farm.

I've also made kohlrabi and potato mash, and eaten lots raw. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have the same impact on the bodily functions as raw turnip.

But I suppose if you ate enough of it...

The Highlands have arrived

2010-01-30T13:03:00.014+11:00

After many months of gentle (and not-so-gentle) persuasion, Eliza's mum has allowed Guy to borrow her Highland cattle to breed with.

Maggie, Linnhe, Morag and Isabelle arrived this morning, and as I look out the window now they're settling down eating some hay in the laneway.

Highlands are a rare breed, according to the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, so we're hoping we can help build their numbers up. We're borrowing a bull in the next week ... so it's all go!

Linnhe and Isabelle

Maggie and Morag

Neither of us have eaten Highland beef before, but a Scottish chef - who just happened to be visiting this morning while the cattle were being delivered - told us it's tender, marbled meat with egg-shell coloured fat.

It'll be a little while till we have any at eating stage, but we're looking forward to having our own rare-breed beef to go with our rare-breed pork, chicken and duck.

Got any garden surplus?

2010-01-29T08:53:00.004+11:00

There's a great new project starting on the north-west coast that's going to link backyard gardeners with families who struggle to buy fruit and veggies.

It's based on something that's happening in the US, Produce to the People, and it'll involve volunteers collecting surplus produce from gardeners, and then taking it to a central distribution point.

That point's probably going to be just down the road from our place, at the Penguin Organic Growing Centre...a patch of ground that's being revitalised at the moment to turn it into a bustling community base for learning about living sustainably.

There's actually a festival coming up at the centre on March 27 and 28 that Guy's helping organise. It's all about growing food, biodiversity and reducing our impact on the environment, and includes tours of local gardens.

We think the new project Produce to the People has got fantastic potential on the coast, and we congratulate the North West Environment Centre for getting funding from the state government to get it started.

Visitors and Escapees

2010-01-27T20:57:00.010+11:00

We've got a visitor staying at the farm at the moment. "Monty" is having a working holiday at our place, and he was working even on his first night here!

He's a young boar and he's come from further up the coast from our friends Kerryn and Don to see what the ladies are like in the Penguin area.

He appears to have settled in well, so they must be quite welcoming.

But while one animal comes in the gates, others are going out.

Everyday the ducks disappear out the driveway and walk into the forest reserve, where they spend the day pottering.

They come back at bedtime, and I just love seeing the dusk light on their footprints.

Testing out the Trotters

2010-01-22T21:25:00.007+11:00

Offal: the parts of an animal butchered that are unfit for use (Webster).

What a great start.

The past few weeks we’ve been collecting our offal from the abattoir. It comes in a plastic bag within a plastic bag: ears, trotters, tails, cheeks, and jowls all together. The tails still have the fluffy whip-like bits on the end of them and the ears are old-man hairy. Our red dirt is still between their toes.

I feel an obligation to at least try all the parts. It must go back to the single brussels sprout Mum used to put on my plate. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, even if it involves stuffing it in our mouths and chewing really fast. If an animal has to die for us to eat meat we’ve got to make the most of it.

The trotters felt a bit like a dead person’s hand. Cold and clammy, bloodless. I ran some hot water and with a sharp knife scraped away the dirt and callused skin. I got a lighter and singed the black hairs…although it didn’t really work, so I pulled them out by hand.

The recipe I found on the net “Chinese-style pigs’ trotters” (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of course) asked me to brown the trotters in a pan. If someone had walked in the door and sniffed they would have thought I was cooking up brawn for dogs. But I was determined.

I added apple juice, soy sauce, caster sugar, chillies, garlic and ginger, then put it all in the crock pot for eight hours.

When I came home that night I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even spoon out the sauce to try. I told myself it would be better in the morning after it’d had time to sit, anyway. I did notice that the trotters didn’t look like trotters anymore. A good sign.

Day two: couldn’t face it for breakfast, so put the pot in the fridge (a chance for the fat to rise and set). But throughout the day, I worked on convincing myself I had a wonderful meal waiting for me at night.

I picked pak choi, snow peas and coriander from the garden and cooked noodles. Then I heated up the trotters and put it all together. It was a bit like an Asian soup, with lots of bones and bits of skin. I didn’t come across any hooves or claws. I did find a couple of tiny slivers of meat, two for each trotter.

