A good bloke

I've written before about my next door (sort of) neighbour, Jamie, who took Buster the bull away and was going to turn him into lovely steaks for me, in return for some of my sausage making knowledge. Sounded like a sweet deal to me and Buster was shipped off the Jamie's home farm, where he got to eat better grass than Lantanaland ever had in his final days. Then I got a call,
"hey John I haven't forgotten you but I've been thinking about that bull, I think we might kill something a bit better tasting and I'll do something else with the bull. Is that ok?"

Of course I jumped at it. Jamie being Jamie it was a few more weeks before he rang to say they'd knocked over a cow and would hang it for a while before butchering it up. Sure enough I got a call on tuesday to say I was on for that afternoon. They'd break the body in the morning and we would make snags after work. I dropped in on the way to work and checked out the quarters, lovely dark meat with a great capping of fat. Once I got in I pre soaked some natural casings and put on some stock to put in the beef snags.

When I got there in the afternoon I was pretty excited. This is four year old beef, on great grass and the snags should have fantastic flavour. I was going to do three, a plain beef snag, but unlike any you would get at a supermarket or most butchers, a smoked chorizo and a cooked salami. The area we were working in was just a farm shed, a steel table, an old mincer and cold room and some tubs. I got straight to work on the beef, hand mixing the meal and stock through the mince and running it through the fine plate again. Then the chorizo and the salami. Unfortunately I forgot to grab some chillies off the bush in the morning so it will be a mild salami.

We were all ready to go and I had had a look at the old modified water sausage filler they had bolted to the wall because they had taken the bottom and legs off for the modifications. We were just standing around waiting for Jamie to 'bring the tractor in'. Jamie had told me that he used the tractor to power the filler but I wasn't sure what he meant. I soon found out! The tractor was backed up and hooked up to the hydraulics. The filler was operated by someone lifting the hydraulics up and down in the cab. Interesting. I threaded the casings onto the nozzle, an old beaten up piece of copper water piping joined on to the filler with a modified irrigation valve. MacGyver would've had a look at this thing and exclaimed "steady on"!

A bit of fiddling around to get the o rings to fit in, not easy when your controller is sitting up in a tractor cab, we loaded the beef snags in and started off. My god, I've never had sausages come out that quickly, it was more cannon than filler. I tried to get the rhythm of it but busted the casing a heap of times. I then filled out some chorizo and some cooked mettwurst salami that I took into work the next day and smoked in the commercial smokehouse at work.

My share is a fair whack of beef. How they dealt with this in the days before refrigeration is a marvel. Jamie is a real old school farmer type bloke, just happy to help and have a go at something. We are bloody lucky to be sharing a boundary with him.

Postscript. Last night we had the first steaks out of the batch. My god they were good. Some stroganoff tomorrow I think, fresh pasta and homekill beef. Heaven.

Lantanaland, the good and the not so good.

Things have been busy around Lantanaland, as you would expect with a four month old and some things on the farm have been going good and some not so good but lots being done. The good stuff of course starts with The Boy. We had a lovely mothers day, woke up at 530am, gave The Mum a cup of coffee and her present and sent her back to bed (the present she really wanted). I rugged The Boy up and went and walked the farm, said hi to the chooks and cows, told Candy I'd be back to milk her in a bit, much to her displeasure. It was fantastic.

The other thing that has been quite pleasing is the beginning of the fruit orchard. I have planted (and killed) a few trees since we got here but a while ago we decided to plant out the slope between the house and the road as a little orchard. It is too steep to mow with the ride on, I let the cows clean it up for me but it is just a wasted bit of grass really and the trees that are on it now are either dead or straggly.

This time I have actually used some of my permaculture training in the planning. The area is what would be classed as zone 1 in permaculture, close to the house. In Beeso speak, zone 1 means somewhere you walk past enough every week that you'll remember to bloody well water the fruit trees. This is important as I have killed a few by forgetting to water them after I have them established. To be fair, I've also killed some with overwatering, there is no end to my talents.

So I have started on the steepest part, closest to the road. The soil is crappy, shaley stuff, so I cut shelves in the slope and planted the trees in some car tires I had. The mix I used was out of the chook pen. I have a little prison system going in the chook pen at the moment. The pen is not massive, big enough but too small to maintain any forage so I have been pulling out great big bins of weeds and tossing them in. The last time mum came to visit the weeds were 50cm deep. They happily pick and scratch and dig at them until they have broken down into a lovely rich soil. That's what I used to plant my fruit trees in.

