Sprung!

Sorry, there is no new news on the property hunt, but I thought I would put up some photos from the last couple weeks to keep you entertained while we search on.

Spring has sprung down here, and is giving up some pretty sweet light for photography.  Plus there has been some real activity on the work and course front as the Tasmanians shake off their winter slumber and come to life!

Mornings can be frosty

Two of the triplets, doing well

Bob (short for Shish-kabob) is a bit of romantic.  Yes he is doing well!

New pig life at the farm.

We have been milking Elsie!  Great fun, but we always leave a bit for Herbert.

No peace for a cup of tea when Bob is around.

Taking hay to the cattle.

At a Sprout winter market garden course - very interesting!

OK, now today's activities may be a bit confronting for some, but here goes.....

Getting ready to process one of the Fat Pig Farm pigs we took to be killed yesterday.

Ross taking off the shoulder for coppa.

That's right, your tasty breakfast sausage had a face.  See it, accept it, respect it, and if you are up for it, eat it too!

Watching Ross knock out sausage twists - it's hypnotic!

The leg, waiting to be cut into a trotter, hock and a cured ham.

So that is it for now, stay tuned for more adventures to come!

Tough Decisions

I was out walking the property we are looking after for friends on Saturday morning, and to my surprise one of the ewes had lambed.  I say surprise because the instructions we received when we arrived said they weren’t due for a month, plus there was not one, or two, but three lambs, all belonging to one mother.  All three looked like they were trying to feed from mum, and we brought them into the paddock close to the house so that we could keep an eye on them.  The next morning, however, it became apparent that one of the lambs was not strong enough to feed on his own, and that if left on his own would probably die.  He could barely walk a few feet without laying down, and didn’t have the strength to get to the mother and feed while competing with two siblings for her two udders.

Two of the triplets

We had a tough decision to make.  Learn to bottle feed him, with all the work required in doing it every 4 hours, or leave him to die.  If it was our animal, we would probably have left it to die, as the genetics of the natural survivors are stronger, and the cost of sheep-milk replacer doesn’t really justify it ($60 for the powder, $70 to actually buy a lamb).  Plus the owners of the farm said they were not going to be upset if he died.

Tough decision time for this guy

We decided to bottle feed him.  This isn’t our farm and that is not our animal.  Our job isn’t to make the decision whether to let it die, it is to do our utmost to ensure every single animal is alive when they get back, regardless of how much work is required.  It is our responsibility, nothing less.

Getting the lamb used to drinking from the bottle

And the little bastard has responded marvellously.  Some borrowed goat colostrum from Matthew next door (sheep can digest it), fed every 4 hours over Sunday and Monday, and the little guy was running about the house this morning, sprawling all over like Thumper on ice (apparently wooden floors aren’t that grippy for cloven feet).

We gave him a feed in the morning, and then put him in the paddock with mum so he can hang with his siblings.  We didn’t expect the ewe to take him back, and she was knocking him around whenever he tried to follow his instincts and feed from her.  But she must have caved at some point, because we came back in the afternoon and wouldn’t you know it, there he is, drinking from his mum, like nothing at all had happened.  He was a different lamb to the one we brought in on Sunday, running around and playing with the other two.  After a bit more watching it seemed like the ewe wouldn’t always let him feed, so we decided to keep up the bottle feeding.

One of the lambs may still die (they will always grow slower than a single lamb), but it won’t be because we didn’t try to keep them alive.

The other tough decision surrounds the house/land hunt.  So many options, and so many possibilities.  We don’t know what business we would want to setup, which means that we are trying to buy a place that gives us the greatest number of possible businesses.  So do we take a place with an established orchard with some sheds that requires tree removal to create pasture and a house-site, or a blank-slate of pasture with a few sheds that is an hour from Hobart?

Each of these would lend themselves to a great business: the orchard property could support pigs, farmstays and farm gate sales; the blank slate could run pastured beef and poultry and farmstays.  But which would be better?  As I said, tough decisions…..

