A trip to the city

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.