All around the trees I have some chip mulch that I buy from the tree lopper guys. On the high side I planted comfrey. Comfrey is like a super plant in permaculture, great for chooks and cows, accelerates the breakdown of compost and the worms love it. What I wanted it for was its taproot. Putting it on the high side it will send down a incredibly strong taproot. When it rains the water will follow the path that root has made rather than just running down the slope and over the soil. It should give the soils a much higher moisture content. Comfrey also pulls up nutrients and trace elements from deep below the root system of the fruit tree, then you just tear the leaves off and drop them under the tree to rot down and enrich the soil.

On the low side, I planted a little retaining wall of lemongrass. Once established it will create a mini terrace that keeps the mulch and water in. I will finish off my transplanting some pintos peanut there in the wet season once I have my starter patch well established.

So far I have put in a nashi pear, a ruby grapefruit and a finger lime. A mate of ours, Jess, put me onto cheap fruit trees at the Powerhouse markets, so I'll be making a trip up there once the chooks have made me some more potting mix. I'd like to establish all the fruit I know I'll eat first, so some oranges, apples, mandarins, avocado and pear will be on the list. I already had some others in in other places so fingers crossed I can keep these alive and thriving.

The not so good news is the cow and the making of cheese. I was really hopeful of largish amounts of milk out of Candy but she is too good a mum. She is keeping most of her milk up for the calf. No amount of massage, warm water or coaxing will convince her to let it down. Letting the calf on to her for a bit works, but she then bolts the bales and feeds the calf. This is where my bales are really letting me down, no head crush, and no real way to keep her still after the calf has had a suck.

When the calf is in the next paddock she is a great little milker, trots on in to her feed and stands dead still while I milk her. It's only when the calf is close she turns into a cow that lists The Great Escape as her favourite movie. I was really hoping to be cranking out the cheese for the Herdshare by now, but alas I am only getting enough for our milk, a bit of milk for the herdshare and the occasional batch of feta.

Still, it beats buying home brand milk at woolies!

Use it or lose it

If you are going to live the life that we have chosen (ok now I do sound like I am starting a commune) you need to make sure that you are being a bit productive as well. Cows and chooks are cool, but if you are keeping them purely as pets then you want to make sure that you have the cash to be able afford those big pets.

That's why I try and plant as many fruit trees as I possibly can. Fruit is not cheap so every banana we don't buy is Lantanaland paying itself off. Sometimes you can fall into the trap of being a bit choosy, only eating and buying the things that you want. That was the thought that hit me as I watched The Wife take pictures of a lizard eating the guavas falling off the tree for him to gobble up. I don't particularly like them as a fruit to eat but what about them in some jam?

As usual I couldn't be buggered looking up a recipe so I just put the guavas, cut in half with two lemons roughly chopped in a pot with half the weight of the fruit in sugar and boiled it up. When it went a bit when tacky on a frozen plate I passed it through a sieve and hey presto, guava jelly. Unlike most of my jam it actually set too and considering it is almost all gone after my parents visited for a week, it must be pretty good.

Confident after my jam experiments I thought I'd have a go at some relish. This time I looked at a few recipes to get a rough idea of the sugar/fruit/vinegar mix. I boiled up the fruit with one lemon, a little water, some cloves, star anise, mustard seeds, cumin and bay. In another pot I sweated off two brown onions, eight hot chillies and a truckload of garlic. Once they were nice and translucent I added about a fifth of the weight of the fruit and onions in sugar and about the same or a bit more of white wine vinegar. (I didn't really measure this out, worse luck). Then I sieved the boiled guavas into the onion mix, added a tin of chopped tomatoes and boiled the whole lot for roughly an hour. I wish I had tomatoes at the moment as well but thems the breaks.

Of course the result was the best relish I have ever tasted, a just reward for not measuring and recording the whole process. Still, not a bad outcome, utilizing what is pretty much a weed here in Lantanaland. There are massive groves of it down the hill that haven't fruited yet so if you know me and live in SE QLD then I'd be thinking what you like more, guava jam or chilli guava relish.

The farm. Need, want, dreaming

I can break the farm stuff into three distinct areas that occupy my thoughts. Things that need doing. Things I would like to have. Things I dream about. The last is important because it keeps the creativity going, and some good ideas come from dreaming about what seems impossible. Some dreams are far off but are good to have in the future as something to work to, like turning Lantanaland into a cooking school.

