Sanity saver

I remember being disappointed a few years ago when I went to visit a local organic guru’s garden.

I had imagined a potager with beans climbing up wrought iron teepees, tomatoes tumbling onto a gravel path and garden edges as straight as a draftsman’s ruler.

It was smaller than I expected, and the tomatoes were restrained behind recycled tree guards. There was no sparkling gravel, but a weedy lawn, and something had been nibbling the silverbeet.

I kick myself now that I’d been so silly. A love of gardening doesn’t simply translate into a picture-perfect patch. This was a garden that was real: squeezed on a suburban block, weeded hastily at the end of the working day, and at the mercy of blackbirds, slugs, and the neighbour’s cat.

Gardens are incredibly personal. They’re like a teenage poem that you’re secretly proud of - but if you showed anyone you’d die of embarrassment. You’d make excuses about the messy writing, the misplaced apostrophes, and the lazy grammar… how it’s only the draft, something you just scribbled down in the night.

And even if you are proud of your garden, other people often don’t share your excitement. When I lived in town before the farm, I would drag my visiting mum into the backyard every second day to tour the garden.

“But I looked at it on Monday,” she’d say.

“Yes, I know; but you didn’t see the flowers on the tomatoes then, and I’ve put in some carrot seed too. And the beans have grown at least an inch.”

In the current patch I’m battling wild radish and clover. I reckon the neighbours who walk their dogs past our place wouldn’t even know I had vegetables in there, but for me startling them with a fork and a wave.

The rows of onions aren’t straight and the snow peas have chosen to sprawl along the ground rather than climb my artistic tea tree support.

We’ve been so incredibly busy with Christmas hams, farmers’ markets, shearing, water problems, and shorting electric fences (oh, and the day job too… almost forgot), but I’ve still been out there on dark pulling weeds and picking peas.

And while some people would say I’m a glutton for punishment (‘why don’t you just BUY your veggies for once’…) they don’t understand what I’m like when I don’t spend time in the garden.

My head gets sore from too many things to remember, I feel anxious when I see my piles of gardening books, knowing that I’m not keeping up with Peter Cundall’s planting list. Stress chemicals circulate through my body, caught in a maze with no gate.

All I have to do is pull a few of weeds and I’m fine again. My mind suddenly empties and I start reflecting on conversations I’ve had, things I’ve heard on the radio, and my creativity returns.

And I love looking at my hands: nails ripped, skin scratched, and deep parallel lines along my fingers that hold on to the red dirt, however hard I scrub.

Summer garden from Eliza Wood on Vimeo.

Guy considers wife-swapping

Would you trade your sow for a wife?

The question came up this week during a farm visit from a group of Papua New Guinean farmers and researchers.

They’re in Tasmania for a pyrethrum conference, and they’ve also been touring Tasmanian farms to get ideas to improve their agricultural practices. And they wanted to see a pig farm.

Pigs are worth a lot of money in PNG; a large mature breeding will cost you about $A2,000. They’re also considered legal tender, and you can trade pretty much anything if you’ve got the right number of pigs.

Apparently several large pigs and a few thousand dollars cash will buy you a wife, and the bigger the pig the better. The sow and money goes to the wife’s family with the largest pig for your bride’s father. The better the girl, the more pigs she’s worth, too.

However, don’t give away all your pigs for wives, as you can also use them to buy land. One mature pig would allow me to get about five acres and start a farm with a new wife. And if you have an enemy, a pig as a token of peace calls off the war.

If you have a herd of pigs you can buy multiple wives. But some families don’t accept pigs, and insist on cattle instead.

I began to do the sums and worked out that with our couple of hundred pigs, 50 cattle and 60 sheep that not only would I have something that could match most PNG families’ demands, but I could potentially buy a new farm and have about 20 wives.

But my excitement and plans to ship our menagerie to PNG were short- lived, when I was told you have to ask permission from your first wife before you can gain another, and so on.

