A busy month.

Been a busy month. A few weeks back I went over to Tolga and picked up our new hot house. It was still standing and I helped the owner and his crew of hapless backpackers carefully pull the structure down. There were about ten sections, each fifty metres long to be disassembled and it was hot, hard work. Nevertheless I am glad I did help as I have a much better idea of how to reassemble it. I plan to cover the veggie garden under two side by side sections each sixteen metres long. In order to do this I will have to level the veggie garden and terrace the lower end. A big job but I know a good man with a big digger that should make short work of the job.
God willing I will have it done before the wet season.

The hot house components stacked in the stockyard.

The drawback to the whole plan is that I have not planted out the winter crops and the veggie garden is currently a grass patch. Not only are we missing our own veg but I am going into severe gardening withdrawal. Damn but I need my veggie garden.

A well deserved rest after a hard mornings eating and sleeping.

What else? Well the remaining two pigs are HUGE now. They still have a month to go before slaughter and we are stuffing them with all the food they can eat until the last week. Then they will only get a diet of soaked corn as this ensures the fat hardens up. Important for bacon and ham. I have grown tired of boiling potatoes in the kitchen twice a day so I made a boiler from an old gas bottle I found on the dump. This goes over a fire outside and can hold two big feeds worth of potatoes in one hit. I am thinking of eventually making a boiler shed on the site with a brick stove for the boiler pot and a covered wood store. This will allow the cooking of potatoes throughout the wet season without too much trouble.

The temporary boiler set up. Blocks form the firebox
and the tank in the background keeps the firewood dry

Two weeks ago the turkey hen went missing for most of the day only turning up for a quick feed in the afternoon. Sure enough we eventually found her hidden in the bluetop under the lime tree on a nest of seven eggs. Not bad for a first clutch and she is sitting firmly. The duck also began disappearing for most of the day and we found her on a nest of some eighteen or so eggs. I am not sure she is sitting though. It is also her first time and she might need some practise before she brings off a clutch yet. I am thinking of stealing half of the eggs and putting them in the incubator.

The duck nesting in a pile of sticks.
 I have no idea how she gets in there.

The turkey hen on her nest. She is insisting that I actually cannot see her.

The weather has turned cold. It looks like we will get a good winter. I like a cold winter. It kills off most of the nasties in the garden and knocks the cane toads about. Today we all went out and took the tractor and trailer into the bottom paddock to load up with firewood that I cut down a year ago. We used to have lychee orchard on the place. It must have once looked like a good idea to whoever planted it but it was of no use to us. The trees only seem to fruit every second year and we would never have harvested more than a bucket of fruit from some eighty trees. However, they do make good firewood. So we loaded cut timber into the trailer and took it up to the house. There I hauled the band saw out into the turnaround and we sawed the timber into billets for the fire and a stock of timber for the potato boiler. It was hard work but fun and we had a good winters day outside.
There were a few weeks of late season rain last month. This was not so good as it meant the cold wet weather did not allow the grass in the fields to get the final flush before winter. As we have four cattle on the paddocks at the moment we will probably be running short of feed before spring. Not to worry though. I am scything excess grass in the house yard and orchard and this should see them through.

I came home last week to find Boris, our beef steer, in the front yard. The child bride had been doing the evening milking and got the fright of her life when she came back in. It looks like he managed to jump the fence into the orchard and then wandered into the house yard through the open orchard gate and couldn't find his way out. I had work the next day so we were forced to move him that night. I can tell you, chivvying a stroppy half tonne steer in the darkness is no picnic. Out the cocky gate, up the road, into the driveway and then through the gate into the top paddock. Of course he wanted to make changes to the route and took off up the road in the darkness and then into the bush across the road on the neighbours place. Much bad language echoing off the mountains in the moonlight.

Pig to pork

The time has come for the first of the pigs to "come inside" as the euphemism goes. That is to say, be promoted from pig to pork.

Using the unfinished chook shed, the weather was a bit too mucky to be outside.

Table for scraping in the foreground. Wood pile for the boiler on the left.
Boiler, a half 44 gallon drum over the fire, in the background.
Gambrel for hoisting the carcasse on the right.

So a few days ago I got together with a couple of good friends to do the deed. Now normally I am happy enough to do slaughter by myself but with a pig I find I need extra hands. You see a pig needs to be scalded and scraped if it is to be really properly slaughtered. This involves heating up a big tub of water and dunking the carcasse which is not as easy as it sounds. Especially when the pig weighs in at over one hundred kilos. Funny how the mind can play tricks, they look much smaller running around the paddock than they do when you have to lift it into the wheelbarrow. It took three large men to lift it.

