In my previous post I mentioned that there were some changes happening at Matiatia, so I’ll try to bring you up to speed…

For those who came late in the day to this blog, brief backgrounder. Matiatia (formerly Mateatea) is this here farm where we live and do farm things and blog. Matiatia is a small holding 5 acre permaculture farm and guest facility owned by my friend Michael. I live here currently with my grrl Charlene.We have been living here for about 1 year, and I have been managing the guest facility during that time. For the full story see here.

We have a fairly fluid family/community life going on here, with lots of people coming and going. We like it like this. Our friend Neha is here from San Francisco at the moment. She will stay for a month. You can check her out at Ekphrastic Feminarca.

So… 

Recently, Michael and I decided to call it a day with the business. It’s no money maker and it’s wierd to have people who aren’t friends or family in your space all the time. It’s a psychic drain., on a permanent basis. They’re always lovely people, really interesting, aren’t your usual Byron tourist fodder, have eco interests often and so on. Still, I feel constrained by their presence.

So on February 11th, in just a few days, the business will close. The last guests are currently in the cottage and the last turnaround has been done. Then it will be just family at Matiatia and that is how it should be.

We (the farm family) will rent out the whole property, including the cottage (formerly guest house) and the bails, which is a renovated space which was formerly the original dairy. It’s a great space, self contained with the outdoor bathroom, but very, um… rustic living. It is a great space. I love the bails.

And so we are expanding, our small family, the core of which has been Charlene and I, this small family in which dogs outnumber humans, will be expanding our number to 5 and occasionally 6.

Deb, frequent commenter on the backyard, our other limb, and founder of the Bring Tippi Home Front will be coming back from the UK at the end of February and taking up residence in her old room, reuniting with her dog Bucky and resuming house duties .

 
Deb (left) and Charlene (right) photo by tom anthonisz

In the cottage our Zhane,special friend, farmboy and tree changer from the Big Smoke (that’s Sydney…) will be living. She will come to Matiatia to be herself and paint and stretch her wings (which are usually hidden beneath her clothes).

Zhane outside the toilets of the Lismore Showgrounds looking cruisy

In the bails will be Jax, a local writer who will write!

Neha will make regular visits in preparation (we hope) for eventually moving out here permanently.

neha on the verandah

In other exciting news, I am about to become farm housewife to a dairy farmer! Yes, Charlene just scored herself a job on a local BIODYNAMIC (!) dairy farm. This couldn’t be more perfect for her. She loves cows, and they are a sustainable, organic, eco friendly, animal friendly ethical family business. They loved Charlene and are prepared to fully train her based on her passion for the job. This is great news for a family that has been living a subsitence level existence for quite a while now.

I broke the mower, perhaps not unfixably but i have to say that mower was everything to me. That mower was my life and today I felt that I could mow forever. I do feel remarkably tired at this juncture, however, and, while I am sure there was more to say, many more important tidbits of information to pass on, I am simply too tired.  

Some words and some pictures should suffice for the day.

Love country style Vxx 

We’ve been having a helluva a time with our internet services lately… hence offline-ness… the reasons why require a bit of backgrounding regarding changes here at Matiatia, which I will save for another post but for now suffice to say no interruption of services is a lie… and I now know about telstra processes 75, 77, 90 and the holy grail, 95…

On with the show…

Over the last couple of days and nights we’ve had sky phenomena which has been quite glorious. A couple of nights ago we had a phenomenal sunset, which transfixed everyone we spoke to the next day. Out of nowhere, out of this uniformly grey sky, as sky that went on for days and weeks and months, exploded, at the crepuscular hour, a golden light so fierce that it hurt… it lit up the hills all around in a fire of psychedelic green gold yellow. We all ran around trying to capture it with various cameras, but it was too ephemeral, too much for any lens we had…

nothing could capture the colors but you can see the double rainbow on the hills 

Then appeared the beginning of a rainbow, quite fluorescent, just the beginning, creeping across the sky until a full rainbow spanned the horizon, with another faint arc beginning to appear just above it. This beautiful double rainbow remained until dark. It felt like a promise of all the skies to come, lit as it was by an unclouded sun.

Yesterday there was another rainbow, and actual sun for most of the day. It was hot. I felt alive. I ran, and mowed. I weeded the vegie patch to reveal long lost spinach and tomato plants. I sweated. I began the task of wrestling the gardens back from the thigh high grasses. We saw 2 snakes today, always a sign of hot dry weather. And a good reason to get onto the mowing. With so many vulnerable animals and humans, and a good number of brown snakes, it’s wise to be able to see what’s in the grass…

A couple of days ago Charlene commented that one of the baby chicks was missing. I thought perhaps another victim of the rains, but really they’re babies no more, gangly teens really, and puddles of water shouldn’t be deathtraps.