Cor and the agent walking around the orchard property

Just part of the orchard

The Buff Orpington rooster where we are farm sitting

And finally, a Muscovy drake, a great duck for eating

Ready?

Well we have finished our latest WWoOFing assignment here in Tassie.  And the conclusion?  We are ready.  We may not know everything we need to know, but we know enough to get started, and we know lots of people to call on when we need help.  Our enthusiasm to get started on our own farm is stronger than ever, and the best way for us to learn this stuff is to just get going.

Ready for this everyday!

Ready to go head-to-head with wily animals!

So what are we doing?  We are leaving.

That’s right, tonight we are on the ferry to Melbourne and then over the course of a couple of weeks driving up to North Queensland.  It is time for my sinus surgery.  The doctor is going to drain them and hopefully in a couple of weeks following do the procedure to straighten them out.  It has been a long couple of years living with this and it is going to be great to get to a point where it is all behind me.

But on the flip side, it is a bit sad.  We have great friends down here now and we are sad to be saying goodbye, even if it is only for 6 – 8 weeks.  We really can’t wait to get back to find that place of our own.  We have seen a couple of promising options which we will come back to in July and look at more closely.  We didn’t want to rush the fence before we went away as we don’t know how long all the surgery and stuff will take.

One highlight of the past month was doing a road trip up to Marrawah in the north west with Sadie to buy a couple of cows.  It was a long couple of days driving but it was great to meet dairy farmers Brian and Ros and the Mount Gnomon crew, Guy, Eliza and Dane.  More great people who are happy to share their know-how.

Brian explaining the kelp drying process at Marrawah

The beautiful Guernsey cow we brought back, 880.  I think the name Susan is nicer....

Cor with Susan and 413, the two new dairy cows I picked up with Sadie.

So that is it from Radio Tassie for now, we will keep you all posted on our trip north and the fun and games of my medical dramas.

We are ready!

Moon-set over Stanley

Generous Spirits

I know that as diary-keeper of our journey to “the good life” I have been a bit slack of late.  It hasn’t been a help that the internet in rural Tassie is so dire I can’t just log on and update the blog.    On this note, don’t believe anything you hear about the rollout of the much-touted National Broadband Network (NBN).  It’s not only late but it doesn’t cover most people outside of town and is expensive to connect to even if you can get it.  Be warned – if you are in a rural area don’t expect it to improve your coverage!

So what is happening with us?  Let me explain….. no, is too much, let me sum up.

We have finished working with Matthew and Sadie for now, having had a great time, worked hard, shared fantastic food and wine, and learned a lot.  They were both incredibly generous with their knowledge and time and we really appreciate it.  We feel very lucky considering Matthew and Sadie don’t often have the time and resources to have WWoOFers.  And to meet wonderfully generous people through them like Phil and Michelle and Jesse and Dwayne and Joan was humbling.

Thank you to Dwayne and Joan for taking us fishing and being such good neighbours, and thanks for Phil for showing us the way of Fat Pig Farm.

Thanks to Sadie for the stylish red work gloves..... I know, I am a wuss.

So we have now left the cold of the pickers’ hut, and are WWoOFing in relative luxury in Crabtree with Bronte and Jenny and their son Luke.  Bronte and Jenny have over 100 acres, a couple of pigs and some chickens, but interestingly they also have turkeys, rabbits and a meat goat herd.

We have come at a comparatively quiet time of the year, the pigs have been slaughtered, the goat herd has already been culled to winter stocking levels, so there isn’t much to do in relation to the animals.  Despite this, we may be involved in another rabbit and turkey cull.

Heavy going to clear the old fences

There has been a goodly share of old fence removal to do, and that has taken up most of our first week, especially given we are now old hands at using the starpicket-remover.  We have also been taking care of the feeding of the animals, plus treating any goats that have developed sore feet from the damp ground.  Coming up we have some goat shelter work to do, gates to renovate, trees to plant, bird fencing to sort, and a whole host of other tasks.

Burning out a stump with Luke calls for a manly pose.

