On the day of our fourth anniversary at Mount Gnomon

On the anniversary of four years at Mount Gnomon: a selection of photos from our farm.

It feels significantly longer than four years - and the grey hairs and wrinkles support that!

But as the song says, all you need is love, and without love we wouldn't be here riding the roller coaster of farming.

Two pig farmers, their brave helpers, and some pulled pork

It’s taken almost a month, but I think we’re close to recovering from The Taste Festival.

Without drawing breath after Christmas, and barely having time for a shower, we packed up our pulled pork and sausages and headed for Hobart early on December 27th.

We drove in convoy, sort of. Guy sped off in the van and I lumbered along behind with the ute and trailer. We met at Ut Si Café at Perth and fueled up on ham, egg, and spinach sandwiches (funnily enough the ham wasn’t ours, Colette had run out, but it was Matthew Evans’). At this point I started to feel a bit excited about the week ahead of us.

When Guy and his brother Mark (Lost Pippin Cidery and Nursery) put in an application to have a cider and pork stall at The Taste I thought they were very optimistic.

I was sure we wouldn’t get in, both being young businesses, and having very little experience at food events. There was a nice link though, with us growing rare breeds of livestock, and Mark working to keep old fruit varieties alive. So the application went in, and I promptly forgot about it.

“Bloody hell”

I think that’s what I said when Guy told me we’d got in, but it might have been worse.

“What are two pig farmers doing going to The Taste?”

Aware that we needed some practice at dishing up tacos and sausages en masse, we attended some smaller events in the couple of months leading up to The Taste. We went to the Spring Festival at the Botanical Gardens in Hobart, the Deloraine Craft Fair, and Hobart’s Sustainable Living Festival.

And I’m so glad we had the chance to practice. We shifted around benches, lengthened bbq legs, graduated from spoons to squeezy bottles for sauces and sourcream, learnt that chopped coriander loses its aroma and plucking is worth the effort, and that Guy and Eliza work best at opposite ends of the stall.

It was a huge challenge preparing for The Taste while we were running around distributing a few hundred Christmas orders. The logistics were a nightmare, and I think we worked the hardest we have so far. But we had the most amazing staff and helpers though, like our butcher Neville who worked 12-hour days with only a 10-minute sandwich and newspaper break. Dane ran around sorting out everything we’d forgotten, and Elisha brought food, humour, and organisation as we worked from morning to midnight putting Christmas orders together.

Our new bookkeeper Andrea got the biggest Mount Gnomon baptism of fire. She thought she was coming to help us catch up with our records, but got thrown into sorting the orders, packaging, cleaning, rostering, and counseling! Guy’s sister Lauren cryovacked every single ham without a complaint, but may never eat ham again. Mark looked after everything at the Hobart end: bumping in, worrying about stall layout, signage, refrigeration, cash registers etc.

So, you can see that by the time we actually got to The Taste we were hardly running on fresh legs.

As we drove in on the first day, I felt like I was 14 again, standing in the wings at the eisteddfod ready to play my first cornet solo. I wanted to vomit and I wanted to back out and scratch from the event.

To my complete surprise, the day went really well. Our staff sorted out their jobs among themselves, and we survived the first lunchtime rush. Ian Parmenter and his team of judges came around and tasted the pulled pork taco, and while it was lovely for him to come around the back of the stall to talk pigs and have his photo taken with me, I thought that would be the height of the excitement.

But we WON the “taste plate”! It’s the top prize for a small dish priced at $8 or under. Suddenly the line grew from a few people interested in our story and free range pork, to an endless line of punters wanting ‘one of those pork things I heard about’.

We’re not fancy chefs at all, and we’ve got an awful lot to learn about food, but I think the taco went well because it was fresh and real. The pulled pork was literally just pork – no seasoning – it had just been cooked all day in fat. The salsa was fresh: chopped in time to the shuffling of the customers in line. (Knife-wielding Carol chopped tomatoes - from the Brandsemas who have been growing them for more than 50 years, chillies, onions, cabbages, and apples for a total of 70 hours accompanied by Neil Diamond and others). The sourcream was organic and came from Elgaar Farm and we managed to source almost all the coriander from our friend Graeme (Thirlstane Gardens) in the north-west.

We wanted to show that you don’t have to work in a restaurant to be able to produce yummy food – you just need really good quality ingredients. But we’ve learnt so much from talking to chefs who use our products, and from our enthusiastic, experimental customers. We really hope more producers will be inspired to have a go at food events, and bring the consumer closer to the grower.

We’d like to thank our wonderful staff and volunteers who may have not been fully aware of what they were getting themselves into. At one stage we had six Robertsons working on the stall: Mark with his cider, builder-cum-bbq-er Dane, twins Allie and Lauren, and mum Denise, and Guy.