Today I found the baby chick, in a most unfortunate circumstance. As I was mowing, a most tedious process using a push mower in thigh high grasses, the mower stalled, as it had been doing occasionally on the thick growth. In front of the mower was the baby chick – in the belly of a carpet snake! Which I must have walked over a couple of times in previous rounds of the lawn. Unfortunately this time I had inflicted grievous bodily harm upon the snake, a most beautiful carpet snake, huge and fat, which had been sleepily digesting the chick in the long grasses until fatally woken by the mower. I felt awful. The snake had to be swiftly killed as it was injured so terribly. I had seen this snake a couple of months ago around the pond, where I guess it was eating small frogs and rats, and I was very pleased to have a carpet snake living on the property, since rats outnumber people here by about 10 to 1… If I had had the opportunity I would have relocated the snake to inside the house, inside the walls or the ceiling to deal with the rat population, but unfortunately snake as gone back to the earth and will eat chicks, rats and other small rodents no longer. Not an auspicious event…

the snake’s stomach, with baby chicken inside 

An update on Tippi, since I know erstwhile farmgrrl 3, Deb, has started the Bring Tippi Home campaign… So, after our unsuccessful visit to the farmer who owns the herd Tippi is running with, and no word from him at all, I finally tracked down phone numbers for him and, feeling not so confident, since I have heard stuff about said farmer, rang and spoke to him. One needs to be bolshy in these kinds of exchanges so I was just as hardcore matey farmer as I could be, with the outcome that he will help us to get her back on Monday. His property had been sold, all cows dehorned, ready for market I guess, so lucky we got him when we did. I’ll report back on Monday as to the outcome. I’ll be happy to have Tippi home, and so will Hinimoa.

Laters, websters Vxx

Mamma chook died this morning, at about 3am.

Mamma was a lovely black and white bantam, a stalwart broody who hatched just about every chook on this farm. After her last brood was hatched she was quite frail. I takes alot out of a hen to sit for so long with such fierce dedication. They are very very protective of the clutch of eggs and the chickens once they are hatched. Mamma looked wild and was quite the devil during the period of sitting and once the little brood was hatched she never really assimmilated back into the flock. She was bottom chook, so had to fight for every scrap of food and was jumped on by George (macho patriarch of the flock) every five minutes with lots of pecking out of feathers and mating carry on to boost George’s frail ego. Mamma submitted but became very frightened. So we moved her out to another pen where she lived with the ducks for a while, but never really fully recovered. I think this constant rain finally did her in. She was skin and bone poor love. We had her in our room in a warm box for the last couple of days, but she died this mornng. She will fertilise the corn patch and provide food for us in the cycle of life that is the farm.
 
Mamma, we miss your little bantam ways and your fierce mothering love.

xxV 

The lack of backyard chronicles of late in no way reflects a lack of action, lovely chaos, yet more explosive growth and motion that is happening in the real world… this real world of the big backyard and the bigger backyard beyond this here farm… I was clearly premature in announcing a settling down of energy and a return to the routine activites of farmlife post Camp Camp in my last update.

Since then there have been yet more visitors (the lovely Neha from San Francisco is having a surreal rural life experience with is for a month), a trip to the Big Smoke (wild country grrls go nuts in the Big City), road trips with crazy storms dogging our every move… camping in the rain, eschewing camping in the hail for the questionable relative comfort of a cabin in a dodgy caravan park, swims in hot mineral baths and driving driving driving. Kate, our lovely farm caretaker, caretook dogs, poultry, goats and cows in the unceasing rain that is our lives. It is something of a big deal to be able to get away from the farm to consume Other Culture, the other one that we came here from…

The going away from it and going back as a visitor to it makes the experience of the inner urban environment new and fresh in it own grimy kind of way. Meeting new people who are doing the city in a Different way is refreshing. We stayed at a large sharehouse that spawns great community activities like bike clubs and community cafes and queer events like queeruption and makes spaces in the city for hanging out and doing *stuff* and the urban gardening glitter faerie will be making her home and garden there… she’s talking about making a herb spiral in the central part of the yard, which is currently inhabited by many many bikes in various states of dis/repair, a trampoline, some overlooked plants, a large table we found on the footpath in glebe, many couches, compost in the shade, some wormfarms that need an overhaul and other odds and ends, leftovers of projects past and ongoing. The trampoline is the hub of all social and solitary activity. I want one on the farm. Charlene is brave and wild and jumps very high and does all configurations of gyrations on it…

So I feel after the heady heights of trampoline fun in the city like i’ve crash landed back into Life.  