The need is easy, those jobs that sit in my forebrain, kicking me, telling me that I should be doing them instead of writing. The never ending fencing is the main one. The urgency on that is a little less now I know the guy that owns the 100 acre property behind mine where the cows escape to, and that it is full fenced. They come back eventually. Ideally this year I would fence the last third of Lantanaland that contains the dam. That would mean that I could do much better rotations of the paddocks and start to get some diversity into them, like pigeon pea and pintos peanut that take a little while to establish. At the moment I am just chasing my tail and none of the paddocks really get enough time to re establish good grass. The clover seed has been going into the cows feed regularly so that will get going again.

The other big need is Curtis and The Wife. While he is so small I really want to spend good chunks of time with him, so I am! I'm blessed in that I can spend time with him and I'm really enjoying it. I'm getting a fair bit of stuff done during nap time.

The things I want. There are so many! I'd settle for a decent vegetable garden, more fruit trees and a few more chooks. The chooks will be boosted hopefully by the donation of some fertile eggs and maybe some interesting day olds. A few new ducks wouldn't hurt either. I'd love to have enough surplus eggs to give some to the Herdshare and have that wonderful feeling that you have to have eggs for breakfast just to reduce the surplus. I'd have to do a bit of adjusting of the pens so they had a semi secure day area that had some electric fencing protection from opportunistic foxes, but the idea for that and a way to integrate it into my ideal veg garden is already kicking around. The problem, as always, is infrastructure and money for it.

Some peoples ideal vegetable garden is beautiful neat rows of each variety, order out of chaos. I fell in love with the gardens at Northey St City Farm, where years of plants seeding and growing wild has led to this chaotic wonderland of a garden, where things just spring forth. You plant the things missing in the space and once a year you let the chooks in to clear it all up and turn the soil over. To get to that stage I need to actually get something to grow and seed. I planted some snow peas today, secure behind a sturdy metal trellis. I'll try and get more of a seed raising system going as well, so that I'm planting plants not seeds.

Fruit trees is a matter of preparation and foresight to make sure I establish them in a place where they will get water and enough love to get started and not get eaten by cows. Sounds pretty simple hey! At the moment I have an apple, fig, mango, lime, finger lime, pomegranate, native plum, lemon and passion fruit that have survived the cows and my brownish thumbs. I'm thinking about only asking for fruit trees for birthdays from now on.

I dream of solid fences made of hardwood that could contain a few sheep or milking goats, of terraces cut into the hill, seeded with a variety of pasture for the cows, of a mowable path to the dam, of a series of water catchments in the hill to ensure every drop of rain, of a big stainless kitchen that was easy to make cheese in, of not so much bloody lantana, of a my shipping container shed/workshop/cold room. Dreams are bloody easy. I've got lots of them. I've got more jobs than dreams though.

Old media, new media that is rehashed old media and new media.

I consume a fair chunk of media. Not as much as I used too, as the red veil of cynicism tends to cover my eyes and ears these days as another lazy journo trots out a piece of link bait or a politician does his best parrot impression during an interview. But two little things helped crystallise my thoughts this week on the restrictions of old media and why it's not dying as quickly as I'd hoped.

The first was a little blog post by Mr John Birmingham, who writes everything from blogs to features to books non fiction and explody. He has sniffed the wind and seen the decline of traditional short form media and is pouring more of his resources into books. I can't blame him. As much as the SMH app has got me reading the paper every day again through its fantastic design, if it went behind a pay wall I'd stop reading, simply because there is so much absolute fucking dross in it.

I had hoped that the ABC might be the one to bust the mould, but their 'new media' effort, The Drum, is just a bunch of opinions thrown against a wall. The 'new media' wave, like Crikey, is like the old newspapers but without the paper. You still have to pay for the whole bunch and opinion rules over reporting. Crikey and the online edition of The Oz are two sides of the same worn coin.

What I'd love to see is a web page or service, that had a whole bunch of reporting, and opinion too, from a whole bunch of sources and writers. The first two paragraphs or a précis is up there for free, then I pay for every article I click on the full article for. No gimmicky crap like top ten lists that give a online paper ten page views. No articles split into 6 pages. No edetorial direction. If its good and I like it, then I pay. It would have to be cheap per article, but enough that a reasonable viewing of your stuff earns you a living. The longer and more thinky or researched the article the more you pay. Like iTunes you could view the 'paper' with the most popular by hits, time or dollars earned. That way, more expensive long form articles with lower page views wouldn't get buried by articles on cats on the Internet.

The same restrictions apply for radio. I love podcasts and one of my favourites is Richard Fidler's Conversation Hour. The biggest flaw it has is it is on the radio. Richard is a great interviewer, but that 50 minute slot means pieces of media that could be truly great are cut off just as they are cranking up. Even the fantastic two part interview with George Megalogenis was about three hours too short. In contrast, many of the tech and geeky podcasts that I listen to are run by networks that have no broadcast ties, no time slot to bow down too. If a topic is interesting and the conversation keeps running, that's fine, it's a little longer. Likewise if it is 40 minutes, no need for padding or nineteen station promos.