Guy and I started The Taste race as though it was a sprint, and on day three when we hit the wall and realised it was actually a marathon, our wonderful workers let us rest and filled the gaps.

We’ve been trying to have a little break during January – in between catching up on farm jobs and attending the usual markets.

But soon we’ll be back on the taco production line… Festivale is on in Launceston from February 8 – 10, Devonport’s Taste the Harvest is on March 10, and before we know it we’ll be at Agfest from May 2 – 4.

See you there!

We survived Christmas!

Thank you to our friends, families, and all the local businesses that have helped us get through this crazy time of year.

And thank YOU for your support and encouragement!

Best wishes for a wonderful season of fine food, wine, and friendships,
Eliza and Guy

P.S. See you at The Taste in Hobart from the 28th!

Pig farmers' Christmas

It’s September and the pigs are snuffling and nosing the soft spring dirt.

“Are you taking Christmas orders yet? We were too late last year.”

“Almost… we're not quite organised yet.”

It’s October (pigs are still snuffling) and the enquiries are increasing.

“Can you put us down for a ham? Are you taking orders yet?”

Alright. I give in: let’s open the floodgates.

It’s November and the orders are flowing like grain from the silos.

“Guy, when are we going to stop taking orders? How many pigs have we got?

“Guy, I want to have some spare. We missed out on a ham for ourselves last year.”

Guy stares at the paddock and stares at the spreadsheet.

And stares again at the paddock and again at the spreadsheet.

I think he grunted.

It’s December. Already.

What if we don’t have enough pigs? What if we lose an order? What if we lose two orders?

How many hams? How many hams? How many hams?

Bone-in, bone-out, half, whole, she’s having a charcuterie pack – with ham, no, without – three gourmet barbeque packs please, with an extra kilo of scotch, did you write that order down from the man who rang last night? What man?

I’m tired.

I’m more tired than you.

I’m wearing odd socks. I’m eating sausages for tea. Not sausages and mashed potato with gravy, just sausages.

I’m shocked when I see my arm muscles in the mirror. You don’t need a gym membership when you’ve got hams to hang.

Five days till Christmas.

           

So early this morning I sat outside on Cyril’s bed facing east and listened.

Cockatoos, roosters, crows, bush birds that I will learn the names of, one day.

And sleepy, snuffling pigs.

Duck egg quiche excitement

Duck eggs generate a unique excitement among cooks that's just not seen with your run-of-the-mill chook eggs.

"You've got duck eggs?
"Have you got many duck eggs?
"I love duck eggs."

And we love them too.

We also love quiche - we're a quiche-loving-couple.
Here's my mum's onion quiche recipe that I've adapted.


Really Easy Shortcrust Pastry

2 cups of plain flour
1 tspn baking powder
1/2 tspn salt
125g butter OR lard OR bacon/ham fat
1/4 cup water
Squeeze of lemon juice

Mix dry ingredients, rub in butter/lard/cured fat, add water and lemon juice, and knead lightly till it's smooth.
I take the really easy option and put the dry ingredients and fat into a food processor, wizzy it up, then add the water and lemon. This recipe produces enough for two average-size quiches.


Really Yummy Duck Egg and Allium Quiche

2 big onions OR 1 big leek OR 10 little potato onions OR a combination
Two big, fresh, free range, happy-quacky duck eggs (or chooks eggs... I suppose... if you have to)
150ml cream
Double handful of grated chedder
Salt and pepper
1 tspn of mustard (wet or dry)

Cook the chopped up members of the allium family with a good knob of butter in a frypan on low heat. It can take a good 15-20 minutes to get them well-cooked and translucent. Leave to cool.

Roll out the pastry to fit your daggy op-shop quiche dish.

Spread the cooked alliums into the dish, and then pour over the well-mixed egg/cream/cheese mix. Try to spread it evenly, so no one ends up with too much cheese and not enough leek. Disastrous.

At this point, this time, I sprinkled over some cooked bacon pieces. You can add lots of bacon if you'd like - it's best to cook it in the frypan with the alliums.

Put your quiche into a nice hot oven (200 degrees) so the duck eggs puff up. When the top starts turning golden I turn it down to 180. Every oven is different, but my quiches take about 30 minutes to cook.

Eat hot or cold, with salad or without, and give thanks to the ducks.

Duck buddies

This is Roger, Dylan and Quack-Quack.

They live on the fringe of the flock: outcasts. They have baggage.

Every morning you'll find them under the dying blackwood tree talking quietly as they wash and forage. The other ducks chatter in the orchard, assimilated.

