A Farmer's Best Friend

Cari is a farm dog. An ebony coloured kelpie. She isn’t comfortable in town. Or in the house. She likes to roll in muck and eat pig poo and chew on enormous bones I get from the butcher. She’s...

Slow Cooking

There’s something marvellous about winter cooking. The fact that you can use tougher cuts of meat, those bits with more inherent flavour, and braise them down to unimaginable softness. When you add ...

Turkish Delight

My apologies to the turkeys. Yes, I did find you creepy. I did find it difficult, having to show you where to find your food in the morning. Every morning. I did sometimes resent having to herd you...

A Potentially Perilous Lunch

Lunch. An amazing lunch. It started as an idea for Rare Food, Ross’s and my stall at the market. But the space we wanted to use was unsuitable, the logistics too great. Where to host it? How many...

Milking Maggie

I started milking Maggie. What a joy. A classic, leggy jersey house-cow, Maggie is well trained to come into a barn forwards, and leave it backwards. She’s been trained to go the toilet before she...

Drought? What drought?

Winter. No kidding. This is cold. It barely makes it above 10°C many days. I bought some merino thermals. The smartest purchase in years.

It’s not the cold that worries me. It’s the...

Reaping the Rewards

Frost fills the valley, thick, white frost, which fits the cliché: a blanket. It swaddles the grass around the creek bed and sits fat and thick on the lawn. The cold freezes the cow trough, the...

A Good Little Cooker

I have a cooker. A woodfired, cast iron, cream country farmhouse cooker. It’s a bloody beauty, all old fashioned technology matched with robust doors, a flat top for cooking on and all the hot...

The Cull of the Wild

It’s taken many weeks of buying seed and sourcing ‘starter crumble’ and nurturing them, and I mostly want my chickens for eggs. Some people say I should cull my roosters before they begin...

Maggie Mooves In

Maggie has arrived. While I loved getting the chooks, adore the pigs, am still totally ambivalent about the turkeys, and can’t imagine life without the dog, Maggie is another thing altogether. A...