I'd love to see the ABC grab this and try some off air only stuff, in particular with their sporting commentators. I think a format that wasn't live or determined by a broadcast schedule might prove to be more popular than the traditional programs.

I have no doubt that old media is dying. The reason it isn't dead yet is that new media is still being born and old media is really only fighting against a repackaged version of itself. I look forward to a day ahead, where people pay per the persons output and quality wins out more than dross. I can hope anyway.

I Think About Infrastructure (and cows) More Than Can Do Campell

In an ideal world, Lantanaland would have been an old dairy farm, complete with iron hard wooden bales and yards, several citrus trees and a chookhouse. In fact one of the places we were really interested in when we looking for a place ticked most of the boxes. Small orchard, chookhouse, yards and sheds and a dam. The problem was it was a 100 grand more than Lantanaland and had a liveable shed instead of a house. The shed was in fact better than the house here, completely converted into a house with 3 bedrooms but there was a risk that council could rock up the day after purchase and insist we build a house. Too risky.

I mention all this because of my adventures this morning. My bales are strung together from some fencing panels from my stepbrothers old fence, old stumps from a veranda my neighbour knocked down and various scraps of second hand timber. The idea for a smallholder milking is to separate the calf off at night so the milk builds up and milk in the morning

Last night I coaxed the calf into the yards and locked her up. Candy was in the next paddock about three meters away so she could see her calf. Cows get sooky when separated and more and more vocal as their udders fill up. It's good if they can see the calf but not get too close as a calf will stick its head through the smallest hole to get a feed. All good so far. In the morning Candy should run down to the bales to see the calf, I let her have a quick suck to let the milk down and then get my morning milk.

When I woke at 4am Candy was bellowing. Loudly. That was good as it meant her and the calf were still separated. Success! I got dressed and got Candy's morning bucket and went down. The calf wasn't in the bales. Dammit. She was up on the hill, out of Candy's sight. No wonder she was bellowing. No worries though, I'll just open the bales and lead Candy in with some food and the calf will come to her.

As soon as I opened the gate to the paddock Candy charged off up towards the cries of the calf. Within seconds she was gobbling down my milk for the next few days. It really is a failure of poor infrastructure. If I had the disposable cash, I'd just go and buy 8 proper steel cattle panels and a head bale and build some proper yards. But I don't , so I'll be pulling out some spare fence panels I had on the old chook pen and raising the height of the yards, building a new gate and I'll lock Candy up at night. The calf can roam around and see mum and in the morning I'll milk Candy then let the calf back on.

That's the plan anyway. Lack of cash definitely breeds innovation and tickles my love of recycling and the second hand. I like the satisfaction of getting something done without just throwing cash at it, but to be honest, if I'd gone down at 4am and seen a calf locked up in proper yards, I probably would have coped.

Pastureisation

Since I have been home and a touch football shaped amount of thinking has vacated my brain, I have thinking about grass. Not the sort of grass that would pay Lantanaland off in a few years, rather the pasture that my cows exist on.

The grass has grown ok this summer but I am highly suspicious that under the status quo I am over stocked. I still have one paddock unfenced, which is probably a third of Lantanaland so I'm not overly worried, even though fencing it will mean more money. But I need to find low or no cost ways to improve my pasture and feed situation.

Clover worked well last year and I am giving the small paddock in front of the house a rest and have seeded it with some grass and done a little spraying. I am also watering it with the house grey water to get some tree fodder started, pigeon pea and mulberry, as well as bananas, arrowroot and comfrey. If I add some clover and lucerne into that paddock it should be a good treat paddock to give them a boost.

Next season I will try a permaculture trick I learnt in my PDC. You get some clay, compost and pigeon pea seeds. Throw them all in a cement mixer with just enough water to loosen. Then you roll bits of the mix up into small balls and put them in the sun to dry. Once they are hard you throw them round the paddocks. The idea is that when it rains, it softens the clay, and the seed sprouts into a nice rich mix to get it started. The other one I'd like to try is getting a whole heap of passion fruit growing over the thicker lantana down the bottom of the hill. Clover seed is also a good one to mix in with the cow feed as it passes straight through them and starts life in a nice fertile growing medium.

I am really just fiddling on the margins I guess, but without large amounts of cash to do a good seeding program, or rip furrows and plant, or bulldoze large swathes of lantana, I shall just have to satisfied with small incremental improvements.