I had a trip to Sydney which i enjoyed greatly, catching up with friends and staying with my lovely and generous friend Sarah. All my plans to take inventory or urban gardens and friend’s sustainable inner city solutions and do a special backyard post dedicated to this came to naught, but i had many a fine dandelion latte with friends and went to parties and looked at the cloudy night sky from a trampoline and freaked out in pubs and didn’t like Inland Empire in the middle of the day when i decided to treat myself to a movie… I missed home, but learned to like the city a little more then when i left it…

There’s been quite alot going on since my return, mostly in the garden. matt, who did much of the landscaping for this place, made a too short trip from melbourne to do a summer overhaul of the gardens, which was much needed. I was feeling overwhelmed by the whole Wild Nature thing, and a bit unable to manage it on my own. It needed a huge slash and mulch, and Matt and the boys were fantastic. I can breathe! The taro, arrowroot, helaconia, gingers and so much more were basically slashed and I can feel the life ready to burst forth and bloom fresh and green and in living color… It was great to watch matt work, and to know just how far i can go in terms of slashing back the gardens. matt also built a duck run off the existing duck house where the new baby ducks are living which encloses the orchard. ducks, geese and orchards go well together. They eat bugs, slugs, keep the grass down and leave their shit around the base of the trees. We’ve trialled the run and it seems to work well. We went to buy some geese from the lismore carboot market on sunday but it seems they’ve taken christmas early…. i love geese. I love the sound they make

Speaking of the animals, there have been some changes. We have had to sell some of our herd since we can no longer afford feed for them. It’s been a big learning curve, and has raised alot of questions and clarified some of my thoughts around animal farming, and we have learned alot about rearing cows in a particular way, particularly hand rearing calves, and milking cows. We have learned about how to treat the animals naturally for a variety of ruminant ailments and some things about pasture and rotation and worming. I also have questions now about how to raise hard hoofed animals in a low impact way. We still have frenchy (see earlier posts for pics) and little girl, who we hope eventually to be our house cow. This feels more doable. I don’t feel so stressed. I don’t think it was an experiment that didn’t work, just a learning curve to be applied.

We have also acquired a goat. Tashi is her name and she’s an anglo nubian X. I love goats, and she has a sweet nature. Michael had a goat, May, who died from snakebite or something, and she’s been missed. We had a little hiccup in the acquisition of Tashi. We bought her from a farm out in a beautiful valley past Kyogle from a German family who had many goats, mostly nubian. We wanted a small goat, but their children wanted to keep the small kids as pets, so we were offered 3 year old Tashi, who has had a few kids. She’s very healthy and plump and has an amazing coat. She was scared to be taken from her herd, but we were quiet and gentle with her and fed her and showed her her new home. It was just on dark, Friday night, when we got her home, and i went to get her some feed, leaving her untethered for just a moment. When I came back she was gone into the night. I searched as far as i could in the dark to no avail. In the morning we put flyers in all the mailboxes of the area, knowing they probably wouldn’t look until monday, and we drove and walked for hours looking for her. By this afternoon I was despondent, thinking we’d never see her again. But at about 5 Charlene and I were feeding the other animals and Charlene who has keen eyesight saw *something* off in the distance on the next door neighbour’s farm. I ran down to see, and it was tashi! - shivering, frightened, starting at the sound of every car that drove by… I was very happy to see her. We tethered her near the house, fed her, brushed her and loved her. She’s very sensitive to her environment, notices all smells, sounds, everything.

here is Tashi:

our anglo nubian x goat tashi

So my best christmas present this year would have been…

Milkwood’s most recent workshop, starts TOMORROW! 

8 - 20 December 2007 - Mudgee NSW
Water is the major issue on every Australian farm. Water harvesting and storage earthworks need to be intelligently designed and well implemented. This three day intensive course taught by Geoff Lawton will give you the knowledge to design and construct earthworks that will act as an insurance policy against drought and increase the value of your property.

Failing that (well, having failed to acquire that), I would also like to attend:

Introduction to Permaculture - Sydney - Feb 08

9 - 10 February 2008 - Sydney NSW

Christmas wishlist.

I haven’t said anything about weeds for a while. I had made a post on a permaculture forum some time ago about my nascent weed thoughts, and noone made much comment, but recently a forum member did make a post which was helpful to me in my thoughts about weeds and how to live with them. I’ll post it here…

I was asking about control of weeds, whether things needed to be eradicated etc… 

Instead of slashing/weeding and burning you may try slashing and charing. Make a pile of weeds and ag. waste and partially cover with dirt and burn on a damp day. This makes the fire burn at a low temp, and low oxygen level. As a result, the carbon is sequestered in the material as well as some nutrients. Spread this char over the garden beds. Do a search on this site for "terra preta" or "dark earth" for a more in depth and accurate description. This process creates a great medium which acts more like a sponge, holding moisture longer and locking nutrients in place instead of them eventually being washed out.

