Author Archives: Joel

Nine years of tree planting

13 Sunday Jun 2021

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Yarnauwi, after the first year of planting, Winter 2013

Nine years ago, our community of friends and family stepped onto a soggy and windswept paddock and began their first year of tree-planting at Yarnauwi. Despite the disappointment of early failures, they’ve returned every winter since and in 2021 our friends returned again, taking the tally of trees and shrubs planted to almost 7800 since 2013.

After planting about 1000 trees a year for the first few years, we now have the luxury of reducing our plantings to a few hundred, filling in gaps and tweaking projects. This year, the focus was on developing a shelter and habitat belt around the front paddock and filling gaps in the emerging woodland of our “wilderness zones”. In honour of long-time friend-of-the-farm Anthony, currently constrained by lockdown interstate, we also planted several rows of Old Man Saltbush on contour through our silvopasture block.

Planting kicks off in 2021, looking in the same direction as the photo above.

Over the last nine years we’ve learnt a lot. With the right guards (corflute for humidity, mallee mesh for kangaroo protection) we’ve significantly increased the survival rate (from almost 0 to about 70-80%) without supplementary watering. Although we still have plenty to learn, we’ve learnt much more about reading soil and aspect, and matching the right plants to the right spots. After a subdued, Covidian planting last year, it was wonderful to welcome volunteers back to Yarnauwi and for the first time, there were moments when it felt like working in a woodland, rather than the open paddock of almost a decade ago.

We’re so grateful to our friends and family for their support and belief in the future. We look forward to seeing what the next nine years may bring.

Digging a spot for a new tree in the emerging woodland.
The 2021 Tree Crew

Fleurieu history: Imagining landscape change

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in ecology, events, exploring, history, planning, regeneration, trees, waterways

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In March 2020, Joel was invited to present to the Yankalilla & District Historical Society on our research into how the landscape of the Fleurieu has changed over the last few centuries. Below is an edited version of the talk. If you’re interested in knowing more, we can also send you some links to interesting historical images from the colonial period. Any errors are our own – let us know if you have any questions or comments.

In 2012, my wife Sophie and I, with our children Asher and Annika purchased Yarnauwi, just outside of Second Valley. Our property is just under 50 acres, running between South Road and the Wirrina golf course, and over the last seven years with the generous support of our friends, neighbours and family we’ve worked to regenerate this patch of the landscape.

Our property is intended to remain at least partly agricultural. We’re not seeking to return it to a prior state of imagined ecological perfection. As we’ve discovered through our research and through our experience of working with the land over the last seven years, too much has changed and is still changing to return what was there before colonisation.

Instead, we’re working to restore its health and function as a landscape, and to build its resilience in a changing climate. I’m neither an historian or a scientist, however we have spent a lot of time contemplating both history and science, and tonight I wanted to share with you some of what my wife Sophie and I have discovered in our process of working to regenerate Yarnauwi. Continue reading →

Yarnauwi (Virtual) Farm Tour 2020

09 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in events, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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There’s been so much growth and change at the farm over the last year that we really wanted to share with our team of volunteers and supporters. However, with everyone staying in their postcode this holiday weekend and farm tours suspended for the foreseeable future, we thought we’d put together a little video so you can still enjoy the big skies of the Fleurieu! Take care, and we hope to see you back under the trees soon!

Tiny communities

27 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by in ecology, regeneration, trees

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New growth on a red gum sapling.

We’ve been talking a bit recently about when a woodland becomes a woodland. Asher suggested 500 years of growth, but was willing to settle for 50. Perhaps it’s a woodland when the birds think so, when the firetails and blue wrens jump the boundary fence from neigbouring scrub and decide they’re safe flitting from branch to branch. As our earliest plantings grow taller than humans, and the canopies thicken and throw shade, we started noticing an increasing diversity of tiny life. Insects for whom a gum or wattle tree is their universe are finding their way across the paddocks to settle in the emerging plantings. Despite the heat and dry of summer, the trees are heaving with insect life. We recently saw the documentary The Biggest Little Farm about an idealistic (and evidently well-funded!) couple who start a diverse 200 acre farming project outside of Los Angeles. One of the messages of the film is that when you create the right conditions, nature finds a balance. As we walked through the saplings, on one, the new growth and leaves were being systematically devoured by small copper coloured beetles. We walked to the next tree, the copper beetles were present, but as we watched, were body slammed by wasps and carried away. At the next, the beetles had been busy, but now a spider had arrived, and was meticulously wrapping the beetle population in silk. Perhaps these tiny communities are beginning to find the balance too.

Here’s a tour of some of the life on the trees – we’d love your help with identification!

Beetle eats leaf.

Spider eats beetle.

Ants farm aphids on an Acacia.

A huntsman and egg sac.

Leafhopper, with comrades.

Two-spotted cup moth caterpillar.

Case moth cocoon, constructed from silk and twigs.

Ants on twisty leaves. What’s going on?!

Wasp galls on a golden wattle.

Year of Fire: Annual Report 2020

27 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by in ecology, planning, regeneration, trees, waterways

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A melted tree guard shrink wraps a seedling after a fire move through part of the property in January 2019.

2019 began and ended in fire. In early January, some errant fireworks set off by passers-by landed in one of our front paddocks, burning across a couple of hectares of our property. We were lucky. There was little wind, and it was quickly noticed and contained by our amazing neighbours and the CFS. Meanwhile, in Tasmania, fires ripped through the forests, and by spring and early summer, vast tracts of the east coast and Kangaroo Island were catastrophically aflame once again. While we’ve escaped the drought and bushfires that have gripped so much of the continent, these phenomena have served to focus our goals and aspirations in 2019. It’s been a year of learning as we work towards a more regenerative approach: ultimately building soil and harvesting water and carbon in the landscape.