Too big for the bath, Hmmm should've thought of that earlier.

We tied the legs together to make lifting easier and lowered it into the water. Then after the prescribed time we raised the carcasse onto the table to be scraped down. Scraping removes all of the bristles as well as the outer layer of skin. No matter what colour your piggie started out as he will become pink all over after being scraped.

Scraping using tin pot lids. Not very high tech but it works.

As it turns out the scraping did not go as well as I had hoped. I had made the water hotter than it should have been and so we lost some of the skin altogether. Bummer. Made no difference to the meat but looks bad. Then we hung the carcasse on the gambrel to take out the plumbing (guts) and cut it down the centre. A chainsaw works well for this although the real experts can do it neatly with a cleaver. I am not an expert. From the offal we keep the liver for liverwurst and the kidneys for breakfast. I also use the opportunity to check for parasites and to ensure the animal is healthy. In this case the kidneys were clean as a whistle. If you are really enthusiastic you can clean the intestines to use as sausage casings. I buy mine from the butcher (the only thing I buy from the butcher) ready cleaned and salted.

We then put the two sides into the cold room at a friends place (ours is not complete yet) for a few days rest.

Yesterday I picked up the sides and broke them down into cuts, roasts and mince. This morning we had some really excellent pork chops for breakfast. The meat is firm but tender and richly flavoured as good pork should be. It is completely unlike the white, soggy and somewhat tasteless meat of the chemically fattened victims available in the supermarket!

I was at the feed store this morning and I happened to notice a phamplet advertising different pig feed products. It claimed that with their feeds (full of growth additives and hormones) you could raise a pig to one hundred kilos in just twenty-two weeks. I laughed out loud. My pigs are over one hundred kilos in the same time on a diet of millrun, corn and free range pasture. We add some potatoes, skim milk from the cow and vegetable scraps from the garden and that is it! Not a single trace of growth additive or hormone ever, yet we produce better pork. 

Serendipity and Cold Rooms.

Beginning the layout or "will it actually fit where I want it"?

Here is one of the latest big purchases. Finally we will be able to properly store our produce. Mostly this will mean hanging meat after slaughter as well as curing hams and bacon. Until now we have been forced to hire or use someone else's cold room. This has made the cost of our food a lot higher than it really needs to be. It also means that the meat is not as good as it should be. Beef, properly aged, should be hung for two to three weeks and at over $100 per week to hire a cold room it gets hung for a lot less I can tell you.
So we went to a rural garage sale a few weeks ago. This is an experience I recommend. No tables of old Cd's and baby clothes, No this sale had tractor parts and attachments, workshop tools and cultivating equipment, trays for Utes and even hot housing large enough to drive a tractor in which came in fifty metre sections. Now this was my sort of sale.
We actually went to have a look at the hot houses and did indeed end up buying a fifty metre section although that is a story for a future post. So we looked at attachments for tractors and seed drills as well as a rather nice chopper motorbike which the littlest cloud farmer was most impressed with. Then as we were saying our goodbyes and doing the ritual shaking of hands, the child bride spotted a piece of cardboard from a beer carton pinned to the wall as a sign.
It simply said "cold room. fairly large. $4000".
Now we have been trying in vain to find a cold room, fairly large, for under $7000 for some time now so you can imagine our interest. To find one locally that we can avoid having to pay freight on is even better. Not surprisingly, we promptly bought it after a quick look to ensure it was indeed a cold room and that it was fairly large.

Progressing. The body is mostly complete.

Now the challenge of assembling it began. It was already disassembled when we bought it and I could only get a rough idea of its layout from the owner. This meant it was sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle when you have no idea what the end picture is supposed to look like.
Nevertheless I have managed to work it out without too much trouble as you can see above. In any case I will surely post more pics of it soon. Probably with the chilling carcasses of some tasty pigs hanging in it.

On Terra preta again.

Jim raised a good question regards the last post:

Ulf, I am wondering why you say you are just doing the "Terra pretta" treatment for a couple of seasons while I understand the traditional Amazons seem to do it most years in the same area of their gardens.
In recent months I have had a couple of fires going to boil water and as soon as I was finished I was able to pour water over the remains of the fires and both times ended up with a bucket or so of "clinky" sounding charcoal. It is in the interow area of the garden so hope it is doing good for the vegies.
We also live in an area where we rely on indoor winter fires for heating. We keep over burning our fire box day after day and end up with just white ash. I know others in this area who insist on emptying out their fire boxes daily, and in so doing throw out a lot of charcoal and they just dump it, throwing away a valuable garden resource.


