My piggy tale…

Using pigs to till the soil has been an experiment with mixed results. There is no doubt pigs do a great job of turning the soil and eating the roots of the unwanted weeds and grasses. But once they reached about 70kg, P1 & P2 (who remained un-named so that apparently it would make it easier to truck them off to the abattoir at 6 months old…), actually damaged the soil, especially once it became wet after rain.

Saying good bye to P2

I had been hoping that raising the pigs, and selling them for meat would help with funding my market garden setup, but the project was lucky to just break even. This wasn’t helped by my choosing to pay a premium for transport to abattoir, to ensure they were shipped as comfortably and quickly as possible. I thought I was pretty cool and tough about the whole process, until P2 (above) wandered over and sat beside me as I filled his water dish for the last time, and then crooned while I scratched behind his ears.

Was there really any chance they would walk quietly with a collar and lead?!

So, would I do it again? It has been nice to hear the favourable feedback from those who have eaten our tasty pork, and to know that it is being enjoyed all over the place by friends and family, but Andrew and I won’t eat it. We do have two new pigs, shown here (above) with Harriet lifting them into their enclosure. But these miniature variety are not destined for the plate, and more than that, they have been rescued as they were surplus to requirements of a children’s nursery animal business. I am hoping their smaller size will be gentler to the soil whilst still tilling the weeds, and they have names – Calvin and Hobbs. Now that feels better.

Crave 2012 in pictures…

I know the Crave Sydney International Food Festival is all about the food, but to us it meant teamwork! The very organised and talented Jacqueline and her Foodscape Tours coordinated our big day a few weeks back, but it wouldn’t have been the fabulously fun day it was without our wonderful friends and family pulling together. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves…

So many thanks to our wonderful guests for ‘giving us a go.’

Curious sticky beak spectator

Bunting (and all these photos) courtesy of the gorgeous Adelaide

Fresh pickings…

Many thanks also to Bev, Will & Antonella for allowing us to visit their lovely, hillside garden

Amazing, delicious lunch by Di of A Bite on the Side – service with a big Harriet smile!

Beautifully decorated thanks to Vanessa – The Wedding and Events Creator

A long table lunch courtesy Barry and Monique at Mountain Ridge Winery

Very many thanks to all, and we hope to use our enormous amount of learning from the day to make it even bigger and better next year! XO

Ham and Salad…

We have been running our Jamberoo Pub Feast Markets for a couple of months now, and some weeks Tass from Jamberoo Valley Farm brings down an assortment of her gorgeous heirloom variety seedlings. She has loads of beautiful varieties of salad greens, some very unusual such as delicate ‘bucks horn’ and ‘lamb’s lettuce’. Interesting tomato varieties too; and ‘casper eggplant’!

Tass and the Jamberoo Valley Farm seedlings

I have of course been unable to resist purchasing many of them, and they have been planted in Warwick Park’s garden. Interested in having a look, P1 escaped from his comfortable enclosure last night, and when I arrived in the garden this morning he was having a lovely time taste testing the fresh garden offerings!

Ham and salad…

They say ‘happy as a pig in mud’, but let me tell you, a pig in a veggie garden is pretty chuffed too! He is led by his stomach though, and when offered his very favourite treat of creamy South Coast Dairy milk, he trotted happily back into his enclosure.

More inspiration, this time in Gundaroo

I have an awful lot to learn about market gardening, and who better to teach that subject than Joyce and Michael of Allsun Farm teamed up with the dynamic Milkwood Permaculture.

Tim and Michael in Allsun’s organic garden

Worth every minute of the 2.5 hour commute, their market garden ‘master class’ filled in a lot of the blanks for me. It’s all very well to know how to plant and water a lettuce, but if you want to grow 100′s of them, you also need to know that you should work ambidextrously; force yourself to be just as comfortable digging and raking to the left as you may be to the right to help ensure your body remains symmetrical, and lasts the distance. Valuable stuff.

The lovely Kirsten from Milkwood who ensured our class stayed ‘on track’ and ‘on time’.

Joyce taught a wonderful combination of theory and practical skills, but at the end of the day, each and every one of us hopes to return to our own latitude, climate and soil and adapt those theories and skills to transform them from this….

Joyce demonstrating the simple (?!) process of designing crop rotations.

into something like this…

Allsun’s Organic Farm at Gundaroo

Game on!

Spring is sprung

Travelling through Exeter in the Southern Highlands on the weekend, the signs are very clear that nature just wants to get growing.

Daffodils herald spring by a gatepost in Exeter

Longer, warmer days mean it’s time to stop dreaming, planning and talking, and get to work. Whilst the established gardens look amazing out the front at Warwick Park in Foxground, the land to the back where my pigs have been busy preparing soil all winter, is a blank canvas waiting for the brush (or the seedlings and tines in this instance!)

The beautiful spring garden at Warwick Park in Foxground

The pigs can’t take all the credit for this fabulous preparation though. My wonderfully clever Andrew has been having fun with a little walk-behind tiller for which he designed and built a bed-forming attachment.

Ready, set, go….planting time!

I also have to confess to meeting Nicko. For months Kerry has talked about Nicko…”Nicko will fix that pipe/fence/bridge.” Then one day two weeks ago I met the amazing Nicko. “How would you like me to go over this with my tractor and tiller?” he said. Now, the pigs have been great, but they are s-l-o-w. So Nicko worked his magic with his mechanical horse, and the cost? “A couple of cauliflowers when they’re ready will do”. Wow. I just love living ’round here.

