The Highlands have arrived

After many months of gentle (and not-so-gentle) persuasion, Eliza's mum has allowed Guy to borrow her Highland cattle to breed with.

Maggie, Linnhe, Morag and Isabelle arrived this morning, and as I look out the window now they're settling down eating some hay in the laneway.

Highlands are a rare breed, according to the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, so we're hoping we can help build their numbers up. We're borrowing a bull in the next week ... so it's all go!

Linnhe and Isabelle

Maggie and Morag

Neither of us have eaten Highland beef before, but a Scottish chef - who just happened to be visiting this morning while the cattle were being delivered - told us it's tender, marbled meat with egg-shell coloured fat.

It'll be a little while till we have any at eating stage, but we're looking forward to having our own rare-breed beef to go with our rare-breed pork, chicken and duck.

Got any garden surplus?

There's a great new project starting on the north-west coast that's going to link backyard gardeners with families who struggle to buy fruit and veggies.

It's based on something that's happening in the US, Produce to the People, and it'll involve volunteers collecting surplus produce from gardeners, and then taking it to a central distribution point.

That point's probably going to be just down the road from our place, at the Penguin Organic Growing Centre...a patch of ground that's being revitalised at the moment to turn it into a bustling community base for learning about living sustainably.

There's actually a festival coming up at the centre on March 27 and 28 that Guy's helping organise. It's all about growing food, biodiversity and reducing our impact on the environment, and includes tours of local gardens.

We think the new project Produce to the People has got fantastic potential on the coast, and we congratulate the North West Environment Centre for getting funding from the state government to get it started.

Visitors and Escapees

We've got a visitor staying at the farm at the moment. "Monty" is having a working holiday at our place, and he was working even on his first night here!

He's a young boar and he's come from further up the coast from our friends Kerryn and Don to see what the ladies are like in the Penguin area.

He appears to have settled in well, so they must be quite welcoming.

But while one animal comes in the gates, others are going out.














Everyday the ducks disappear out the driveway and walk into the forest reserve, where they spend the day pottering.

They come back at bedtime, and I just love seeing the dusk light on their footprints.

Testing out the Trotters

Offal: the parts of an animal butchered that are unfit for use (Webster).

What a great start.

The past few weeks we’ve been collecting our offal from the abattoir. It comes in a plastic bag within a plastic bag: ears, trotters, tails, cheeks, and jowls all together. The tails still have the fluffy whip-like bits on the end of them and the ears are old-man hairy. Our red dirt is still between their toes.

I feel an obligation to at least try all the parts. It must go back to the single brussels sprout Mum used to put on my plate. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, even if it involves stuffing it in our mouths and chewing really fast. If an animal has to die for us to eat meat we’ve got to make the most of it.

The trotters felt a bit like a dead person’s hand. Cold and clammy, bloodless. I ran some hot water and with a sharp knife scraped away the dirt and callused skin. I got a lighter and singed the black hairs…although it didn’t really work, so I pulled them out by hand.

The recipe I found on the net “Chinese-style pigs’ trotters” (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of course) asked me to brown the trotters in a pan. If someone had walked in the door and sniffed they would have thought I was cooking up brawn for dogs. But I was determined.

I added apple juice, soy sauce, caster sugar, chillies, garlic and ginger, then put it all in the crock pot for eight hours.

When I came home that night I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even spoon out the sauce to try. I told myself it would be better in the morning after it’d had time to sit, anyway. I did notice that the trotters didn’t look like trotters anymore. A good sign.

Day two: couldn’t face it for breakfast, so put the pot in the fridge (a chance for the fat to rise and set). But throughout the day, I worked on convincing myself I had a wonderful meal waiting for me at night.

I picked pak choi, snow peas and coriander from the garden and cooked noodles. Then I heated up the trotters and put it all together. It was a bit like an Asian soup, with lots of bones and bits of skin. I didn’t come across any hooves or claws. I did find a couple of tiny slivers of meat, two for each trotter.

The end product was no where near as traumatic to eat as it was to prepare. And I think I would happily serve it up as an entrée for visitors, it was pretty rich as a main meal. They just might not find out exactly where the meat came from till after the washing up.

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’.