If you do decide to go ahead and get a second wife without permission, it’s common for your house to be burnt down and then you have to trade more pigs to get another house.

A look from Eliza indicated that a burnt down house would be the least of my worries.

The visiting farmers asked lots of questions about our free range pig system, with the hope of taking some different ideas home.

In PNG pigs are often kept on a lead or chain that’s moved around the farm so they can work the ground. Others are kept free range where they scrounge for sweet potatoes and edible plants.

Pig farming has come a long way in the past 20 years: pigs now have their own shelters - previously it was traditional for pigs to share a house with the farmer’s family, with the pigs getting one half and the family the other.

One of our close friends Graeme Stevenson spent time working in PNG several decades ago, and recalls using a long drop toilet and hearing the sound of pigs cleaning up the mess.

There have been close ties between Tasmanian and PNG ag scientists for decades. At the moment they’re working together to grow western vegetables to market to the expat community in PNG. It’s an interesting dilemma facing many developing countries as they are influenced by the appeal of western agriculture practices, plant varieties and livestock breeds.

The most common meat eaten by our visitors is not backyard chicken or pork, but lamb that’s been imported from Australia and New Zealand.

Western agriculture offers greater levels of productivity for farmers and could lead to improvements in nutrition, but at the same time it has the potential to displace traditional practices and culture. It can also lead to the extinction of local species and breeds.

Interestingly, the loss of cultural knowledge in PNG and the switch to western food has prompted another Tasmanian agricultural scientist, Bruce French, to develop an international database of edible plants.

Bruce and his team of volunteers are hoping that by identifying native edible plants and documenting their nutritional values, that they can assist indigenous people to overcome diet-related health issues and encourage them to continue using indigenous plants. It’s a fantastic cause and they have already successfully documented 18,000 plants.

When the farmers saw the size of our pigs their eyes lit up, “They are so much bigger and productive than our native pigs. We would love some of these pigs in PNG”.

I guess it would be hard not to be excited when large pigs like ours could give you access to virtually any woman.

While I’m sure the Wessex Saddleback would adapt to a diet of sweet potatoes and pasture, its size and productivity could quickly lead to the displacement of the indigenous local breeds.

That thought was a subtle reminder that it’s probably best to keep our pigs in Tasmania.

Contemplating compost

There are two places that get me thinking about death: funeral parlours and compost heaps.

And I know which one I’d prefer to end up in.

Into a compost heap we put everything we don’t want - an apple core, yesterday’s newspaper, grass that reached beyond the mower blades. But, out of it comes something we do want: rich, sweet-smelling compost that’s good enough to eat.

I compost consciously twice a year, during spring and autumn. My compost heaps are contained within timber pallets and galvanised mesh, drawn together with blue baling twine.

I made my first compost bin when I came back from uni and bought a house in town. Dad and I scavenged the timber off a shed on a farm that had been ripped up and turned into plantation.

At 8am on my first Sunday in suburbia I was waking up my neighbourhood nailing together my bin.

It was hard in town to find the volume of materials to get the heap really heating up. I’d mow the neighbours’ nature strips just so I could get the clippings, and for two seasons in a row I got told off for nicking the autumn leaves off a footpath that wasn’t outside my house. I was too scared to go back a third time.

I’d visit my parents’ farm and volunteer to pick up horse manure, or clean out the chook house.

The last day I spent on the farm with my dad, before he died a week later in hospital, we scraped out his duck pen. Dad held open the bags and I wobbled the shovel above - piled with straw and sloppy, stinking poo - trying not to spill it over him.

Now we’re at Mount Gnomon my compost is a rich mix of life’s waste: piglets that disappeared under 200 kilos of sow, chooks fallen from their perch, and a hairless joey found on the road.

It’s layered with pig manure, and cow, sheep, duck, guinea pig, horse, cat and rabbit poo. There are spud peelings, rhubarb leaves, mouldy loaf-ends and forgotten left-overs.

