Holy Hammy Houdinis!

Welcome to another instalment of “Into the Good Life”!  Since we last updated we have been WWoOFing with a fantastic couple, Didier and Mandy, who breed pigs and cows for sale.  In addition to this they grow stacks of their own food, brew their own beer, make salamis and sausages, keep bees, raise chickens and ducks, and are incredibly “plugged in” to the property goings on in and around Huon Valley.  These guys are the sorts of people that everyone should know.

Chuck at work with pigs following along.

So we have been spending a bit of time fencing.  Ah, fencing.  Those little hammy Houdinis will take any opportunity to push their way under a fence and then the next thing you are chasing a bunch of piglets across a neighbour’s paddock looking like a right idiot.  This means that they need Fort Knox standard fencing, and Cor and I have been spending a bit of time so far getting to grips with this and earning blisters swinging a hammer.

Fencing time!

But we have also been pruning the orchard, helping get honey from the bees, spinning it, setting traps for possums, draining a siphon with an air-block, clipping chicken wings, cleaning chickens, feeding pigs, helping make beer and salamis, plus baking bread and gathering stuff from the garden for dinner.  All that and world-beating sunrises from our caravan (the WWoOF accommodation here) and brilliant meals to boot.

Our reading has moved on also.  I am still making my way through Peter Bane’s “The Permaculture Handbook” but Cor has read “Farm Animals” by Jeanie Peck Whiting and “Storey’s Guide to Keeping Pigs”.  Courtesy of Mandy and Didier’s library I am also reading Joel Salatin’s “Salad Bar Beef” and “A Practical Manual of Beekeeping” by David Cramp.  I will add all these to our ongoing reading list for reference in future.

It's a pig's life.

We also have some rather exciting news.  As previously posted, on my Dad’s suggestion we contacted Matthew Evans via his website.  Dad was reading that he had taken on new ground and thought he might be looking for help.  Matthew will probably be familiar to most Australians for “The Gourmet Farmer” TV series on SBS.  For those in the UK, think of him as Australia’s answer to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  It transpires that he is based here in Tasmania (right up the road in fact), and he and his lovely partner have agreed to have us volunteer with them for the month of April.  They have some fascinating things going on with management-intensive rotational grazing (of the sort used by Joel Salatin) and a bunch of other interesting things and it will be brilliant to help them in whatever way we can.  It is just a wonderful opportunity and we are very lucky to have it.  I have to thank my Dad for the great idea.  The downside is that we have to leave Mandy and Didier much earlier than we would have liked, but I have the feeling we will be staying in close touch with these guys and continuing to work with them whenever we can.  WWoOFer hosts, not just for Christmas.

Not the Hammy Houdinis, but their irresponsible parents!

We have another idea that we are exploring (thanks to Mandy!), namely the possibility of farm-sitting for people who would like a holiday.  We will be examining this as a way to continue our farming education while we are looking for a property when we return from Queensland in July.

Following up on the end of the previous post, we did go see that property that was privately advertised - owned by a lovely Dutch emigre couple with their two young kids.  It was a great plot of about 17 acres but a bit too small and far away from town for what we (potentially) have in mind.

So during the first draft of this blog I heard a squeal go past the caravan, and what do you know, those Houdini pigs were out again.  There is more work to be done for sure!

Stay tuned! 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?

The Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything...

...is 42.  Everyone who has read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy knows this.

But this post is more about what the meaning is for us, or in other words why Cor and I are on this journey in search of "the good life".  We are often asked why we left good careers, a happening place like London (in an Olympic year), and all our friends, to go off travelling the world.  Well, actually that part people understand, but what they don't understand are our plans of buying a smallholding / hobby farm and growing our own food.  That seems just like a crazy amount of work, right?  Why go to all that trouble?  So a post to explain a bit seems in order.

Back in December 2010, Cor and I were back in Australia on holiday driving from Ingham to Albury when we had a nasty car accident on the highway between Mackay and Rockhampton.  We aquaplaned off the road at about 105 - 110km per hour headfirst into a ditch and flipped the car over.  We were lucky, and for the most part walked away mostly unscathed.  I had a broken nose (check out the Disaster post for the issues this is causing now), whiplash, a gashed leg, a busted head plus some soft tissue bruising courtesy of the seatbelt, while Cor had a tiny scratch on her foot.  But more than anything else it was a wake-up call.

If we had come off the road 5 metres earlier we would have hit a massive gum tree and be dead.

There was lots of water on the drive and if there had been just 1 to 2 feet of water in the ditch, we would be dead (upside down, it took us a while to get out).

Take a good look at the photo of the inside of the car.  See that small tree above the driver's seat?  6 inches lower and one of us would be dead.

See what I mean about wake up call??

We owe thanks to our family Justin Burnside and Vayne Monzeglio for coming to our rescue after the accident.

At the time we were living in London going through the motions, but after this we decided that it was time to reassess our lives and live where we could engage in what made us happy, which is being outside.  Whether it is climbing, running, diving, fishing, camping, hiking or skiing, we love being outside.  So we decided to move somewhere we could do that from home, rather than living near work and commuting to what made us happy.  Our friends Tim and Lynne had done this with their new massage business and were an inspiration.

The other thing we love, though, is food.  We love growing it, cooking it and eating it.  We had an allotment and a great garden in London and were largely self-sufficient for fruit and vegetables 8 months of the year.  It had always been our dream to do a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gourmet Farmer, raise our own animals and be self sufficient in food as much as possible, but that was always off in the future in a semi-retired state.

Well, after our wake up call, we aren't putting it off anymore.  Bucket list?  Doing it now.  There is no point being rich but dead and therefore unable to dive Sipadan, or climb El Cap, or ski some insane off-piste.  The time is now.  And as for a smallholding, well why wait to do the things we have always dreamed of?  Some people ask if we have enough money to do it, and as anyone who has followed their dreams will tell you, you can keep chasing "just a bit more" but you will never have enough.  Far better to get out of the comfort zone, and see what happens.

I hope this goes towards explaining why we seem a little crazed, and perhaps inspire a bit of craziness of your own.  Perhaps we'll see you on that dive boat this year or maybe coming up the drive of our little farm one day for a cold cider and a warm welcome.  Palya!