In principle the charcoal puts a layer of carbon into the soil which in turn creates an environment for the bacteria that create Terra preta. Even though the charcoal will be gone in a decade or so, the soil will be changed and become self renewing. Tests have shown that when black soil is removed from the beds in the amazon it actually grows back over time.
I suspect the annual burning by the Indian peoples in the amazon was to gradually enlarge the beds each year rather than continue enriching the same beds. I was not aware of any of the peoples living in the Amazon still creating these beds. I note that many of the original beds were very deep, sometimes over six feet deep! This would require a lot of burning indeed. Possibly this meant a concentrated effort for several seasons in the same area.
In reading about the old ways of farming I constantly find references to farmers using the ash from the fire in their fields. White ash yields potash of course and the charcoal enriches the soil as described above. To throw it out would be a dreadful waste. Perhaps your neighbours would give you their ash if they are not going to put it to good use?
One very interesting old process describes layering the white ash from the fireplace with chicken manure in barrels over the course of winter. Come spring this is then broadcast over the fields for a sort of super mineral compost. Apparently the time it has to age together increases its potency. I will really have to try this sometime!

Terra Preta

It is said that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic to those who do not understand it.
There is an ancient magic trick used by the Indians of the Amazon. Black earth known as “Terra Preta”. In essence, nutrients in the soil will bond to charcoal and retain the soils fertility. Even in the wet tropics of the Amazon there are garden beds over two thousand years old that are good enough to plough and grow in today. Now this, I contend, is an ancient piece of technology that smacks of sheer bloody brilliance! And we, with all of our soul destroying civilizations, have not until just recently really understood this. Therefore magic.

Over winter I burned tonnes of cuttings from the old lychee orchard to make charcoal. Hard but satisfying work that smacks of this wizardry. You light a big fire in a deep pit and when it is hot enough, cover it and bury well. Working by the light and heat of the fire in the darkness and cold of a winter night was a surreal experience. There is a particular scent of burning charcoal that is unlike any wood fire, it stays with you. Unearth this in a couple of days when cool enough, and there is a rich haul of charcoal. Not ash you understand but hard, grey charcoal that will musically clink and ring when shovelled. And how we shovelled, but it was worth it and will have a lasting effect on that garden where it has been spread. I will burn charcoal again next winter but after that never more. There will then be enough buried in the garden that it will change the soil for hundreds of years to come. Fertility that our grandchildren can use.

The soil has become a thing of life and richness. Originally red and leached by the rains of the wet season, it has become darker and has a rich humus-like scent. In winter I dug in huge grey loads of charcoal, spread a tonne of wet straw and poured black peaty compost into the soil by the barrow load. And then soil changed as if by some magic trick. In a matter of days there was a different scent and feel. Everything I have planted has a darker and richer colour this year and grows so much faster. There is a saying that you become part of the soil as it becomes part of you. I understand that now. I have put much of myself into this garden and it feeds us, body and soul, in return.

I must be getting old.

Well I hurt in just about every muscle in my body. Hell I even hurt in muscles I have just discovered I have. I must be getting old.

Still have to put the wall and mesh on but you get the idea.

Yesterday I put the roof on the new chook shed. Today I cut the roof ends back to length and installed some bracing underneath. Now when I was a young feller I would not have even considered this a days work.
Seriously.
For example, one of the first jobs I had was working in a flour mill. I was nineteen and worked filling and shifting bags of millrun, pollard, bran and semolina. The big bags weighed fifty-five kilos (121 pounds for the metrically challenged) and the small bags were only forty kilos (88 pounds). Each man would manually lift and stack at least twenty five tonnes of these per day. If we had to load shipping containers, we would be shifting the flour in eighty kilo (176 pound) sacks. We considered these heavy.
When I buy stock feed these days I notice almost nothing is over twenty kilos. I suppose the nanny state has decided people just aren't as strong as they used to be. The young man serving me was aghast when I loaded the forty kilo sacks of millrun (the heaviest thing the sell these days) on my own. He was of the belief they took two men to lift. He says they will not be packing the millrun in the forty kilo bags for much longer because they are "too dangerous to lift".
See, I am definitely getting old. That was an old mans grizzle about young folks these days.
Anyway, It will be a good chook shed. Well worth the aches and pains.

