Living with wildlife

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

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

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

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

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.