Quite an odd sight to see looking out the bathroom window in the morning....

It is getting hard to keep a log of what we are picking up, because every day holds a new skill or bit of knowledge that we are “learning by doing”.  And what I am really learning is just how valuable this practical experience is.  Seeing how different people tackle their problems and what they prioritise gives us lots of food for thought.  Coreen and I are constantly discussing the things we would like to try, and chatting about where we would take the same approach as people we have met, and where our needs and approach would differ.

The Great House Hunt…..

So where are we on the search for property?  Well we still have quite a bit of our cash in pounds, so the recent weakening in the Aussie dollar and RBA’s indication of possible interest rate cuts is helping us turn our hard-earned British pounds into more real-estate on the old map of Tassie.  We have been looking at land coming up for sale, and there are a couple of promising areas that we are going to look more closely at this week.  We aren’t in a rush.  We want to get the right block of land, and if this has to wait until July, August or November then so be it.  And when we do get our land, we are reconciled to grabbing a caravan/cabin/storage container for temporary accommodation until we can build our own Bonnie Doon.

I previously mentioned the consequences of searching for a bigger block and the impact of that on our budget.  We are now looking to pay up to $300K for fifty-plus acres, then $200K for our own house (with us managing and doing as much of the build ourselves as we can).  This is more than our original budget where we were looking at 20 acres and some sort of existing house for $300K-$400K. While the expanded amount of land will allow us to develop whatever farm business we want to do, the increased financial burden will also leave us less cash to deal with any problems that arise.  Keep your fingers crossed for us!

That is where we are at the moment, we will keep you updated (as updated as we can with this god-cursed-internet anyway) on how we progress.

We hope you are all doing great, until next time, a toast to the good life…..

"The Gourmet Farmer" meets "The Apprentice"

We have been working with Matthew (the Gourmet Farmer) and Sadie at both their home farm and their new farm for two weeks.  As with all our volunteer work we have learned a lot.  There have been challenges, like helping host 16 corporate people from SBS for a 4-course lunch at the farm, splitting a few tonnes of firewood (if you saw the episode where they built the smoker, we split the parts of that tree they didn’t turn into planks), and holding an ewe that was trying to escape the yard while we were trying to get her onto a trailer.

Our accommodations in the "pickers hut"

And despite my belief to the contrary, getting up on those cold mornings have been challenging.  We are staying in an uninsulated, unpowered, unplumbed and unheated pickers hut, and it has made for interesting night time discussions along the lines of:

“Is it too cold to get up and go pee?”

“I don’t know, how much do you need to go?”

“Quite a bit, I shouldn’t have had that cup of tea after 9pm.”

“You know that always makes you need to pee in the middle of the night.”

“Yes but it isn’t always this cold!”

And this goes on until the person caves and goes outside to pee.  OK, who am I kidding?  Until I go outside and pee.

But it has been great as well.  We have learned a lot about rare breed pigs, about milking cows, and about rotational grazing (management intensive grazing using electric fences that are moved regularly).

Oh yes, and we have been taking these cute little guys off to the abattoir too

And Chuck the Truck is being used for what he was meant for.  Towing trailers, lugging timber, four-wheel driving across paddocks, carrying fertiliser and straw.  And in one case towing a porta-loo! Which I certainly never anticipated using him for, but he is like Chuck Norris in Walker Texas Ranger, whenever people need him he is there to help.

Meeting some of the people who Matthew works with has been one of the best things that we have experienced.  He has a great network of people and they all have a unique energy and approach to life.  We are very lucky to get to meet some of them, and even more lucky to work with them.

With a work environment like this, it's no wonder we want to be farmers!

Now, onto the property situation.  We started looking in earnest this week.  We have revised our previous plans somewhat.  First, the size.  You see, quite a few people we have met have started with 10 to 20 acres and then had to buy additional land to accommodate new plans when livestock come onto the scene.  The fact is that 10 acres, after putting a house, a garden, some fruit trees, a dam or two and a shed doesn’t leave much space for grazing animals.  Trying to put half a dozen cows or pigs onto the remaining space creates an overgrazing situation and a horrible mess in winter.  So we have upped our planned area to 50 acres, and are struggling slightly with the consequences of this on our initial property budget.  We will keep you posted on how this works out.

