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.

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.

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.

The positives and negatives of electric fencing.

Being relatively poor, all the fences here at Lantanaland are of the electric kind. There was no real cow proof boundary fencing when we got here and to put that sort of fencing in requires serious money. I'd hate to think what sort of money goes into fencing at a proper farm. Proper fencing requires long term vision and planning as well. You have to think of all the possible ways you might want it set up, not just how you want it set up today. Once it is in it is expensive and time consuming to change. Electric fencing is pretty good as long as you stay on top of it and has one real benefit that fits in with my permaculture principles.

Permaculture has a theory that you learn with the land. That is the longer you are on a piece of land, the more you understand the most effective way to work it and make it work for you. Electric fencing is fantastic for this because it is really easy to reconfigure. Just pull out and bash in some star pickets and give that way a try. I think I have reconfigured the 'home paddock' about ten times already to get the best out of the set up. Learning the way the cows behave, building a chook pen and now setting up for a vegetable garden has all influenced how I build the fences.

The latest little permaculture program I have started is the veg patch. I've been watching the River Cottage Veg program and it made me realize that one of the reasons that I don't cook more veg is that the stuff from the supermarkets is fairly uninspiring, flavour wise. When I broke it down, the reason I don't grow more veg is that, well, I suck at it. I forget to water it, or feed it or don't have good enough soil. Hopefully the new patch will solve all these problems.

I have used tyres to build the beds because they are free and modular. That lets me do a bit each day rather than waiting for a whole free weekend to build beds with materials I can't really afford. The beds are just outside the chook pen and right next to where the cows come and wait to be fed, the best source of rich broken down soil. It's also gives me a super enriched fertilizer, the water from the duck pool in the chook house.

I redid the fences so that there is a little buffer between the beds and the paddocks so the cows can't reach those dexterous tongues through and munch on the tasty plants. I walk down past this garden every day to milk and there is always water down there for the cows so there is no chance of neglect. That is probably one of the most important things for me. If it needs daily attention then it had better be somewhere I have to go every day.

The next bit of refencing was around the tree and tank above the house. I have a little paddock there that is too steep for the ride on and I extended it round the big fig and second tank, down to the aquaponics. This little slope is a pain to slash, so getting the cows to do the work for me seems like a smart thing to do. It also means they can come down and say hello when we are on the deck or in the spa, something that Dolores will like. She is a very friendly cow.

All in all for a couple of hours work yesterday and today I have increased my pasture, got a secure vegetable garden in and started, fixed up another fence and moved Laf and Buster the bull into there. All done, until something comes along and gives me an idea and I change it again. All part of the fun.