Taking stock

Running our little fresh produce markets at Berry and Shoalhaven Heads each week for the last 4 months has been a great test of my skills in the kitchen. Although I can do all the basics pretty well, and my family is reasonably well nourished, I don’t consider myself a cook.

Vegetable stock in the making

It makes it so much easier to prepare wholesome, tasty offerings though when you have plenty of great, fresh produce to start with. As our market’s customers know well (PLEASE tell me you need broccoli this week??), what we don’t sell, we have to eat. And customers are unpredictable…one week we sell out of bananas, the next we are googling “101 things to make using bananas”!

French toast and pomegranate

And then there’s The Press. If it was on MasterChef, or Kim Kardashian said it was good to eat, we can’t sell enough of it. But this has all been great for widening the repertoire of ingredients I can do something with. Some of the experiments have gone down well, (like pomegranate served with Classic Yoghurt and maple syrup), and others have been a disaster (seriously…does ANYONE know how to do a turnip justice??).

Fennel and english spinach in the Seven Cedars garden

All this learning has been great for giving me ideas as to what I need to plant lots of as my market gardens get going, (kale, beets, english spinnach, fennel), and what I just mean leave for someone else…to grow and to cook!

How to ruin a paddock.

I have been watching this paddock over the last year or so, as I pass by a couple of days a week. It looked to me like a fairly normal sort of pasture, complete with a few grazing horses. But then one day the horses were gone, and it was all black. It had been burnt completely, releasing all that stored carbon into the atmosphere, and destroying all those grass roots so effectively stabilising the soil.

Fireweed is a highly invasive and opportunistic weed native to south eastern Africa. It quickly colonises overgrazed pastures and disturbed areas.

It was then left for months and months, so that rain after rain could remove any topsoil, and leave 10-20 cm deep erosion channels in the sand, running the length of the paddock. The natural progression for this distressed ground was of course for the fireweed to move in. Declared a noxious Weed of National Significance, fireweed has now taken over, flowering beautifully to ensure it continues to spread and flourish all over the South Coast. I presume a herbicide will be sprayed next? This will ensure the soil becomes more acidic, and hostile to the microbes trying to heal it. Sigh.

Can anyone explain why this poor management of the land is allowed to occur? Next week…my neighbour who has Astro Turfed his “nature strip”. Again…sigh.

How old is heirloom?

We celebrated all things unique and special this week, with Deb’s Birthday, heirloom veggies and the wonderful job our heritage pigs are doing preparing the ground for spring. Not sure if Deb would like to be considered ‘heirloom’, but seeing she now has grand-nieces and nephews, I don’t think she’d be too offended by the dictionary definition of, “A valued possession passed down in a family through succeeding generations.”

Deb & Steve – enjoying Ran’s heirloom cherry tomatoes at the Pavilion on Tuesday night.

Heirloom veggies are described as old, open-pollinated and mostly non-hybrid with some suggesting they needed to exist as they are today before 1951 (which Deb certainly didn’t!), or even before the Second World War. Popular not just because they often look interesting and beautiful, but often taste better and are sometimes more pest and disease hardy.

Gorgeous heirloom eggplants ran out the door at last week’s Feast Markets, and will make an appearance again this week.

The exact lineage of Feast Farm’s pair of pigs is somewhat doubtful, but they look like Berkshires to me, which is Britain’s oldest pig breed, originating from Berkshire county (now Oxfordshire). I’m just thrilled with the job our pair are doing moving the grass at Warwick Park. As well as preparing the ground, we planted over 40 trees along the Southern fence line line here last Sunday to help create a wind break and bring small birds to the new garden. Bring on spring!

Pigs at Foxground doing a great job of moving the grass

Purple perfect

Inspired by the first purple cauliflower in Feast Farm’s Seven Cedars garden, we had great fun this week with all edible purples. Pam kindly modeled our display as she was so appropriately dressed!

Pat in Berry with our display of purples…

Like all good fresh fruits and vegetables, these are not only chock-full of vitamins & minerals, but also naturally occurring phytochemicals which are responsible for the rich, vibrant colors of plant foods. Phytochemicals help safeguard the health of plants by protecting them from a variety of environmental toxins and stressors, including insects, ultraviolet radiation from the sun and disease-causing fungi. Scientists believe the beneficial compounds in plants can provide similar protection to the humans who eat them on a regular basis.

Vibrant violet and wet with rain.

Anthocyanins are the particular phyochemical responsible for the vibrant purple colors of ripe blueberries, cherries, black currants, rhubarb, beetroot and eggplants. Apparently, in humans, anthocyanins have been shown to boost levels of brain chemicals that influence memory and learning, promote healthy aging of the eyes, possess potent anti-inflammatory properties useful in the prevention and treatment of arthritis and other degenerative diseases, and a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that anthocyanins have powerful cancer-fighting potential. Wow!.. all those brains and good looks too!

Like a pig in…

The dream is a tractor. A red one. And a trailer with all the custom tools and bed forming attachments. A motor that hums along perfectly aligned rows of rich, black soil. Effortlessly nurturing and manicuring my productive, organic Feast Farm. There’s going to have to be a lot of veggies sold before that day though, and in the meantime, these guys are going to give me a hand.

What a bit of fun! The little sounds these 7 week old boys make are sooooo cute! They seem to love their new, cosy little home, which will be moved across the paddock as they finish digging under the grass and snuffling through the surface of the soil. Piggy tractors. I could stand and watch them for hours. Like a pig in mud.