I decided that I would reactivate this blog and damn the surveillance team *waves gaily across the ether* since this is public domain stuff. it’s just weird to see your words in an unexpected context, you know… so, I logged into the backyard after a long hiatus and found this old post, which i abandoned halfway through, but was a honor roll of thanks to my special friends and i have many many photos to post as well, which i will slowly but surely sort through and contextualize in some kind of unreliable chronology!
so… this bit is in the past…
I’ve had a despondent season or two in the garden, which i have not failed to mention more than once in this here blog. Rabbits are a never ending problem, and the aforementioned rains wreaked havoc on newly planted seeds and seedlings. Fruition has been slow or absent due to lack of sun. It’s disheartening work sometimes, and every now and again managing the gardens alone seems too much and I grow dormant along with the plants. Recently Bek and Jax and I made a plan to create time for community gardening to take the burden of any single one of us, which i am grateful for. In addition I’ve had a never ending stream of visitors, farm stayers and wwoofers all willing to contribute to the productivity and general well being of the farm, and this has resulted in an overhaul of the vegetable beds which mean they are now manageable, viable and are beginning a cycle of newfound productivity, I do believe.
[aside: to the present day I have failed my gardens in this respect, but once we move to the present day, in this narrative, you will see that things are looking up!!!]
The delightful Sarah, a frequent farmstayer and loyal friend, built singlehandedly a raised garden bed, using remnant sleepers from a recycled timber store in Lismore. It is filled now with becoming-soil, made in the soil lasagne method, layers of of cowshit, chook pen bedding, garden prunings, cardboard and paper, grass clippings, vacuum cleaner dust, food scraps and straw. the process of mulching takes some time, but i predict a wildly dynamic bed of nutrition for baby foodstuffs to nestle in when the time comes.

raised bed by sarah, making soil lasagne
[indeed the soil is ahhhh mazing! - the rabbits, however, still exist, and anything nestled in that lovely soil lasted, oh, about … um… overnight *sigh*. again, however, there are changes afoot!]
Then came Jan and Kaja, the Estonians, my blonde wwooffer angels who dug, mulched, rabbit proofed, weeded, planted, cared for animals and loved the farm with all their hearts while i took a break from life and hitchhiked to Alice Springs and back. I have been eating the product of their labors for nights and nights now. fresh broccoli snapped from the stalk and steamed. pepper, perhaps, as an accessory. lemon maybe, or the smallest dob of butter. one doesn’t want to overdress fresh broccoli. I watch anxiously as small heads form on the cauliflowers, all compact and protected in their tight parcel of outer leaves. Green caterpillars want these babies as much as I do, and i hope their snowy growth will outrun the caterpillar hunger.

cauliflower harvest - there are more!
mulberry season - we harvested buckets of these daily!

bek’s jam!

kaja and me, choosing our plantings

jan in the garden

garden with rabbit proof fence v.1.0. design modifications have been made.
current version of rabbit proof fencing will be seen on this blog soon…

Some photos from my road trip (hitching) to Alice Springs through the middle,
with Pike, my Canadian friend
Ernie’s big rig - i have a fascination for these huge rigs, these rolling signifiers each
with their own very specific and ornate heiroglyphics, truck codification of
identification and hierarchy. i love the punched metal casings that say "Western" or
"Mack" or "Hino"…
but this is probably another blogworth topic "the textuality of bigrigs" or some such!

