Who's the boss at Mount Gnomon Farm?

This is Dane, Guy's younger brother. Some people would say he's lost his marbles.

He's handed in his notice and started work this week as Mount Gnomon's first full time employee. He's working with pigs, and he's working with family. Crazy.

But we are so happy he hasn't come to his senses yet.

Dane is going to build our butchery and tourism centre. We're well underway with the plans now, but construction probably won't start for a good couple of months.

Until then, he's 'farm infrastructure manager': fixing and building fences, making repairs, putting up new stockyards, and sorting us out generally.

After only one day on the job, the grass has been cut, the electric fence is humming again, and the little piggies are eyeing the gateways nervously.

Guy's caught up on some paperwork, I've cleaned out one of the freezers (and even written a list of what's in it!) and I even had time to make a celebratory cake.

Welcome to the farm, Dane! We are so excited to have you formally on this journey with us.

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.

Dreams becoming a (slightly daunting) reality

If we’d won $100,000 in the lottery the feeling would be very different.

We’ve received a Federal Government grant, and while we’re elated and buoyed, there is a great sense of obligation.

As the apple farmer at the market told me, we’d better spend his tax dollars well.

The other thing is we’ve got to come up with matching funds.

A couple of months ago Guy spent a week writing a massive application for a T-QUAL grant. The grants are competitive and merit-based, and aim to boost the tourism industry in Australia.

As the post office staff starting locking the doors late one afternoon, we pushed 16,000 words into a post bag.

We’ve always wanted to move into farm tourism – and when 650 people turned up for our open day in April, we knew there was real demand.

We can all see the growing interest in real food, cooking, farmers’ markets, ethical production…. but research is showing people also want hands-on farm experiences, so they can get back to the roots of what they’re eating.

And that’s fantastic – because 85 per cent of Australians live in urbanised areas, and are so disconnected from farming.

Farm tourism is a big thing in Europe, the UK, and New Zealand, but it still hasn’t really caught on in Australia.

I imagine it might be because of lack of labour on farms, and lack of farmers’ confidence to market and promote what they do.

But if farmers want to keep their families and businesses going, they’ve got to diversify their incomes.

In Tasmania, 70 per cent of farmers have to work off-farm. From our experience, that’s really hard: you become torn between two jobs; you wish you were at home; and you become resentful.

Onlookers probably wonder why north-west Tasmanians haven’t embraced food tourism.

We grow and make so many products, and we have small farms with soils suited to niche production.

But we’ve been trying to compete on a global market with commodities – and we just can’t keep doing it.

We think food tourism is vital in building the brand of this region.

At the moment few tourists stop as they speed along the Bass highway heading for Strahan or Cradle Mountain.

We’ve got to give them a reason to stop – and not just one or two places offering good food and farm experiences.

We need a whole chain of businesses – farm stays, cooking schools, berry farms, wineries, cheese factories, restaurants using purely local ingredients – to make the trip worthwhile for visitors.

For our part, we’re planning a centre where visitors will learn about rare breeds; we’ll have a butchery and commercial kitchen; and there’ll be a focus on giving our visitors a full paddock-to-plate experience – gumboots included.

And for the full story on what we’re planning, you’ll just have to stay tuned...

The birth of Harvest - and Tasmania's farmers' market history

In 2001, I recall a close friend of Eliza and I being excited about the start of Tasmania’s first modern-era farmers’ market - in Burnie, on the north-west coast. An organic enthusiast, he anticipated farmers’ markets could solve many of the problems facing farming in Tasmania. They would be a way for farmers who were doing something against the norm to engage with the public, and the conscious shopper could source local food. Tasmania, with its abundant produce, would be a farmers’ market winner.

Our friend teamed up with a few other passionate locavores to present a case to the Burnie Show Society. The society was a logical place to start: it had an existing committee, a suitable venue, and the market proceeds could assist to keep the society running. The society accepted the proposal and the farmers’ market was born. It quickly became a success, with roughly 1,000 people wandering through the gates with their shopping bags every fortnight. The stallholder fees provided a much-needed injection of funds for the show society. The show societies of Wynyard, Devonport, and Launceston soon launched their own farmers’ markets, after seeing the success of Burnie.

A small and scattered population made it challenging for all the markets to be a raging success. Initially, the rules were that stallholders had to produce everything they sold. Unfortunately, the reality was that northern Tasmania was a producer of commodities, and few farmers grew niche products or were interested in taking what they grew to market. For generations their job was to farm and let the processing companies sell what they delivered to them. Due to a shortage of farmers wanting to go to the markets, the committees began to allow producers to sell wholesalers’ products to ensure there was enough range for the customers.

The committees were also worried about the lack of produce farmers could grow in the Tasmanian winter, and as a result introduced the 80/20 rule, where stallholders could source 20 per cent of their items from other producers. Many people saw this as the decline of the markets, as the rule was hard to police and easily abused. All of a sudden supposedly local produce, like sweet potatoes and oranges, started appearing at coastal markets alongside cheap wholesale vegetables. Tourists travelling in the region would have left disappointed with the quality of some of the produce on offer, a situation that wouldn’t have helped grow the quality Tasmanian brand.

In hindsight, the cash-strapped show societies were perhaps not the best groups to run the markets, as they were more interested in collecting funds to repair their showgrounds, than care about running a true farmers’ market and ensuring it reflected the best produce of the region. Ten years on, Burnie is still going strong, the Wynyard and Devonport markets remain, but the original Launceston farmers’ market has folded.

In February this year a new farmers’ market was born in Launceston called Harvest. In contrast to the other farmers’ markets in the north, it was started by a couple of passionate foodies who, on moving to the region, couldn’t believe it was lacking a high quality farmers’ market. They had done their homework (a survey showed a high level of demand from the public), they had reviewed successful market structures and governance, and had lobbied the local council for a suitable venue.  Importantly, they had a long list of producers who were crying out for a suitable farmers’ market. They also had confidence that a genuine farmers ’ markets could be successful – in the south, the highly popular Farm Gate market had been running in Hobart for the past couple of years.

Harvest was launched on Festivale weekend by delicious magazine’s Vali Little and to date, has been a resounding success. Shoppers in Launceston can now access some of the best produce of the north. They have an opportunity to meet the farmers and form a greater connection with their food. Travelling tourists also get the chance to try a whole range of Tasmania’s finest produce in the one spot.

Harvest has been great for the stallholders too: instead of taking home a vehicle of produce, many are selling out and leaving the market with a smile on their face. The confidence of a reliable market has seen existing businesses expand and new businesses created. 

An unexpected benefit has been the chance for producers to get to know other each other and share information and skills. Collaboration among producers is an important step as the food culture in northern Tasmania develops, as food trails begin to emerge, and as the region begins to back its reputation as a food destination.

View our farmers' market schedule here.