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.

A special breed

X4 and her calf at Mount Gnomon                       Photo: Eliza Wood

It’s been more than two years since our first Traditional Dairy Shorthorn cattle stepped off a truck onto Mount Gnomon Farm at Penguin, in Tasmania’s north-west.

When Warrick and Betty Holmes sold their girls, we were very fortunate to be given the opportunity to buy a portion of the herd.

Since then, the numbers have slowly grown, and we now have almost 20 females on the property.

We have sourced additional heifers from local dairy farmer Symon Jones, who lives just over the mountain from us.

The dairy shorthorns give us so much pleasure – they are stunning to look at, and they are friendly and easy to handle.

You also never know what you’re going to get at calving time. Often the roan cows produce white calves, and the white cows surprise us with roan calves.

Our goal has always been to direct-market their meat and engage consumers in the dairy shorthorn story.

As the first steer grew closer to size, we crossed our fingers that his meat would fulfill our expectations.

We remember that first piece of porterhouse so well. It was buttery, beautifully marbled and had a texture like none of the other breeds we had processed.

The feedback from the customers across the markets in Tasmania was incredibly positive, and that confirmed in our minds that this was the meat breed we wanted to keep.

Supply has been the biggest issue, and we have sourced young steers from Victoria to fatten on our farm to supplement our own production. It means we can provide customers with dairy shorthorn meat more frequently, and continue to promote the breed while our own numbers increase.

The dairy shorthorn in listed on the Ark of Taste – an international list of flavours at risk of extinction. Our meat was a feature of Slow Food Hobart’s Christmas dinner, which Guy attended (for quality control, of course!).

Our future plans include increasing our production of dairy shorthorn meat; milking a handful to supplement our weaned Wessex saddleback pigs; and promoting the dairy shorthorn as a perfect cow for the smallholder.

Next year we will open a rare breeds interpretation centre on the farm, at which we will hold courses on keeping house cows, making cheese and yoghurt, and numerous animal-related topics. The possibilities are endless!

Ten more (slightly restless) sleeps

In the same way a woman goes on maternity leave as her due date looms, Guy and Dane have been coaxing pigs with swollen bellies out of the herd paddock and into their personal farrowing paddocks.

They haven't got a hospital bag or a new nightie, but their pen has a muddy wallow and a shed filled with soft barley straw.

Through luck - and a tiny bit of planning - we've got a number of sows due in the week of our Rare Day Out.

Who wants to see a fresh, silky piggy, or ten?

The muscovy ducks that have been sitting in the barn have surprised us with their timing, and brought out their waddling clutches a little earlier than anticipated. At least the ducklings will be a bit more robust for enthusiastic handling at two weeks old.

The guinea fowl has also got babies. In the past we've had rotten luck with getting the chicks past a week old, but as we check these ones through the binoculars, they seem to have outlived the riskiest time.

Part of that's because the weather's a bit like dry Africa, where the fowls originated.

A year ago, as I looked out this kitchen window, the grass was a brilliant green and there was a paddock of smiling clover ready for the pigs to be moved into.

Today the grass that clutches the dirt is dead and waiting for the autumn break to bring it out of dormancy.

But as the wind blows, and the pigs rotate their bodies in the mud wallows, we are thankful for the  hardy shelter belts that divide the paddocks like green oasis strips.

It's dry - certainly the driest season we've had since we came to Mount Gnomon in 2009. But the old farmers across the north-west says it's been decades since we've had a year like this.

I'd love it to rain before our open day. I'll order a day where the cloud hangs low over the mountain and the water trickles slowly into the ground over hours. And then I'll order warm, overcast weather for the next day, and then the sun can come out and coax delicate shoots from the soil.

Dry weather or green grass, we're starting to get excited about the 2013 Rare Day.

Last year we fell off our hay bales when 650 people turned up to see our patch of piggies.

This year, we've got a few extra attractions, including music from the Doctors Rocksters, artisan wine from Blue Penguin Farm, Lost Pippin Cider, and cheesecakes, platters and smoothies from our friends at Red Cow Dairies.

They'll join Seven Sheds Brewery, enthusiastic coffee-making friends Theresa and Beau, and our team of Mount Gnomon taco and sausage cookers.

Head over to our registration page to let us know how many people you're bringing - you could win a voucher!

And we'll get back to running around like headless farmers as we prepare for your arrival...

Peachy keen

Five years ago Guy set the romantic bar rather high when he sent me a bunch of tropical flowers from the Northern Territory.

He was working at Humpty Doo for 12 months doing sustainable agriculture work, and I was living in my little house in Ulverstone getting up early to present the ABC's Rural Report.

As I relaxed in the bath on Valentine's Day 2009, I was annoyed by knocking on the back door. Very little will get me out of the bath once I'm in, so I ignored it.

The knocking continued. I assumed it was the children down the street, so I called out for them to "go away!". Eventually they gave up, and left me alone.

Later that night I opened the back door to go out to the veggie patch and there was a longish white box on the mat.

When I opened the box it was one of those wonderful moments where, even though you're alone, you grin rather stupidly and make happy exclamations.

There were heliconias, bee hive gingers, birds of paradise - all so bright and almost fake-looking. They were nothing like the salvias and daisies in my yard.

