26 Saturday Mar 2022
Posted in art & craft, ecology, food, regeneration, weeds
Tags
ecology, farm, permaculture, rapistrum rugosum, revegetation, southwestern Fleurieu, trees, weeds
Well, it’s a pretty niche topic for a comic, but with some recent time at home, Joel’s been working on this illustrated tale of our relationship with a particular weed: Rapistrum rugosum, or as it’s fondly and commonly known, turnip weed, giant mustard or bastard cabbage.
2022 also marks 10 years of our work with this patch of ground, so perhaps there are more comics to come! Enjoy!
16 Tuesday Jul 2019
Posted in events, food, livestock, regeneration
Tags
agrarian, conference, deep winter, ecology, farm, farming, Fleurieu, Fleurieu Coast, food, gathering, livestock, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, soil, winter
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.
25 Tuesday Apr 2017
Tags
clay, dryland, farm, Fleurieu Coast, horticulture, orchard, orchard establishment, permaculture, rain, soil, soil preparation, southwestern Fleurieu, tools
We’ve always been excited about fruit and nut trees. However, with our erosive, heavy clay soils we felt that the standard method of deep ripping for orchard preparation seemed inappropriate for our circumstances. Instead, with some research, we thought we’d experiment with a mounded method, building soil up on contour to catch rainwater while improving soil structure from the top down.
Wrestling the rotary hoe for the first till of the soil.
We began with constructing a shortlist of common species that are likely to be successful in our climate and soil type. Our intention is to construct a series of small-scale, experimental plantings around the farm before scaling up the most successful species and soil preparation methods. Continue reading
18 Sunday Sep 2016
After a year or two building up our experimental flock of climate-resilient sheep, it’s time for another meat harvest. This October, we’ll be offering cuts from a selection of one-year-old lamb and hogget, together with some mouth-watering mutton. (For those of you who need convincing on the delights of mutton, look no further than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who describes mutton as the beef of the sheep world, or fellow foodie Sophie Grigson who gushes that mutton is “beautifully tender, firm-grained, and with a rich but not aggressive flavour,” offering, in comparison to lamb, “more depth of flavour, a more complex rounded taste, more ‘umami’, if you like.”)
All of our sheep are born, raised, grazed, and slaughtered on the Fleurieu Peninsula, and this year will be butchered by the team at Normanville Meat and Seafood. Each cut ordered will be vacuum-packed and delivered in refrigerated luxury to your door at the end of October (assuming you live in Adelaide or surrounds).
In an effort to utilise as much of the beast as possible, once again, we’ll also be enlisting Tony Scott of Southern Tanners, Port Elliot, to tan their delicately mottled hides. These hides will be available later in the year for all your home decor or artisanal urges. Stay tuned.
If you’d like to put in an order, drop us an email at yarnauwi[at]gmail.com, and we’ll send you all the details!
Hides available later in 2016
02 Monday Feb 2015
We celebrated our first sheep harvest with Snag-a-Palooza, our inaugural sausage-making fiesta. An entire beast was put through the mincer, so we invited a number of mutton-connoisseurs and aspiring snag-o-nauts to come and belt out some bangers. With several sausage fillers on the go, including a couple of 5kg hand-cranked machines hired from a butcher, the group made short work of the meat and had a vast amount of sausages ready in time for a barbeque lunch. Despite having armfuls of library books to prime ourselves, there were a few handy tricks we developed over the day to make the sausage-making a little smoother:
Guiding fresh sausage into its spiral.
22 Thursday Jan 2015
Tags
A mutton and lentil stew, with mutton consumed.
Back in December, we conducted our first slaughter from our flock, selecting some of our more senior ewes and a handful of lambs to be dispatched at the local meatworks. We’ve discovered a great deal of buried enthusiasm for the merits of good mutton. From the likes of Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall and Prince Charles with their Mutton Renaissance campaign, to various friends who fondly recalled being raised on the more mature meat.
At its best, mutton is renowned for being a fine grained meat, with a complexity of flavour reflective of its diversity of forage. With Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall describing mutton as the beef of the sheep world, fellow foodie Sophie Grigson has gushed over mutton as “beautifully tender, firm-grained, and with a rich but not aggressive flavour,” offering, in comparison to lamb, “more depth of flavour, a more complex rounded taste, more ‘umami’, if you like.” Continue reading
16 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in food, livestock, Uncategorized
Our first lambing season has come to an end, with four boy and four girl lambs gracing our paddocks. All our ewes birthed successfully and recovered well for which we are proud (none were first-time mothers). Our two alpacas have done a great job at keeping foxes away from the lambs, making this freaky high pitched ululation when even a small elderly house dog sets foot on the property in a car with its owner! We’ve kept mothers and lambs together so that mothers can pass on their nutritional wisdom, and to self-wean whenever they choose to.
Asha, Simon and Joel wrangle lambs in our moveable sheepyards
Even though we completed an excellent NRM sheep course, we’ve had to largely teach ourselves how to do a range of lambing operations. We’ve docked all the tails, given two rounds of vaccinations, tagged their ears, and castrated the boys (this was a real challenge!) Thanks to Simon, Asha and Rob who were guest sheep wranglers at various points, and without whom we would have struggled to complete the jobs.
Continue reading
24 Monday Nov 2014
Tags
design, events, farm, Fleurieu, logo, market garden, permaculture, seeds, soil, vegetables, Village Greens
I’ve recently been working with Village Greens, a dream-team of young growers and permaculturalists, developing their logo and crowd-funding video. They’re establishing a sustainable, human-scale market garden in Aldinga, on the southern rim of Adelaide, and the northern expanse of the Fleurieu Peninsula. One of the ring leaders, Nat Wiseman, is a great friend of our farm, and has hauled junk or scythed thistles on more than one occasion!
The Village Greens team have negotiated access to an acre of land in the Aldinga Arts EcoVillage, and with their wealth of experience and enthusiasm are poised to transform it into a thriving market garden. Their crowd-funding campaign has kicked off and they’re currently seeking support to meet one-off infrastructure costs so they can get growing. Check out how you can support them here. Continue reading
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Tags
Taking a kip.
With the last blast of winter, our small flock has had its first new birth. Both ewe and lamb are healthy, with the mother appropriately protective of her new charge, huffing and hoof-stomping whenever we wander too close and carefully keeping apart from the flock. Continue reading
14 Tuesday Jan 2014
You may be wondering where the cheese part comes in to Trees, Bees and Cheese. One of our plans is to eventually run dairy sheep and have a small-scale artisanal cheese business, to complement the other income streams on a diverse farm. But in the meantime, we are busy honing and expanding our cheese-making skills.
Our first camembert, ready to eat.
After learning how to make haloumi, ricotta, and goat curd from Lulu of Culinary Art Productions, and teaching ourselves a modern camembert from Cheeselinks‘ book Home Cheesemaking, the next cheesemaking frontier has been good old child-friendly mozzarella. Continue reading
Yarnauwi Farm 