The end product was no where near as traumatic to eat as it was to prepare. And I think I would happily serve it up as an entrée for visitors, it was pretty rich as a main meal. They just might not find out exactly where the meat came from till after the washing up.

Living with wildlife

2010-01-07T21:19:00.007+11:00

One of the great things about Mount Gnomon Farm is that it borders natural bush that extends from the seaside town of Penguin through to the central plateau. In fact, if one of our pigs decided to go for a walk, they could follow the Penguin to Cradle trail to Cradle Mountain and if they had enough energy they could then do the overland track all the way through to Lake St Clair.

Not only does the farm’s location allow us to go on fantastic bush walks from our back door, it also results in some of Tasmania’s magnificent wildlife visiting our farm. This week we were woken by a different sound in the orchard. After turning on the flood light we watched a Tasmanian Devil as it surveyed the orchard to see if any of our poultry had failed to find a secure and safe place to sleep.

The devil looked healthy and seemed free of any facial tumours - the symptom of the lethal disease that has just spread to devils in our area. While normally a scavenger, devils will take poultry. Fortunately we had shut up all the chooks and ducks, which is a nightly job to protect them from devils and the two native quolls: the eastern quoll and the spotted tail quoll, which are also well-known for taking poultry.

At the moment we’re using our future garden shed to shut up the chooks, but in the future we intend to build a quoll-proof chook house that the chooks can fly in and out of, but quolls and devils can’t enter. There’s a great design on the parks website.

But in the meantime, our ducks have to be herded into a covered pen at night. Fortunately our Indian Runners are very easy to train. If they’re not already in the shelter, at the sight of us at dusk they quickly waddle in. The Indian Runner has more of a herding mentality than any other species - it's the reason they're used at sheep dog trials.

In South East Asia, where they originate, large flocks are kept for integrated pest management in rice fields. At dawn the ducks are released from their shelters and follow their master to the rice paddies. When he puts up a flag the ducks know it’s time to go to work and they have to keep within eyesight of the flag. At the end of the day when their master takes down the flag they know it’s time to go home.

Our ducks aren’t quite at the same level, but one day when we get some spare time, Guy has dreams of training one of our Wessex pigs to herd our ducks - Babe style. Guy is convinced our pigs would be capable of negotiating a new password with the ducks, something a bit more ducky than ‘baa ram ewe’.

Everyone loves to scratch a piggy

2009-12-24T11:27:00.005+11:00

One of our goals for Mount Gnomon Farm is to open it up for the public as much as we can.

This week we had a visit from a group of parents and children who home-school.

It was wonderful to watch the kids scratching a pig for the first time and laugh as they saw the piglets’ ears flop around while they chased each other.

It ‘s really important for children to learn where their food comes from, and that there are different ways of producing meat – some ethical, some not.

And when we talk to their parents we can explain why we need to protect rare breeds, and why free-range is the only humane system.

Hopefully we can sow seeds that will change people’s buying habits, in time.

Domino has a seat while Guy talks to the group, and Betty and Big Bertha line up for scratches.

Telling Tales

2009-12-16T17:43:00.005+11:00

We've got three new arrivals on the farm! Guy's just been to Victoria on the boat and brought back two sows and a boar of different bloodlines. So we need to think of names....we like to keep the first letter the same as the name of the line, so for example we've got Bramble, Betty and Big Bertha who are from the Beatrice line. Our two new girls comes from the Lass and May lines, and our little boy is a Satellite. Any suggestions for L, M, and S names?

Our Lass girl has a strange tail. There's no denying it. But we celebrate difference on this farm, so all's well. She might just have to practice curling it up in the Mount Gnomon Farm way (see below).

Some pig farmers don't have the pleasure of watching pig's tails unfurl and wind-up. On intensive farms where the pigs are kept inside they cut off their tails when they're a week old so they don't chew them off each other when they get bored.

We're yet to try eating tail, but we've just bought a book from the UK, Nose to Tail Eating by acclaimed St. John Restaurant chef Fergus Henderson that has lots of offal recipes in it (Offal, not awful...). We're going to try this recipe and we'll let you know how it goes...