2019 had the dubious distinction of being Australia’s hottest and driest year on record. It got pretty warm in the shed.

Learning
Our regenerative aspirations have been focused by some outstanding events this year. In June, we attended the Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering in Willunga, drawing together 150 aspiring and established regenerative farmers from around Australia to share skills and ideas. Former CSIRO microbiologist and climate scientist Walter Jehne set the tone with a rousing and inspirational keynote on restoring natural processes through agriculture to cool the climate.

The Food Forest’s Annemarie Brookman with Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis at Deep Winter, Willunga.

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Winter work: erosion control in dispersive soils

11 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in diy, ecology, regeneration, waterways

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Some of the challenges of our landscape regeneration efforts have been both working to restore eroded badlands in some parts of the property, as well as to arrest continuing erosion. To make matters more complex, some sections of the property have “dispersive” subsoil. While the topsoil is relatively stable, when the subsoil becomes saturated it dissolves and begins to move, hollowing out tunnels beneath the surface that ultimately collapse into sinkholes, and eventually gullies. Of course, because it’s all happening underground, tracking or predicting which areas are vulnerable, or already cavernous is tricky.

Over the last seven years, we’ve been gradually working our way around the property installing erosion control structures, based on the work of permaculture-based landscape restoration folk like Craig Sponholtz and Bill Zeedyk. Hailing from the dry southwest of North America, Sponholtz and Zeedyk advocate applying small and slow interventions that use local materials to slow water flows and gradually heal erosion. In the permaculture spirit of viewing problems as solutions, our junk-filled erosion gullies have provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of demolition rubble, concrete chunks and segments of brick walls that are ideal material for these structures.

This headcut just keeps moving, despite the perennial grasses and good ground cover.

One of the sections that we’ve avoided is a notorious headcut that our DIY soil tests showed us boasted slaking soil that disintegrates when moist and subsoil that was also more saline than other locations around the farm. With saline subsoil, most plants wanted to avoid getting their stabilising roots down. Tree-planting was also fraught, survival rates in the saline subsoil and cracking grey topsoil were low and  the very process of digging a small hole for a seedling can be enough to expose the subsoil so that next time there was a downpour, a sinkhole would open and swallow the seedling, tree guard and all. With the headcut moving about a metre a year and also widening, we thought it was time to get stuck in. At the very least, we’ve discovered that doing something is better than doing nothing and the act of getting in there and digging around allows for more accurate monitoring and effective intervention. Continue reading →

Deep Winter comes to the Fleurieu!

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in events, food, livestock, regeneration

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Joel dusted off his design degree to contribute a logo to the gathering.

Each winter since 2015, aspiring and established small-scale and regenerative farmers and their supporters and allies have gathered somewhere in Australia as part of the Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering to share ideas and inspiration for their projects and enterprises. In June 2019, this convergence drifted westwards to be held in Willunga, South Australia, and we were delighted to participate.

150 aspiring and established regenerative farmers, growers and their friends gathered in Willunga, SA, for the Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering.

The tone for the convergence was set with a keynote from former CSIRO microbiologist and climate scientist Walter Jehne, who spoke on the role and responsibility of rebuilding soil carbon and water cycles through agriculture and land management. Through his inspiring presentation, Jehne drew on indigenous land management as described in the work of Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe to also establish a precedent for the capacity of Australian soils to hold significant amounts of carbon and water.

Walter Jehne, in full flight.

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Yarnauwi Treefest 2019

10 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by in diy, ecology, regeneration, trees, waterways

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A serial tree-planter manages to synchronise his outfit with the colouring of Eucalyptus occidentalis.

A couple of days before this year’s tree planting, I rang our friend and regular tree-planter Jeremy, and told him that three out of four family members were sick with the flu and we were thinking of cancelling this year’s planting weekend. He didn’t accept that proposal, effectively telling us that tree planting would happen regardless of our involvement, that between his family and another they would take care of catering, rally the volunteers and get the trees in the ground.

It has always been an aspiration of ours that the farm might offer a place for people to be able to develop connection with the landscape through collaboration on land-based projects – “where people and the landscape can restore each other”. I hope that Jeremy’s response, and the support of our friends and community over the last seven years of tree-planting is an indication of this aspiration in development. In this spirit, this year we were also delighted to host regenerative side projects such as Steven Hoepfner’s seed ball regeneration experiment, and provide a waterway for Sue and David Speck’s sedges, and a forever home for Greg Wood’s trees.

Steven’s seed ball project: local provenance bundles of seed and nutrients distributed across revegetation zones to germinate when the conditions are right.

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Nightlife in the Country

08 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in art & craft, ecology, exploring

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A little while ago I received a motion camera, triggered by movement and able to shoot in complete darkness with an infra-red flash. I mounted it on a fence post, scattered some food scraps in front and left it for a week. Over the week it’s offered us a fascinating window into the life of the farm.

Curious kangaroo

Boxing match

The fight gets out of hand

Persistence is rewarded

Very curious kangaroo.

Unsurprisingly, the hordes of kangaroos feature heavily. They graze through the day and night, occasionally box, and one problem-solver has multiple attempts at reaching  the enticing leaves of a mesh-guarded sapling. Continue reading →