Wed 3 Dec 2008 | 
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Enlarge textIn the past week, we have been back in the vineyard again.
As the long dry continues in Victoria, we are tidying up the vines by reducing the number of new shoots and fruit bunches. We have no water for our vines, so we do what we can to help them through the summer.
topOf Mothers and Babies
We wake most days to the plaintiff and mournful moo of our little steer calves. We are weaning again. In past years, I have failed miserably at the task of weaning our animals. Our first weaners were a bunch of Angus steers. Of course, we didn’t know they were weaners. We didn’t know what “weaner” meant.
We thought they were cute little cuddly black cows. Surely they were too small to be hard to handle. Within a month, these babies, who had been sold at the market straight off their mothers, had caused us untold dramas.
We didn’t plant the olives. They were there when we bought the place. Mind you, we had to look hard to find them. Just sticks, about thirty centimetres long with a couple of leaves hanging from the tip, they were buried amongst long, spring grass. Kangaroos, and God knows what else, had been eating them.
As I had planted the vineyard close to these olive trees, I had an interest in them growing. I hoped they would one day provide protection from the strong southerly winds. So Christina and I got down on bended knees and weeded them and put tree protectors around them. We heaped some cow manure around their bases. We stupidly disposed of any identification tags that remained. Then we sat back and expected it all to happen.
Just over a year ago, a mate and I got bored watching the Cats thrash Port Adelaide in the Grand Final, so we went outside and started "the wood-fired oven project".
First stage was to remove a 5000-gallon water tank that stood beside the house. We relocated it to behind the shed and the flat and round hole it left was the perfect size for the wood-fired oven I had always wanted to build.
Meditations on the Stock Market
As the global economy takes a nose dive, David Shennan gets a crash course in trading on the 'other' stock market.
I took some steers to the stock market in Kyneton recently. We were re-balancing our stock portfolio. Getting out of the sub-prime steers, which we used to mow the grass, and getting into prime breeding stock. We wanted to breed cattle for our own consumption, rather than rely on the ups and downs of the unregulated market from which we were purchasing.
I lined up on a cold and foggy Saturday morning in the car park of our local farm produce store to buy some trout fingerlings. The twenty we put in a couple of years ago had grown well, so we decided to put another twenty.
Our dam, back then, was still full of water. Today, after another couple of years of drought, the level is much lower. We know the trout are still in there. An uncle caught one recently, and he was a big, hook-jawed monster. The uncle threw him back.
Smoking our own farm produce has been an adventure. If you do a quick Google search on smoking meat at home, you will find hundreds of suggestions.
The simplest method for smoking your own produce is to “hot smoke”. With hot smoking, you actually cook the produce. With cold smoking, the idea is to cure the food with salt, then smoke at a low enough temperature to not cook the food. The result is more delicate and way more delicious.
A couple of colleagues of mine are both new Australians. Frankie and Suzanne are immigrants from different parts of the United Kingdom. When I told them I was trying my hand at making bacon, they both wanted to taste it.
“You can’t get bacon in Australia like the bacon we had at home,” they cried. Like young Australians abroad craving Vegemite, these young, urbane English are craving smoky, streaky bacon.
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About this Blog
Quality farm produce from a city slicker family? Follow this entertaining journey of sustainability and struggle at the end of a country lane.
David Shennan David continues to work in the city after moving his family to a small country property. His wife calls him "a weekender" who swaps gabardine for gumboots. It's the struggle he must endure to strive for the perfect ham from the perfect pig.
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