You need: 8 long pig's tails, 2 onions, 2 carrots and 2 celery sticks roughly chopped, bundle of fresh herbs, 3 bay leaves, 10 black peppercorns, 1 head of garlic, zest of 1 lemon, 1/2 bottle of red wine, 1.1 litres chicken stock, 2 tbsp English mustard, 4 eggs whisked together, 450g seasoned flour, 225g fine white breadcrumbs, a large knob of butter.

Fergus says to put the tails in a dish with the vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, garlic, lemon zest, wine and stock, and then cover and cook for three hours in a medium oven. Allow them to cool in the stock, then take them out before it turns to jelly.

When they're cold and firm, mix together the mustard and eggs, then dip them in flour, roll through the mustard and egg mixture and coat them in breadcrumbs. Get a large roasting tray hot, melt the butter, then add the tails and cook in a hot over for 10 minutes, turn them over and cook for another 10. Sounds yummy - we'll have to start collecting our tails.

Carrot-pulling pleasure

2009-12-13T09:27:00.006+11:00

Why do shop carrots taste so much worse than homegrown carrots? The difference is astonishing. So it's a major relief to be pulling my own now they're starting to get a bit of size. The few months over winter when we had to buy vegetables - we'd only just come to the farm and it was too wet and cold to grow anything - was a good reminder of how important it is to grown your own. The shop veggies were droopy before I even got them in the car, their flavour was dreadful, and I would be surprised if they had any nutrients left in them by the time they got to the table. Guy complained we weren't eating enough veggies - well I wonder why?!

But now! I can go in to the patch each evening and select what we're having for tea and it goes straight from the soil to the pot or plate. The choices are still fairly limited because of the time of year...we've been eating a fair bit of silverbeet, bok choy and broccoli (Beet and broc au gratin is surprisingly yummy with lots of cracked pepper and good cheese). The salad veggies are also coming on and here's a selection of what we had last night.

The potatoes are poking through, the corn's going upwards, the garlic's almost ready to harvest, I've had my first handful or raspberries (don't tell Guy!), I've got the best germination of parsnips I've ever seen, and the pumpkins, squash melons etc are doing a terrific job at standing up in the ferocious winds that come across the garden. Hurry up and grow shelterbelts!

Had a bit of a disaster with my tomato seedlings...I started a different shift at work and forgot to open up the cold frame they were under. It wasn't a super hot day, but by the time I got home I had 58 dead seedling and two live ones. The soil was still moist, but they were fried. Am scrambling now to get a few left-over seedling from friends.

If you've got a couple of pumpkins that need using at the end of the season, I tried this recipe from Hobart cook and writer Sally Wise. Quite unusual and delicious.

3 tablespoons olive oil, 250g chopped onions, 1 cooking apple, cored and chopped, 500g diced pumpkin, 8 garlic cloves, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, 2 teaspoons mustard powder, 1 tablespoon salt, 125g sultanas, 375g brown sugar, 90g white sugar, 2 cups cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon ground allspice, 2 teaspoons curry powder, 1 teaspoon nutmeg.

In a saucepan saute onions, apple, pumpkin and garlic for five minutes. Add the water and cook until pumkin is tender. Add everything else, bring to boil, then simmer for about 40 mins till it becomes like chutney. Put in sterilised jars, keep for two weeks in the pantry then eat!

Growing up

2009-11-18T20:45:00.026+11:00

The warm weather of the past couple of weeks has had the pigs looking for mud baths to cool down. And don't they love rubbing against you when they've just had a bath.

It might be hot, but it's good growing weather for our Wessex Saddlebacks.

And some of the babies are growing so much they're not so interested in mum's milk and are sneaking off to find the big bags of grain. Sprung.

Some, however, are quite happy hanging around with Mum and using her to get a bit of shade.

The ducks are spending a lot of time swimming and diving. These are our youngest ones who were hatched in the incubator. We can't quite tell yet if they're boys or girls.

There's also lots happening in the vegetable garden. I made a silverbeet pie from my first bunch of this coloured heirloom variety. It's so good cooking with my own veggies again.

