Old MacDonald's Farm.... in progress.

So as usual when we update our blog, lots has been happening.  However, to avoid boring you, there are two ways to read today’s blog.  Actually, there are always two ways to read it.  You can skim the pictures and get a general picture of what we have been up to and a recent day in our lives, or you can read the boring prose.  I know which one I would do if I were you…. but then maybe you haven’t had your monthly dose of “farming life” and need to top up!

So we have been busy fitting into Geeveston life.  We have had sushi at the famous Masaaki’s (who it turns out used to live in the house we are renting), we have made friends with our neighbours and the people behind the wonderful Geeveston Roadhouse, James and Samara, we went to a charity bingo night at the local services club (which I have joined) for young Will, watched a woodchopping championship, and went to the Cygnet release of Matthew Evan’s latest book.

Sadie and I submitted the egg petition to Parliament.  The response from the politicians was all very placatory, however the draft legislation that has since been released is nothing short of nonsense.  I guess it will take a pelting of rotten eggs to wake these pencil pushers up, so stay tuned for my next blog post from prison.

On the farm front when last we spoke we had 14 Wiltshire horn sheep.  Well Matthew put us in touch with a lady who was giving away 8 Wiltshires, including a ram.  Comedy ensued getting them in the trailer, however lucky for us there was no camera crew around.  They settled in quickly and we thought we were all done on the sheep front.  Until we spoke to our neighbour.  He has been grazing his 55 sheep in our orchard for the past few years and we thought that after we took it over he would simply send them to the saleyard and keep a few as “lawnmowers”.  Instead his response was to offer them all to us!  The price?  All he wants is for us to give him a couple lambs every Christmas.  Not a bad deal, but now we have 22 Wilties, 55 mixed breed sheep, and Bob, who probably can’t believe the amount of company he has now.  Do you like how I said that?  Almost as if we didn’t spend the morning with 5 people running about the orchard like idiots trying the herd the 55 into the same paddock as the Wilties, and failing.  The job is done now (with lots of pratfalls and swearing), we will have a few of them butchered this week so we will have a fully stocked freezer come Christmas.

In a vain effort to get our grass growth under control, we also got 5 cows.  Despite our hankering for hairy Highland cows, Matthew and Sadie had 5 pregnant “lowline” Angus cows that they wanted to move on as part of their ambition to move towards a more dairy-focused herd, and that made the decision-making process easy for us.  As an added bonus they are trained to electric wire for strip grazing and they now have settled into a routine of daily morning moves to a fresh salad bar.

One of the cows flew over the fence the first night, we still don't know how...

But the new animals don’t stop there!!  We have also agreed to be the retirement site of choice for a couple of Matthew and Sadie’s old Wessex Saddleback pigs, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell.  We hope to get a litter or two from them while they spend their later years exploring and rooting up part of the old orchard.  They have already caught the imagination of both the neighbours and the local kids, as pigs are wont to do.

We also bought 5 Muscovy ducks from a friend up the highway, 4 girls and a drake.  They have settled on our dam and are coming up every morning for their grain breakfast.  To add to our little chick flock we also bought half a dozen Plymouth Rock chicks from Ross on Bruny Island, taking us up to 11 little cheepers who now running about a little fenced area at the farm.

And finally, we are now open for WWoOFers of our own!  We have joined WWoOF and are hoping to have an extra couple pairs of hands helping us out and sharing our great food as soon as we can.  Want to volunteer?  Your room is ready, step this way…

Luxury indeed!

OK, now that that is all over, here is a recent day in our life on Our Mates’ Farm.

Open up the chicken house

Walk the dog

Feed the pigs

Feed the ducks

Check on the vegetable garden

Top up the water for the cows

Hook up new electric fence

Move the ladies onto the new salad bar

Brushcut a line for sheep electric mesh

Move them in

 

Phew, time for a cuppa and morning tea

Some of Cor's home-baked treats

 

Back to work: fixing irrigation, cleaning off water shoots and thinning some apples

But we do get some time to go fishing occasionally!

Until you arrive to take possession of our guest room, stay tuned for more of the Good Life!

Hail to the peeps!

Hi all, Coreen here.  We’ve been a bit remiss at keeping you all up-to-date.  Sorry about that.  It really has been getting exponentially busier in our lives as we came closer to completion and then finally completed the purchase of Our Mates’ Farm.  Not just with the (extra)ordinary business of buying a farm, but we’ve been through a learning curve with our increasing livestock, our social media identity is spreading, and Matt has officially come out as a “Geeveston orchardist”.

