Summertime on the farm!
It's here! After our third winter in Tasmania, we emerge from lockdown and isolation. I have to admit, it didn't hit us that hard really. We live quite far out of town and try to be as self sufficient as possible.
What's new
We've cut and baled 60 large square bales. Resisting the urge to buy a machine we only use once a year, we hired a contractor to come in and bale for us. Our difficulty up here on the hill is that everyone else in the district has finished by the time we are ready (the higher altitude slows growth) so we couldn't get a silage wrapper to come this year. And we don't have a hay shed yet... So it's stack them and cover them with a big tarp and hope for the best! We only baled from one paddock - our best - the North paddock. So 60 bales is fabulous. It is fascinating to watch the machine spit out bales, already compressed and tied with twine, as it is pulled around by a tractor.
We've had good rain, quite late into summer, so there is plenty of green. And because we have built up the soil microbes, no longer till or rip the soil, it holds the water and roots are able to go deeper.
Soil workshop
Recently we hosted a soil workshop through our local NRM. They used our farm as an example of what can be achieved with regenerative agriculture. Apparently we've done in 3 years what takes 10 years normally. Of course we still have a long way to go, but we are slowly reforming this land.
There are so many jobs to do, (fencing, sowing, mowing, moving sheep, vaccinating and drenching sheep, removing weeds etc. We often work with our neighbours, helping each other, supporting each other, to get them done. As a community we are spread out, but close in spirit.
What was so lovely, apart from the compliments on dung beetle populations and clover health etc, was that we met local farmers trying to do the same thing - most of them 'mainlanders' like us, who have moved down to the Apple Isle for a tree change. It's wonderful when you meet people who understand your crazy vision!
Kitchen Garden
During 2020 I got a bit carried away and planted some more raised vegie beds. Now I have seventeen of them! A few we built ourselves, recycling wood from an old wardrobe and pallets I bought off Gumtree, a couple I bought from a local guy who makes them from untreated wooden pallets, one fancy one, which slots together like a jigsaw I bought online and it was delivered from Hobart and the others were used potato crates and seed cleaning crates, (also through facebook and gumtree) which we cut down to the right size. Feels good to reuse and recycle in this age of excess and built-in obsolescence, doesn't it?
So what did I plant?
Well, I now have climbing beans, bush beans, blue berries. strawberries, coriander, marjoram, lettuce, silverbeet, swiss chard, 17 tomato plants of various kinds, baby leaf spinach, spring onion, (lots of it), loganberry, raspberries, cucumber, pumpkin, and zucchini. In addition we have a small orchard of apple varieties, cherries, nectarine, nashi pear, ordinary pear and loquat. It sounds a lot, but they are only young plants and trees, although there is a healthy bunch of apples on each tree I am looking forward to tasting! Had our first homegrown tomatoes with my lettuces on a wrap the other day. Yum!
HOWEVER, as you can see from the photo below, my attempts at growing carrots was a failure, judging by the alien lifeforms I produced.
Our neighbours sometimes pop round with extra fruit. (aren't we lucky?) Lately it's been raspberries, so I bottled some for winter. I also bottled some delicious cherries, which are now in season.
I've been making a smoothie for breakfast most days, with goodies from my garden, supplemented by in-season fruits, banana and a spoonful of quick oats, milk and hydrolyte. It's been a successful weight loss venture so far! (phew!) And so much healthier than cereals, especially if you include greens such as silverbeet and spinach, which don't have a lot of flavour, so its easy to disguise it!
Comments
Post a Comment