We had a brilliant sunset to make me feel better. I took these shots when I was out doing the milking.

Now having a view like this as you quietly milk the cow is really something I value. The sounds of the day have almost ceased as the dusk settles. I can hear a few last calls from the big cockatoos in the rainforest and the chickens are making that soft sleepy clucking sound as they settle down. I can hear the pigs rustling in their hay as they make their beds for the evening and the gentle hiss of the milk hitting the bucket. Very Zen and a wonderful end to the day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

The Veggie garden.

Looking down the rows. Leeks on the left, cabbage centre and Kale right.

The veggie garden is one of my favourite places. I enjoy pottering about whenever I have a few spare minutes. Pulling out weeds, checking the growth and snacking on peas. The changing seasons are felt here more than any other part of the farm. The garden has a cycle repeated each year. I am constantly tweaking it with small changes each season. Bit by bit as I learn more this tweaking is paying off and the garden is producing more and better food each year.

Fiesta chillies. My favourite.

The start of the year, as far as the garden is concerned, is the winter planting. To get ready for this we slash the garden after the wet season and turn it over. This is when I will empty the compost heaps onto the garden and add lime. In the tropics it is rare to find any of the "no-dig" adherents with a garden large enough to really produce food. Out of simple self defence against the rampant tropical growth we are forced to turn the soil twice a year. It is the only form of realistic weed control without spraying poisons everywhere. So we instead use the wet season growth as a green manure and turn it in each year.

This is a wheel hoe. It really makes a difference when weeding between rows.

The garden beds are then laid out. I have a four bed rotation system so that each year the whole garden rotates anti clockwise by one plot. This means that nothing will be grown in the same plot more than once in four years. Obviously we can only grow the annuals in these plots. Perennial plants are grown in the borders around the garden perimeter where they act as windbreaks and grass barrier. Our plot rotation is in this order,

1. Root vegetables
2. Legumes
3. Brassicas
4. General bed for anything that does not fall into the above categories.

Originally we only manured plot 1 each year and there is nothing wrong with doing this but I simply had a lot of excess compost to use and so I spread it around the whole area now. The only exception is if I am planting something that likes old manured soil, like garlic, that will not do well on fresh compost.
So to get back to the winter planting. After the beds are prepared we plant everything that likes to grow in the cooler part of the year. Peas, Cabbage, Kale, lettuce, Leeks, Potatoes (if we are growing them, we live in a potato growing district and I can easily buy large quantities of cheap potatoes), Jerusalem artichoke, silver beet, Carrots, Shallots, Radish, Turnip and garlic. I usually grow several different varieties of each and as time goes by I learn what likes our climate and soil. There is a lot of excess and this goes to the pigs or other livestock. Nothing is wasted.
As the weather warms up we enter the warm-dry season (as opposed to the monsoon or wet season at the end of summer, we don't really have a spring or autumn here) and we put in the second planting. Beetroot, Cabbage, Carrots, Cucumber, Zucchini, Beans, Lettuce, Sweet potato, Bok-choi, Radish, Okra, Pumpkin and Tomato.
We then enter the wet season. This time of year is a rush to get the water loving plants to harvest before we lose the garden to weeds. They grow too quickly to hand weed effectively and it is far too boggy to get the tractor in to turn it over. So I fight a retreat until the last harvest is out and then let it go to growth for a month. In some climates they have a downtime due to snow, here it is due to water. In the wet we will plant a bit more lettuce, carrots and sweet corn which loves water. Then we are back to the winter preparation and planting again.

NOT a staged shot. I just took a picture of the basket one night before dinner.

Our single biggest problem is obviously the volume of rain we get. We live in one of the wettest places in Australia if not the wettest.
For example

• 2007 had 4250mm / 13.94 feet of rain
• 2008 had 3953mm / 12.96 Ft
• 2009 had 3286mm / 10.78 Ft - a bit dry that year...
• 2010 had 4330mm / 14.20 Ft
• 2011, well I need to add up the diary entries still but I can say it will be the wettest by far. We experienced a six month, wet season! It rained nearly solidly for half the year!

So obviously we are looking into somehow obtaining a secondhand industrial greenhouse to cover the garden. This way we can control the amount of water hitting the garden. We will also be able to reduce the amount of nutrient leached out of the soil which should have a big impact on the garden.