Contemplating compost

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

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

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

“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

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.