Right now the grass is thigh high and there’s a kind of grotesque and abject fecundity everywhere, worms crawling around inside, the really blood red ones. Whole cities of termites building inside a cupboard full of sheets, where there was not a one just a week ago. Mold growing on surfaces that I never imagined could support mold growth. everything from outside wants in. Rats, flies, crawlies and creepies, frogs and beetles, cockroaches in their millions… and the usual quota of fucking huge spiders…

Everyone is talking about it. The weather. Small talk has become big talk. Predictions of the Big Flood to come, bigger than ‘54. Due February 12th apparently. The Bureau predicts rain for the forseeable future. I am going crazy.The animals are bedraggled. Their bedding is an abomination and i can’t do anything about it til the rain stops, or relaxes, please! Tashi is standing on top of her copper mountain in the rain. Tippi (Dexter cow, Hinimoa’s daughter) has run away and won’t come home. The farmer next door cut her horns off. I think he plans to sell her. We went to see him to try and get his help to retrieve her but i think he was hiding inside his house when we called by refusing to come out. I believe he was in there. We left a note asking for his help but so far we’ve heard nothing from him. We nearly had her home this afternoon but she’s got the spooks and tosses her head and runs off if we try to force her to go anywhere. It’s this inch by inch process of luring her with lucerne closer and closer to the bottom gate, which we can hopefully shut behind her… Hinimoa is a bit beside herself and lonely and calls Tippi from the fenceline… Mamma chook was nearly killed today. She’s living in our bedroom in a cardboard box with food and water and towels for warmth and lots of quiet. She won’t uncurl her feet to stand properly and is doing a little bit of falling over on her side, which is disturbing. I hope it’s all just shock and that tomorrow morning we’ll find her being normally chook-like and she can live out her days scratching in the dirt and having dustbaths (tho *dust* does seem like a far fetched concept in this endless wetness that is the world… ) I could not allow an ignominious end to such a stalwart broody… The calves, Little Grrl and Frenchie, are just beautiful. There is more grass than they could ever dream of eating and they are fat and happy, growing into the most beautiful creatures, and so lovely, living just close by us all the time, nudging us with their noses, gentle big doglike things… They have not a care, and the rain does not bother them one bit.

My gardens are inpenetrable. The cucumbers have exploded. The corn is done. The tomatoes are rotting on the vines. There are greens, but they need sun. The beans are vicious, tendrils reaching out to grab you as you walk by. I can’t find the spinach in the projectile lateral explosion of nasturtium growth, so recently well decimated by the Dome chooks…

I realise this is a chaotic post, but i guess life feels a bit like that sometimes, and that isn’t all bad. Despite fences and neat cornrows and delineations between animal and human, between wild nature and a kind of civilised world (I have a farmhouse and i live behind its doors. Nature is beyond the doors), sometimes this all just defies containment. At the moment these fickle physical delineations are all a little blurry (we are all of the earth anyway), as the rain falls inside the house, as wood cracks and swells and doors rot away, and nature moves inside and we move a little bit outside.

I’ll leave my wild ramblings there for tonight. Sense may return at a later date, but hopefully not.

See you in the backyard again soon.

Love feral farmgrrl V xx

EDIT:

I almost forgot… there will be some changes at the farm. Beginning on February 11th Matiatia will no longer be running a guest facility. (I think i spoke about that aspect of the farm in the very first post…) So there will be new farm family moving into the previously guest-inhabited cottage and the into the bails, which is the renovated old dairy. This will make a considerable difference to our lives, we think. It’s odd having guests in your home all the time, ones that aren’t friends or family… Zhane, who is previously pictured in the unusually sunny backyard, will be living in the cottage, and a writer called Jax will move into the bails. Their lives will become part of the backyard, and they may pop up from time to time. Our old housemate Deb, who’s been in the UK since the backyard has been up and running, will be back home by the end of February, and our raggle taggle farm family will be complete…

FROM THE BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY (The BOM’s distinctions between rain, chance showers and rain periods are lost on me, since it NEVER FUCKING STOPS!):

NORTHERN RIVERS

Warning summary at 0948 hours :
Flood warning for the Richmond/Wilsons River.

Lismore:      Rain.

Lismore:       Rain periods, chance thunderstorm.

Lismore:       Rain periods, chance thunderstorm.

Lismore:       A few showers.