Secondly, the house.  We were talking about getting a place with an existing house on it, but this feature appears to add at least $200K to the price of any property.  The problem is that no house we have seen is actually up to scratch in terms of design or insulation.  Most are weatherboard places built in the wrong part of the block with no scope for grey water reclamation or solar energy utilisation.  To retrofit one of these houses even slightly would add significant additional cost and negate the usefulness of paying that $200K premium in the first place.  It would therefore be much better to build a new passive solar, straw bale, double glazed house, despite the significant grief that this would cause us.  And by grief I mean having nowhere to live in addition to the much trickier matter of dealing with Tassie tradies.  Cue a number of late-night conversations regarding whether Cor would be prepared to live in a caravan on a building site or, as Matthew is pushing, a converted shipping container.  This chat is normally over before the peeing conversation starts.

Our source of warmth..... when we can wait for it to get going!

And finally, we have had the surreal experience of watching an episode of the Gourmet Farmer sitting on the couch with the Gourmet Farmer.  Very odd indeed, kind of like turning on the director’s commentary feature while watching a DVD, except this one is brilliantly interactive.

So that is where we are.  We will be back in Queensland in June for my sinus surgery and a biopsy of my cheekbone, but in the meantime we have another couple of weeks of work here, then onto another farm for more learning for May.

Until next time, dream of the Good Life!

The mornings that make it all worthwhile

A year after it began, it begins again.

And so it begins.  We are going to another WWoOF placement tonight.  This one is will go until the weekend after Easter, when we will start another one a little closer to where we want to look for a place of our own.

So what are we trying to find out?

1.  Is the average annual rainfall here in Huonville of 755mm (30 inches) enough for pasture and vegetable production?

2.  What water retention methods need to be practiced to make it work?

3.  Is the graph below a true picture of normal temperature variations?

4.  Are these temps warm enough to grow the varieties of fruit and vegetables that we want to grow?

5.  What are council rates like (though at first glance for the type of property we are looking at I think we will be hit up for $1500 - $2000 per annum)?

These are just a few of our questions.  We will fill you in on our answers.  Plus of course we want to learn as much as we can about farming techniques, the Huon Valley community and the potential to develop commercially-successful regenerative agriculture in the area.

As an aside we also popped into Matthew Evans' (of the Gourmet Farmer TV show) shop in Hobart.  We have also reached out to him in relation to volunteering at his operation, he has expanded his interests dramatically and sounds like he could use some help.  It seems according to his blog he has had some WWoOF- type help in the past and we could certainly use his knowledge.  Especially as he has run into problems with regulation surrounding small scale food production such as labelling rules, nutrition panels and the like.

He is appearing at the Writer's Festival in Hobart this Saturday, and if we weren't planning to be working we would pop in to hit him up for some info.  C'est la vie, some other time perhaps.

One other little bit of exciting news, we answered an ad in a local cafe for a property for sale not far from here and we are going to check it out on Thursday.  There seems to be quite a bit available around here but we didn't want to start dealing with real estate agents just yet.  As our internet access promises to be sporadic for the next couple weeks it may be hard to keep people posted on what we find out, but we will try.

Wish us luck!  Palya!

The Crazy Plan

I hope everyone had great Christmas and New Years’ celebrations, and that now you are excited about what 2013 holds!  Every day is precious, make the most of it.

OK, now something that has been on my mind for a while (forgive the word-heavy post!).  I know we have set up this blog ostensibly as a place to talk about our journey to find our own corner of the world to grow our own food, and we haven't really been talking about it here.  But that doesn't mean that we aren't thinking about it.  And I mean a lot!