I love seeing the steam rising from it on a chilly morning. I love seeing the worms bury to safety as I fork it into the barrow.

I know where I’d like to end up.


The perfect mix
Without getting too sciency, the secret to a good compost comes down to the carbon/nitrogen balance.

You don’t want too much carbon (straw, newspapers, cardboard, dried-up weeds) or you’ll end up with a dry, mulch-like material that won’t break down.

And you don’t want too much nitrogen (grass clippings, green weeds, kitchen scraps) or you won’t be able to go near the heap for the terrible smell, and it’ll be slimy and way too wet.

So, you want a bit of this, and a bit of that. Think of pork belly and the way the meat and fat are layered. (Think of pork belly often, just for the sake of it).

When I’m putting a heap together my layers are about 10cm thick, so I’ll have a layer of straw mixed with manure, then some green weeds, some torn-up newspaper or cardboard, rhubarb leaves etc etc. I sprinkle the ashes out of the fireplace thinly, and if I’m putting dead animals in I make sure they’re near the middle so they’ve got the best chance of breaking down.

I read an anecdote in an old Tasmanian organic gardening book about a keen composter whose heap exploded when they tossed in a chicken. Unfortunately nothing as spectacular has happened in mine, yet.

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.

Duck season

It’s a challenging and busy time at Mount Gnomon. The days are gloomy and recent rains have made a pair of gumboots an essential item for feeding the menagerie.

But spring feels like it’s not too far away: we have only a couple of ewes left to lamb and we’ve had our first Belted Galloway calf.

The biggest indicator that the days are drawing out and the weather is going to improve is the onset of duck season. I don’t mean the shooting variety - I’m referring to the time when our large flock of ducks begins to lay.

I’ve long had a passion for ducks: it was my responsibility as a child to be the duck herder. Every night I’d call our Khaki Campbells with “dill, dill, dill” and they’d come in for their feed, and I’d shut them up so I could collect the eggs in the morning before the crows got them.

Eliza also grew up with ducks, and proudly tells of the time she took hand-reared Jimmy to the North Motton Pet Show on a lead.

The first ducks we bought for Mount Gnomon Farm were Indian Runners. Tall, upright, and elegant, the Indian Runners are great foragers and have earned a reputation for being the ideal garden slug and pest eradicator. The colours we have in our Indian Runners are classified as rare - in fact any colour other than white and white-and- fawn are rare and need support.

We have cinnamon, fawn, apricot, mallard, blue fawn, trout, and harlequin, and as a collection they make a great spectacle.

Indian runners have more of a herd mentality than any other duck and while they’re a bit scatty, they’re easy to train to go into their house at night. About an hour before dusk they run as a group to the shed entrance and wait to be shut up, away from our healthy population of quolls and devils.

The safety of the shed also protects the eggs from being pinched by crows each morning. Indian Runners are prolific layers and if fed a good laying ration can rival most chooks with their egg-laying capacity, often producing over 200 eggs in a season.

We have about 24 Indian Runner hens and when they all start laying it’s quite possible we’ll have to find a home for over 12 dozen eggs a week. We’re not sure what the market is like for ducks eggs, but we’re soon to find out.

Duck eggs are quite different to chook eggs. The yolk contains more fat and the white is higher in protein, and as a result if they’re eaten like a chook egg many people find them too rich. With their high protein levels they also require gentler cooking. However, the protein makes them perfect for baking and you can freely substitute chook eggs for duck eggs in cakes, biscuits, custards etc.

The high protein levels also mean that the whites will whip up better, so your cakes should be lighter and higher (and the richness of the egg yolks makes the cakes even richer).

Due to the relative scarcity of duck eggs most people haven’t cooked with them or are hesitant to give them a go. We’ve been told we’ll have to find some older country-style chefs that learnt to bake at a time when duck eggs were more common.

We would love to hear from people who have a particular use for duck eggs, or a favourite duck egg recipe, or know of someone who is after a regular supply. If not, our pigs can look forward to some special duck egg treats.