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Watch VideoGourmet Farmer
Matthew Evans
Ever wondered what it’d be like to leave a cushy city job and set up a small farm without any experience of rural life? Join Matthew Evans as he adjusts from being a restaurant critic to learning exactly where his food is coming from, on a farmlet in Tasmania’s beautiful Huon Valley.
Matthew Evans was once trained as a chef, before crossing to the dark side of the industry and becoming a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2,000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, Matthew realised that chefs don’t have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he’s raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.
Water for novices
3 CommentsWater. Take a look around every paddock, every time you’re in the country, and you might not even see the water. But each paddock, each field, usually has a source of water, if not for livestock, then for crops. Under the earth and along fence lines are countless kilometres of pipe, feeding into baths and troughs, some gravity fed, some using a siphon, some connected to pumps, and most work on a float valve, the kind of thing that sits in your cistern above your dunny and allows the water to...
Too wet to bale
They say that when you stack hay too wet, it can heat up. If it’s stacked tightly, it can heat up a lot and, with the introduction of oxygen, spontaneously combust. Not a great thought to have when picking up heavy, occasionally green, sometimes quite wet-feeling hay on Christmas Eve. Not a pleasant thought at all.
Feels like Christmas
Growth. Abundance. The full flush of the season. I stand in awe of the bounty in the garden. Purple-podded peas, fat in their shells. Sweet green peas, sugar snaps, broad beans, artichokes (well, a couple). Sure, the asparagus has been let go to fronds and the tomatoes are a mere fantasy on the vine at this stage, but everywhere else there’s stuff growing to maturity. Plants adore daylight as well as warmth, and while we don’t get super hot or even very warm springs, the garden looks amazing.
A Farmer’s Dictionary
We’re in process of setting up 70 acres as a mixed farm, haemorrhaging money and failing to meet all our self-set deadlines. Here are a few things I’ve learnt since moving to Puggle Farm and working on the new place.
A mother's instinct
I think it was Henry Lawson who described it best. A sound short, sharp and terrible. The sound of an anxious mother calling for her child. I heard Sadie from the house. A voice worried and piercing enough to raise the hairs on every part of this jaded food writer’s body. We have a fairly child-safe house block, well fenced and secure. But Hedley had discovered a way out of the yard, by sneaking through the chicken coop, and had headed down towards the creek while we were doing chores.
The misadventures of Peter Pan
It took a bit longer than a day. For the two of us. Longer than a day to replace the shelter that Peter Pan the boar smashed to the ground, and it cost about $100 in salvaged tip shop timber and corrugated iron. More in timber from around here and a mate’s. Screws, nails, and petrol not included.
Where the grass is greener
Cows only have bottom teeth. They swipe their thick, coarse tongue over a swathe of grass, curl it around and chomp it off using the teeth and a hard pad on the upper jaw. With this quick, efficient action, a cow can graze quite happily for about 10 hours or so a day, walking forwards past the eaten graze to fresh grass further afield.
This is paradise
A first lamb of the year. A new fence. More land. More work. Wood still to split in the barnyard. Tomato seedlings that, worryingly, don’t seem to have grown much in the last few days. A hole in the ozone that means a searing sun even when the air is only 13°C. Lots of eggs. Rhubarb again. Flowers on the apple trees and bees everywhere.
Featured Food & Recipes
Hot Tips
Baking powder vs baking soda
You can substitute baking soda for baking powder (but not vice versa) with the addition of cream of tartar. Simply mix two parts cream of tartar with one part baking soda.
Glossary
Beans
Beans (frijoles) - Pinto and Black turtle beans are the main types. Black turtle beans are used to make refried beans.