Plus, we haven't really told many people what we are planning to do.  Why?  Mainly because they will almost certainly think we are crazy for chucking a couple of well-paid 9 to 5 careers in for this madcap notion of growing our own food with any “real” work fitting in around this.  But then the people who read this blog have read the "why" in my Meaning of Life post earlier in 2012, so now I am going to put some of our ideas out there.

Here is the crazy plan:

1.  Buy a property with the qualities listed below.

2.  Get cracking growing our own food, focusing on heritage and heirloom varieties for a focus on the best taste (we are all about great-tasting food).

3.  Year one - chickens, a couple of weaner pigs and my personal challenge: bees.  Have a crack at making cider/perries with our first fruit harvest.  Start a farmer's market stall selling any surplus produce we don't barter away.

4.  Year two - a goat for milk, another couple of pigs, plus a beef steer.  Mead-making anyone?

5.  Year three - ducks, a sow that we will use for breeding, with a couple of pigs, another beef steer, and some lambs.

6.  Year four - sheep, and perhaps a heifer for milk and breeding (depending on how we go with the goat!)

7.  Year five - commence farmstay.  Actually we may start this sooner as we get going and need extra hands but growing enough food will be the focus.

We will supplement our food as much as we can with whatever we can get for free from nature - fish, venison, rabbit, duck, goose etc.

It is a very rough plan at the moment, and we have no idea whether we have enough cash to actually last that long, or whether we can make enough at farmer's markets to pay the bills that are inevitably going to arrive.  As an accountant I would do a budget, but I have no notion as to what things are going to cost, so it won't be that useful!

So, what do we want in a property?  We have quite a list worked up, and each point has been the result of much discussion.

In no particular order we want:

- lots of space.  We don't want to be able to see our neighbours and we need enough land to grow our fruit and vegies plus enough pasture for animals.

- a mix of native bush and pasture.  We want to have some bush that is suited for camping and generally giving the native fauna a place to live.

- our own water supply.  We know that water is precious, so a creek and a dam or two, or maybe a spring, would be ideal to ensure we can keep our garden growing and putting food on the table.

- established orchard.  It takes a long time to get fruit trees up to full productivity so an apple and pear orchard, with other fruit trees, already established, is a must.

- north-facing block.  Plants like sun.  We like sun.  Enough said.  Oh, and keep in mind we are talking the southern hemisphere here people!

- a house, of no particular quality.  We would like to build our own house.  I have a lot of ideas in mind for a very energy-efficient house that is incredibly cheap to run and is very self-sustaining.  But before we can build it we need somewhere to live, and we will also need a house or cottage for the farmstay business component of our plan.

- outbuildings.  No real rocket science to this one, if there is already a chicken coop that is one less thing for us to build, plus we will need somewhere for the vehicles.

- in the right area.  This should really be number one.  We need a place that is in an area where people are either doing something similar or have experience at doing it.  We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we want to use other people's knowledge as best as we can on our journey and also not try to do everything.  Why try to get into making goat's cheese if the family down the road are making award-winning stuff that they are happy to trade for some pork products?  Plus we need an outlet for surplus produce.  We need a town with a farmer's market or something similar within reasonable distance to allow us to shift all those things that you suddenly have a glut of. And we can't be an excessive distance from an airport.  When we progress to the aforementioned stage two this will be more important.

- reduced chance of bushfires.  We aren't spending years building a place and a business up to support us and then having it go up in smoke in 30 minutes and have to start from scratch when we are older and less able to do the hard physical labour.  This may be hard but we will be looking for properties with plans in place to manage this risk.

So that is it, pretty demanding I know but we can trade a few things about, and we will probably end up adding to this list.

I don't know where in here we would have time for anything like building a house, but we will see how it pans out.  We know that we are not really going to get vacations in the first few years, hence the massive trip now, but we have a few ideas for how we can get holidays once things are ticking along and I'll flesh these out in another post.

So what do you think?  Are we crazy?  What would you suggest we change or plan differently?  Would you pay to come stay on our farm and eat our quality food, and maybe help out around the farm if you feel so inclined?