This I will try, because i am very interested in carbon farming ideas…

It’s late for farmgrrls and i want to post a couple more pictures before sleep, so I’ll end here. Sorry i was away for so long… More updates soon…

xxV 

It’s so lovely to have visitors. We both have friends and family who live far away (happily, some closeby as well) and it’s no small thing for them to make the journey here. It’s a gorgeous place, very beautiful, a kind of paradise, especially for inner urban dwellers. The farmhouse has been lovingly fitted out without taking away any rustic charm and historic ambience. Michael, my good friend who owns this place has put great effort into the design and infrastructure, and the establishment of the gardens and the renovation of dilapidated outbuildings etc. So it’s a lovely holiday for those who visit.

Everyone who has made the effort to come and stay has been so engaged with our projects, and we really appreciate their interest and eagerness to get their hands dirty. We’d be happy for them to sit on the verandah, snoozing in the hammock, or doing the tourist drives to the local villages or going for coffee to bangalow or whatever, but instead they coose to grab a mattock and decimate thistles and other such hot and thirsty work.

I really wanted to thank our lovely friends for their efforts, and hopefully put pics of their pet projects up!

Sarah was official photographer of everything we did while she was here! The lovely banner pic and many more are her work. She also taught Charlene to play guitar and built a pyramid hay feeder for the cows so they wouldn’t foul their hay and so it wouldn’t get trampled and blown away. We’re off to buy some lucerne and so next time it’s in use (read: when the sun finally comes out!) I’ll take a pic and insert!

Matt the aspiring tree farmer hardly sat down. Despite the fact that his wardrobe was decidedly metrosexual, he was up and at em with the mattock, waging a personal war against the weeds. He also built us the Chook Hotel for Mamma Chook and her 4 babies. Their accommodations were inadequate, space wise, and not snake proof (we’ve had alot of snakes), so using discarded corrugated Matt built a moveable run for them, with their smaller house inside (they like the safety of the smaller space at night, so they can snuggle under mamma’s wings). Covered half with shade cloth and half chicken wire it was a larger and safer space for them to learn how to be chooks! This has been decommissioned since we’ve let the chickens out into the regular run. Mamma is still a bit crazy (a broody chook can have the devil in her, I tell you!), but the little chickens are exploring the world at large. There have been some requests for pictures, so I shall endeavour to insert chicken and chook hotel pics here. 

My Dad was a powerhouse, and all I can say is that he’s crazy and generous and despite my best efforts, I could never keep up with him. He did the bulk of the garden bed preparation and also did a good stint on the fireweed. He’s my ultimate working buddy. Never flags.

Sido was a joy to have on the farm. Generous with her knowledge and her energy, she really helped me to sort out the gardens, as is evidenced in the last few posts. 

Greggie is one of a favorite people. He comes equipped with all the recipes in the world, scissors to transform the rattiest farmgrrl into a stylee queen who turns heads in downtown Dunoon, and never lets you into the kitchen. Heaven!

Kathy, Julie, Darcy, we love having your presence around the farm. It’s lovely to be able to offer friends and family a retreat where they can recoup flagging energies. We look forward to more of our distant friends and family coming to visit.

Watch this space for pics of pet projects

xx 

Six months ago my partner and I moved from Glebe, an inner city suburb of Sydney to an established/evolving permaculture farm in Northern NSW. We reside in the C1890’s farmhouse on 5 acres of gardens and pasture land. There are a number of roles we fulfill here. The property, called Mateatea (www.mateatea.com.au) is part of the Byron Hinterland tourist industry, in that it provides accommodation for guests who are interested in holidaying in an environmentally low impact, solar passive design luxury bungalow. We manage this business for the owner, my friend Michael, who has run away to the city for a while to run with the freaks! The other part of our life at Mateatea, and the part which we will attempt to chronicle here - part old school farmer’s almanac, part journal - is our farming life…
 
This blog is to chronicle the learnings and realisations that arise on a daily basis living on a permaculture farm. Written from the perspective of 1 city grrl and 1 latterly-city grrl, lost to her formative rural years. We are discovering how to make things grow, understanding systems of agri/culture, and discovering the very fundamental changes it can make to one’s person. We make lots of mistakes, but we honor the land and try to live by sound sustainable principles. We wake up smiling every day, ready to milk our cow, Maybe…

We are not vegan or vegetarian, so please be warned that there may be posts which disturb or offend.

We do, however, try to approach farming, our version, as a humane and loving way of growing plants and animals in an environment where respect for all living creatures is our number one priority. We try to approach the ideal of having a system where everything has its place and purpose and is a kind of feedback loop. The theory of permaculture is not part of our vocabulary in any formal way, but we read and experiment and take on the tasks of weeding, calf wrangling, castration, milking cows, creating gardens, building animal housing, sometimes killing animals (never gratuitously), rotating pastures, spring planting, cow shit collecting, mulching, duck-watering all with equal enthusiasm.

In the following post we will post a diagram of the farmhouse and its systems (established by Michael) and speak about how we utilise these systems.

Virginia and Charlene