I know you're thinking about the flower miles and how a card would have been sufficient - but just let me enjoy this short moment of reminiscing.

My romantic contribution had been to make a batch of gingerbread biscuits, cut in hearts, and a card with a pumpkin on it. I was really worried the tropical heat would cause the biscuits to go mouldy, so when I asked Guy if he'd collected the office mail that day I had to encourage him rather strongly to make a special trip to town.

Five Valentine's days on, and surprises come in different forms.

"Get off the phone, Guy," I called inside this morning. "I've got a surprise, come and look!"

"Have we got guinea fowl babies?"

"No..."

"Have the Aylesbury ducklings come out?"

"No..."

We were heading for the orchard.

"Peaches!"

A tree that we thought the possums had destroyed is completely covered in beautiful downy, white-skinned peaches.

They're ripe and drippy and I can smell their fragrance as I stick my head between the branches to take photos.

So today we slurped and chewed in the orchard: dirty boots, farm clothes and messy hair, and ate the first fruit from the trees we planted together when we moved to Mount Gnomon.

That's what I call romance.

A slithering dilemma

Tasmanian tiger snake. Photo: Adam Holbrook

I saw a snake in my veggie patch yesterday. It was sunning itself next to the lettuces and sugarsnap peas.

I’d just finished watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse, and as I turned out the door, I saw a flash of black as the snake turned back on itself, and darted for the patch of weedy fat hen.

I made a noise of course; I don’t think I’ve ever responded to a snake encounter silently. It wasn’t a squeal or a scream, more of a “Waaaaah!” in various notes. Cyril had his nose in the grass near where the snake was headed, but looked more concerned about the sound from my mouth.

The first snake of the season makes your heart beat the fastest. Dane’s been tripping over them for weeks now, but Guy and I have had a slow start to the season.

There’s been one hanging around the tool shed, which is next to the washing line. One day he was stretched out straight across the doorway when Dane went looking for some pipe fittings. Another time he wriggled across the walkway and behind the compost. He scared Andrea the bookkeeper so much she believed he was in her car and had to stop part-way home and empty the contents with a hook-handled umbrella.

My mum can’t sleep with striped sheets. Back in the 1970s when Dad owned a wildlife park, he used to have a program on Tasmanian tv for kids. He’d take his snakes into the studio and let them slide around the polished floor, frightening the cameramen. Then he’d take them home to Granton in hessian sacks, get distracted and forget to unpack the car, and Mum would discover them under the seats when she left for the work the next day.

When I was growing up, long after the wildlife park, Dad would get stirred-up with people in our district who would go looking for snakes to kill. The general rule at our farm was that we’d leave the snakes alone unless we, or the dogs, were at risk. A toddler playing with a snake in the backyard was one of Mum’s big fears.

I can remember clearly the prolonged twitching of the first snake I saw killed. I can’t remember how Dad dispatched it – probably the mattock – but the image of it lying next to the rubbish bin flicking back and forth stuck.

Guy’s mum Denise ruined many wooden-handled garden tools protecting her family of five from snakes at the backdoor at Yolla. You’ll notice she now has steel handles.

The family dog Sasha was a great watchdog for snakes: she had a unique bark when she discovered one, but never touched them. Dane lost his beloved Jack Russell, Rusty, a few years ago. He came home to find a dead dog and two dead snakes on the lawn. And then Denise lost Jaffa, another Jack Russell, last season.

The fence at Guy’s Grandma’s place was speckled with holes, made with the shotgun as she blew the snakes off the lawn. She kept shooting them till she finally had to leave the farm in her 80s. There aren’t so many snakes in town, but I bet she shuts the screen door with the same care.

Since we’ve been at Mount Gnomon we’ve had two sows die from snakebite, both of them from rare genetic lines. When we found the first one frothing at the mouth and stumbling across the paddock we thought she’d contracted some sort of exotic disease. We shooed her out of the herd paddock to be quarantined and she collapsed in the laneway. She was struggling to breathe and her mouth and tongue was dark purple.

She died as the vet pulled into the driveway, and then we realised she’d been killed by a snake. The vet confirmed it.

The second one had piglets on her, and the symptoms appeared less severe. She was standing in the paddock puffing, her mouth a bit dry and bloody. The following day she was lying down, and her breathing had worsened. Because she hadn’t died quickly, I was hoping the poison was working its way through her system and she was going to fight it out. But she died, and it took hours, and it was horrible.

Occasionally cattle and horses will die from snakebite, but I think the problem with pigs is their curiosity. They’ve always got their noses to the ground, turning things over and investigating.

So we have a dilemma. We choose to live next to the bush, so we have to accept that sometimes snakes will visit our territory, just as we go exploring in theirs.

It would be impossible to call the snake remover after an encounter. We wouldn’t be able to keep track of the snake, and they’d be searching all over the yard.

It’s illegal to kill them; they’re a threatened species. But it’s a horrific death for an animal that gets bitten. And we worry about Cyril, and friends’ children, and the people who work for us.

So yesterday I put the sprinkler on the veggie patch and hoped the snake wasn’t into cold showers.

But I reckon as soon as he saw me he was gone: through the chicken wire, across the lane, and into the silage stack. Or perhaps he went across the driveway, through the orchard, over the road, and back to the bush. Let’s hope so.