I raised Roger and Dylan in the bathroom of my house in town. They swam under the warmth of a desk lamp, and came out to watch the news on the couch.

When they moved outside we would play on the lawn. I'd lay on my tummy and they'd walk along my back and tinker with my earrings and tease my hair.

Their confidence grew. I'd step outside with the washing and they'd sprint to the line. Roger would aim for the skin behind my knees and latch on - so great was his affection.

I contemplated a 'Beware of the Ducks' sign.

Quack-Quack is a dumped duck. She was an only child and her owners thought she'd be better-off eating our grain.

She's of "mixed breed" and appears to cogitate a lot.

The three spend most of their days together, but the boys do need Roger and Dylan Time. They have a special bond, these two.

Roger and Quack-Quack slid under the fence into the shelter belt the other day. Dylan was beside himself, wondering what they were up to.

But when Quack-Quack goes under the conifer to lay her egg, the boys waddle and hide.

And Quack-Quack spends the afternoon by herself.

Peering over the fence

Farmers in Australia have traditionally been pretty cagey about what information they share with other farmers. Perhaps they’re worried about competition, or perhaps they lack confidence in what they’re doing.

Either way, when they don’t share they miss the chance to solve problems and, ultimately, improve their farm businesses. And the chance to inspire and energise each other is also lost.

I’ve never been one for group work – Guy will back this up – but I love it when we meet farmers who are generous and free with their knowledge and experiences. (Guy loves group work so much he used to work as a facilitator getting farmers together to share their skills.)

John and Sandra are from Swallow Valley Farm in California. I suspect part of the reason we hit it off was because of the geographical distance between us. It’s a bit like the way you can have a deep and meaningful with a stranger on a plane.

John and Sandra were doing a talk to the ag researchers at the uni, and by chance I was introduced to them as they were walking into the lecture theatre.

John’s the farm manager and Sandy works off-farm for blocks of time as a presentation graphics designer.  When she’s not tied up with that, she’s working on the farm or at the markets (they do five markets a week).

Swallow Farm’s main business is a sheep milk cheesery – they milk East Friesians. But on the 130 acres they also produce rare breed lamb (Katahdin, a shedding breed), pork, poultry, soft fruits and vegetables… and there could be more that they didn’t mention.

We were really excited to find out they’d had a Mangalitza pig – the primitive-looking, curly-haired breed that you’d definitely not want to meet on your way to lock up the chooks at night. (I say had – the Manga’s now in the freezer, but it didn’t produce much meat).

They also had a Traditional Dairy Shorthorn, the rare breed of cattle we’ve just started processing and selling at the markets. It was good to hear that their ‘Bella’ – also in the freezer – was the best beef they’d ever eaten.

Guy now wants a chook tractor. Not the rabbit hutch-sized ones you see in gardening magazines, but the ones that house 80 birds (Guy just informed me he doesn’t want one, he wants many). John and Sandy have 400 hens and each night they put themselves to bed, with a solar-powered door automatically closing behind them at dusk. If the girls feel like staying out late they’re unlikely to see the morning thanks to the local coyote population.

Interestingly, at Swallow Farm they can process up to 10,000 head of poultry each year without having to deal with painful red tape. So they kill turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese and sell them at the farmers’ markets. The exemption from the rules comes about because of the value placed on the cultural practice of killing turkeys for Thanksgiving. Perhaps we could compare it with mutton bird harvesting?

We also heard little bits about their animal welfare and bee friendly accreditation, their plans to produce biochar from their eucalypt (!) plantation, and their involvement in a new CSA – a community supported agriculture enterprise where the public subscribes to a regular delivery of produce.



Californian farmers Sandra and John

They face the same challenges as we do: reliance on outside meat processing, free range labelling inconsistencies, and trying to re-educate consumers who see the price, but not the value. 



After listening to John and Sandra’s presentation I asked them to park their camper in our yard and have dinner with us. They stayed two nights, we shared our home-grown meat and vegetables, and we said goodbye feeling so fortunate to have spent some time together.

There is so much we can learn from elsewhere in the world – why do we think we have to battle through without asking advice, or having a look at how someone else does things?

Last week I was selected for a Churchill Fellowship to spend six weeks overseas looking at farm tourism, value-adding (such as charcuterie), and how food-producing regions put themselves on the discerning tourist’s map.

I’m planning to spend time in France, Italy, Spain, and the UK – it’ll be my first time out of Australia, so I’m a little nervous, but very excited.

We think Tasmania, and the north-west especially, has amazing potential to provide visitors with genuine, earthy, and top-class experiences that combine real food with really stunning scenery.

So let’s do it!

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.

Two years of hard work and satisfaction

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 a 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

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!)