We experienced a circle of life loop at the farm.  From having to fish out a poor drowned wallaby from the lake and burying it, to releasing a possum formerly resident in the house roofspace, to little chicks hatching out in the incubator to some pretty excited clucking by us (yes, we were clucking), to the trauma of finding one of them dead in the brooder box later that night.

  

 Education never ends, there’s always something new to learn, whether it’s great advice from a neighbour and mentor, or a more formal course we’ve signed up for.  I went to a three workshop series run by Sprout Tasmania on marketing & social media which was great, lots to think about for our own business and having met some really passionate, savvy people.  Matt had a hot time at his Intro to Welding course run by LINC Tasmania, which covered both theory and some practical welding experience.  He was disappointed that the all-day practical course was cancelled the following weekend, but will try and follow it up at a later date.

So that was Cor’s contribution to our blog – she is now off to make cheese!

We have been busily preparing our apples for our first crop.  We purchased a second hand sprayer and have been spraying approximately 3 hectares (out of our 18) with organic chemicals to reduce the incidence of powdery mildew and apple scab or black spot.  It is important to us to use organic materials, even if we aren’t necessarily certified as such.  We want every visitor to our farm to be able to walk into every corner and see nothing that would make them unhappy to buy our produce.  Using organic chemicals still requires safety gear, but they don’t make me worry about going sterile from their use!

The sprayer at work.  Check out that grass eh?

Now you all know we have Bob the lamb, and Princess the dog, but we have been making plans for more animals.  We have bought 14 purebred Wiltshire Horn sheep.  The grass is growing so fast now that on a quiet sunny day you can almost hear it, and in some places there is a danger of losing the dog, even though she is growing like a weed herself.  So we need something to get it down, and the first solution out of the gate are some sheep that we hope to strip graze with mobile electric fences.  Next step: cows!

Some of the Wiltshire horn sheep we bought.  They are lost in the grass!

The eggs also hatched in the incubator.  We started with two dozen eggs, and only had nine hatch.  Unfortunately we lost a couple in the first couple of days, and two seem to have leg issues from the incubation.  The room the incubator was in really fluctuated in temperature a lot and this seems to have affected both our success rate and the chicks themselves.  That said, we now appear to have five healthy little chicks, and two in need of physio.  Construction on their home begins soon….

The survivors!

When a physio and an OT came to visit, we put them work correcting chick gait with rubber bands....

We have had our first house guests!  Cor’s brother flew in for a night’s stay during a conference in Hobart, and I took my Belgian cousins for a four day whirlwind tour of the East coast of Tassie before coming back here for a night.  Kudos to Cor for walking to the farm in this time (35 minutes) and doing so much while I was away.  We also had Rod and Karen pop in for a day of recuperation post the Cradle Mountain track.  Lucky for them it was raining so we didn’t put them to (real) work.  Instead as a physio and OT they were perfect candidates to implement our corrective procedure for our splay-legged chicks!

Casey and I at 6 in the morning before I drove him back to Hobart for his breakfast meeting!

Mia and Luc at Port Arthur

Mia and Luc at Wineglass Bay (such a goofy shot - I had to share it!)

Us and Rod (see chick physio photo for Karen!)

In addition to working our own farm, I have been carefully crafting more “work” for myself.  You see, in a moment of frustration I started a petition regarding the new egg-stamping rules that are coming for Tasmania.  We want to sell eggs at the farmgate of our new farm and these proposed rules were going to make it uneconomic to do so.  There have been newspaper articles (in which they call me a “Geeveston Orchardist”!!), radio interviews, and 7,000 signatures so far.  I have to say that I am a bit uncomfortable as an “activist”.  They were always the most boring people at a party, just a little too earnest for my liking, and normally given a wide berth.  It would seem that I have now joined their ranks but I will at least try to talk about something else!  We are due to present the petition this week so if you want to sign up or share it (and haven’t already), it is here: https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/bryan-green-minister-for-primary-industries-and-water-exempt-small-egg-producers-from-the-new-egg-regulations

So that is my long-winded explanation as to why we haven’t been posting much.  Hope it wasn’t too boring, there has been lots to catch up on!  Until we next time, if we haven't seen you we miss you all, and hope to see you down on Our Mates’ Farm.

I know, exhausting right?

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!