There are also lots of tiny seeds poking through my no-dig garden bed. I became thoroughly sick of digging up the lawn to plant my onions and garlic, so I'm experimenting with layering cardboard, bedding from the pigs, ducks, chooks, guinea pigs and rabbit, grass clippings, compost and sheep manure right on top of the grass. I've then put a thin layer of mushroom compost where I'm sowing seeds to make a nice moist bed for them to germinate. Seeds of rocket, radish, carrots, beetroot and spring onions are so far coming up well.

Just a tip though, if you try this method, remind other family members to keep the veggie garden gate shut. He and the chooks are only slowly coming out of the badbooks after I found mulch and seeds on the wrong part of the lawn.

But things are recovering.

Reaching double figures

2009-10-19T13:06:00.024+11:00

The thing about piglets is you never know how many you’re going to get. That’s much more exciting than human babies, according to Guy.

And what a litter arrived on Saturday!

The bets were on that Mary would produce double figures. Last time she had nine.

Wessex Saddlebacks used to be known for their big litters, but as numbers declined – along with their genetics, the litter sizes got smaller and smaller.

When the breed was at its most critical you’d be lucky to get four or five. But now, as the breed is nurtured, production is improving.

Mary had 13 piglets this time. We thought she’d finished after 12. I’d already put the afterbirth in the vegetable garden, but in a couple of hours time number 13 popped out.

Piglets literally come out running. Their eyes are wide open, and once they’ve got their umbilical cords untangled, and their birthing goo out of their mouths, they’re headed straight for a teat.

We’ve got two more sows expected to give birth in the next couple of days, what’s your bet?

Is there anyone in there?

While we’re talking babies, Victorian Wessex Saddleback breeder Fiona Chambers from Fernleigh Farms brought her pregnancy testing kit when she visited us earlier in the week.

You can actually hear the blood pumping through the uterus and the galloping hearts of the piglets.

A pig’s gestation is three months, three weeks, and three days. Wasn’t that well planned by nature?

Remember the duck eggs in the incubator that had all the power troubles?

Well, despite the cold eggs, exploding thermometer, and trip to band practice, we’ve had 28 ducklings hatch out.

A few of them needed a bit of help out of their shells, but they’re all fluffed up and growing madly now.

We can’t tell what colours they’ll be yet, so we’re going to keep them for a couple of months until their grown-up feathers grow, and pick out which ones we’re going to keep.

There’s good demand for coloured Indian Runners by backyard poultry keepers, and we’ve already got orders.

Apparently Indian Runners are good eating ducks too, but we won’t go there – yet.

To end a week full of piglets and ducklings, we had a herd of humans visit the farm. A group of local farmers, who mostly keep cattle and are interested in alternative farming, came to see what we’re doing.

There are so many closet pig fanciers around. I’m always amazed that when you mention you’ve got pigs to anyone, they’ll straight away say, “Oh I love pigs…we used to have one called…and she got turned in to…”.

The ham was a real hit with the farmers, with many saying they hadn’t tasted anything like it for a long time.

And that’s why we’re bringing the breed back.

Who's my mummy?

2009-10-01T10:25:00.015+10:00

I imagine these Indian Runner ducklings will have turbulent teenage years.

It won’t be easy coming to terms with being a duck whose mum was a chook. But I hope they’ll be tough, and survive the taunts.

We put the duck eggs under a broody Rhode Island Red, and she sat very patiently for 28 days, until the babies pushed their way out of the thick, white shells.

To reduce the psychological strain on the ducklings we took them away from the chook, and now they’re in a cosy pen with a light and lots of crumble and water.

Like the pigs, the ducklings had an exciting windy weekend. Their light went out with the electricity, but they did a good job of keeping each other warm for a few hours.

Inside the house, where we’ve got an electric incubator set with 40 eggs, the power cut caused a little more stress.

The temperature dropped incredibly quickly, a duck-expert relative was called, and then a doona was wrapped around the incubator. We warmed some water on the metho burner and filled a hotwater bottle and tucked that in too.

But the temperature continued to fall…

The chamber got moved to the lounge room in front of the fire, and slowly the thermometer started moving upwards.

But then it got too hot and exploded, spreading purple alcohol over the eggs!

