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

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

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

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

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

A farmer for a day

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)