pike on a hill of tailings, or mullock, at sunrise, with a fence
i became enamored of, for it’s purposelessness, it’s angles, it’s photogenic nature…
erldunda sunrise, on the way to uluru
Urban retreaters see the farm as a green respite from asphalt and concrete, and are always eager to get muddy, filthy and prickly. Do a shitload of work and then eat a hearty eggy breakfast and wash it down with a glass of Rosie milk. Lucky, since milk and eggs are the 2 most consistent things the farm produces. Urban retreaters love to gingerly pat the cows. Esther is a welcome return farmstayer and friend from Melbourne who I am in awe of for her unparalleled skills in city farming, greening inner urban environments, geurilla water harvesting and other such wonderful acts of participation in creating livable and sustainable environments. She’s an amazing cook, and writes a blog dedicated to all things food (i think she’s in my blogroll, and even if she hasn’t made a post for a while, her archives are amazing…)

esther with matilda, the closest thing to a "pet chook" we have…
tho a reluctant model…

esther rolling around in wanton abandon on a bed of prunings
from the reed bed wastewater system … mmmmm … sewage pinup?!
This was the end of my attenuated post… I think the gist of the post was that I really wanted to thank visitors who have contributed in significant ways to making this small system work, and as they reached in, i reached out, and the exchange has been mutual and there have been learnings, and all this ripples out into the world.
[time passes]
my father died in this pause………………..
So there have been some major changes.
Firstly, I will catalog the animals we now have on the farm:
2 cows, both in calf! and ready to calve i think in about a month! (i am somewhat freaked out by this, for various reasons)
4 geese, beautiful creatures, if a bit noisy and disinclined to stay in the orchard, where they are supposed to be doing good works!
0 ducks! (long story) I should be picking up a trio of khaki campbell’s in about a week. this is exciting!
5 chooks (sadly depleted flock). I am looking forward to replenishing supplies with australorps and barnevelders
I have moved out of the ‘main house’, the farmhouse, where i held court, all queen like, for some years! After the last tenants moved out I lived there by myself for some months, but it’s a big house and i didn’t like living in such a big space all alone and i couldn’t afford the entire rent and it’s difficult to get people to rent just a *room* rather than a whole house… they don’t see the value in that, the lifestyle commitment i guess, that they are entering into…
so i offered the whole farmhouse for rent and moved across to the dwelling jax used to live in, the converted dairy bails, which i really love. it’s a gorgeous space. rustic, open plan, unfinished on the inside, raw wood and cathedral roofline, the ceiling silver with insulation, an old kookaburra stove in the kitchen. all muted greens of old enamel and raw wood and red floors. i like it because it makes me feel like i can keep a handle on the way i function in the world, the space i take up in the world, the very real connection i have with the resources i use and the waste i produce. I have an outdoor shower and bath and a compost toilet. the great outdoors is my pissoir and i also use my piss to water the plants and add nutrients to the compost. my compost toilet is a bucket style, which means i have to get up close and intimate with the shit when i empty the bucket into a composting receptacle. i do not hate this process. it makes all the abject invisible (flushed away) very real.
sunny corner in my new dwelling
early kooka
looking through the arched window out into the cattle yard and run
… so the most fabulous people have moved into the main farmhouse. chuckie and margaret. gorgeous grrls. chuckie is an old friend from the city. they are amazing and wonderful. excited by our project of communal living. it’s lovey to feel a sense of shared purpose and dedication to the ideas of sustainability and self sufficiency. I’m also very happy to be feeling held in the security of what feels like a farm family ethos, where there is a commitment and a dedication to an ongoing project of living and working together. it feels very supported. of course bek, the lovely bek, is still living in the cottage.
bek took this beautiful photo of the flowering cactus in the cottage garden. beautiful, no?
it was margaret’s birthday shortly after they moved into the farmhouse,
and chuckie and margaret created a gorgeous farm lunch table outdoors for the occasion…
margaret, who lives with chuckie (arm visible) in the farmhouse,
at the birthday table under the palms
There are so many stories in between these lines and paragraphs, and it’s hard to fill in the gaps and silences, the quantum leaps from there to here… i think i will need to do some dedicated posts. i need to post about the gardens, about the cows, about the poultry… i think it would be best if you, my farmfans, would let me know what you would like to hear about. rosie stories? produce and baking exploits? projects? water harvesting? building? mini pigs?
I’m very happy to be wandering around taking stock of what’s in mybackyard again. I hope you enjoy the time out too.
much green love, ms. v xxx