I had band practice in town in the afternoon, so along with the tenor horn on the back seat we sat the incubator.

After a couple of hours being plugged-in at the band rooms, with the eggs turning to the music of Edward Gregson’s The Plantagenets, the power came back on at home.

We shone a torch into the eggs last night, and actually saw a duckling move inside its shell, so hopefully they’ll be alright.

What a weekend!

2009-10-01T08:17:00.005+10:00

If there was a chance pigs might fly, it would have happened last Sunday.

The most spectacular southerly winds came through the farm, ripping out trees and shifting a pig shed from one paddock into the next (breaking four fence wires in the process).

The pigs weren’t worried at all, and continued rooting around, and even climbed into the broken shed as it balanced, twisted, on its end.

The bush in the south-west corner of the farm looks like a patch of carrots that have been thinned, with the rejects left between the rows.

Old eucalypts have been completely uprooted and there are tens of trees being cradled by their neighbours, holding on till they're let go.

The winds continued for a good 12 hours, and when they had finished the farm and the bush was completely still, and the sun set an eerie warm yellow.

Snuggly shelterbelts

2009-09-24T09:09:00.007+10:00

Look who got into the shelterbelt yesterday...I think she was looking for grubs, but in the process of digging them up she disrupted a couple of our newly-planted natives!

They might be small at the moment, but in a few years these trees will provide valuable shelter for the pigs (and us).

Shelterbelts keep animals warm and protect crops. Our pigs will be able to use all their energy for growing, rather than shivering in the cold winds.

More on the science of native shelterbelts coming soon to the blog...

What’s special about Wessex Saddlebacks?

2009-09-23T15:23:00.007+10:00

The Wessex Saddleback is critically endangered – there are less than 30 new registrations of sows each year. They’re extinct in England, and purebreds exist only in Australia and New Zealand.

There’s a bit of argument about where they came from, but most people say the New Forest area in England. The reason the numbers dropped in the UK was because intensive pig farming became trendy in the mid 1900s, and the Wessex Saddlebacks were more suited to being free-range. They’re a hardy lot who are into rooting – the ground, that is.

When the numbers got dangerously low in England the Wessex Saddlebacks were crossed with the Essex breed – which look a bit the same, but are different genetically. The result was the British Saddleback.

Fortunately before this “blending” 17 Wessex Saddlebacks were brought to Australia between 1931 and 1953.

The Wessex Saddleback is one of the most un-altered breeds around, and is probably the closest to the Landrace pigs that foraged for centuries in the woods of England.

We’ve got a particularly rare line on our farm, called the Mary line.

We find the Wessex Saddlebacks have got beautiful temperaments…they’d be no good for the rumoured destroying of evidence, they seem to have more of a taste for green grass and the chocolate in their feed mix.

And there’s a particular spot on their back that they love having rubbed. Our boar Domino will almost knock you over when he gets excited having his back scratched.

Juicy, juicy roast pork

2009-09-21T07:47:00.002+10:00

We had roast pork for lunch today, with crunchy crackling and homemade gravy. The sow who contributed to the meal was one of our first piglets on the farm. The meat was juicy and quite dark, and certainly not like the dry, white pork too many of us have had before.

I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s suggestions for cooking roasts in his Meat Book: salt, pepper, oil and thyme rubbed into the skin; a half-hour sizzle at high heat; and then a couple of hours at 160 degrees c.

Two nights ago we sampled the first cuts from the sow. Fresh from the abattoir, we had loin chops marinated in garlic, honey, lemon juice and black pepper. I sealed the chops in a fry pan on moderate heat, and then cooked them for a couple more minutes. They were served on mash with stir-fried carrots, broccoli, capsicum and ginger. The marinade was subtle enough for the flavour of the pork to come through.

Winter’s wet weather continues into Spring. Just when the puddles have evaporated to a squishy mud hole, they fill again. The pigs seem to be enjoying the soft soil for digging, but it’s putting the vegetable garden very much behind. So far I’ve been able to dig enough ground for garlic, onions, a row of carrots, a few different brassicas and a good patch of rhubarb. Let’s just hope the broad beans, peas and potatoes can catch up.

We can’t complain though when the dams are overflowing and everything is green and freshly-washed.