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Yarnauwi Farm

~ Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia

Yarnauwi Farm

Category Archives: waterways

Yarnauwi: the First Five Years

07 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by nopalito in art & craft, diy, ecology, events, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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art, books, design, ecology, history, illustration, photography, planning

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Towards the end of 2012 we first came to Yarnauwi Farm. The property at that time was a single paddock, carved up with junk-filled erosion gullies and with two regal, remnant red gums smeared up the hillside by the wind. However, set within a grand landscape of rolling hills and a couple of kilometres from the coast, there was something about it that captured our attention and our aspirations.

Five years later, the property is beginning to change. The survivors of annual tree planting are now heading skywards, most of the junk is gone, paddocks have been fenced, some erosion gullies are stabilising, sheep graze, fruit trees peek from the tops of tree guards and rain thunders on a shed roof. The last five years have brought with them an almost vertical learning curve, challenge, plenty of failures and the indescribable satisfaction of seeing seedlings become trees become woodland.

We’ve tried documenting this process online here at yarnauwi.com, but to celebrate this milestone we’ve also produced a limited edition book curating photos, illustrations and writings from the last five years.

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Yarnauwi: The First Five Years is divided into sections on the history of the property, trees and tree planting, creek restoration and erosion management, treasures extracted from the junk heaps, property planning, “obtaining a yield” and landscape change through the Fleurieu seasons. Each section is copiously illustrated with photographs and drawings and hopefully provides inspiration to others who are seeking to regenerate their own landscape or who have a connection with the spectacular landscape of the Fleurieu Coast. A number of sections contain “before-and-after” photographs of locations around the farm showing the impact of tree planting and low-tech erosion management strategies, predictably however, with a few decent summer downpours the changes were even more dramatic just a month or two after taking the final photographs!

It’s available for purchase now from our Etsy shop and we’ll also have a few copies available, together with sheepskins and farm- and Fleurieu-inspired artworks at the Second Valley Market from 10.00am-3.00pm on Saturday 27 January 2018.

Yarnauwi: The First Five Years
Softcover, 48 pages, full colour on premium satin paper.
Approximately 21.7cm x 28cm.

New poster: Imagining Yarnauwi before colonisation

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by nopalito in art & craft, ecology, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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art, books, design, ecology, farm, Fleurieu Coast, history, illustration, kangaroos, planning, poster, seasons, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, trees, water, waterways

Click to view a printable, A3 version of the poster.

Over the last few years, we’ve spent a great deal of time learning about the landscape of Yarnauwi, and the broader southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula. This has been essential for us in helping us to understand how the landscape works, and therefore how we can best work to ensure its health and function. We’re inspired by a statement from the 2015 Greenhorns New Farmer’s Almanac, where Connor Stedman writes, “Farms, forests, and grasslands can store and regenerate natural capital again, rebuilding the ecological fabric that is the ultimate source of our prosperity and survival. But to know how to undertake that stewardship, it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as the planted field.”

In this spirit, in this poster we’ve tried to imagine and illustrate the landscape of Yarnauwi and the surrounding area as it may’ve appeared before colonisation. It summarises our reading and research, as well as our experiences exploring more intact local landscapes. It’s a work of imagination, it’s definitely not to scale, but we hope it helps communicate some of the complexity of a functioning landscape and the interactions of the Kaurna in maintaining its function and ecological health over millennia. Then, as now, the southwestern Fleurieu was a cultural landscape, maintained through intentional management practices. This poster is also an effort to acknowledge our own place in the long history of this landscape. Continue reading →

The Wet Season 2016

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by nopalito in ecology, livestock, trees, waterways

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

ecology, erosion, farm, Fleurieu Coast, history, livestock, permaculture, photography, revegetation, seasons, sheep, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, trees, water, waterways, winter

The first big storm saw the dam fill and rivers broaden to ten times their normal size for an afternoon. A neighbour’s creek crossing dissolved in the flow, the rock and rubble broadcast along the river bottom. The second big storm saw our rainwater tank, still awaiting a shed to fill it, lifted vertically from its nest of stardroppers, vaulting a tractor and four or five fences before being swept off in the swollen waters of the Anacotilla River, carried across two properties and wedged under a red gum. The third storm came with days of warnings, threats of winds over 120km/h and rainfall to rival all of the previous deluges. It left all of South Australia without electricity, the farm a sucking, gurgling swamp, and me walking home through a darkened, scrambling city.

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Mist in the valleys

It’s been a demanding few months on the farm. The persistent moisture has made the ground unworkable, most of the farm inaccessible except on foot and the weather generally hostile to both our motivation and ability to do anything useful. The vast quantities of rain we’ve received however, have meant that moisture has permeated deep into the subsoil, so we console ourselves with the hope that as the weather warms, our tree plantings (including those from earlier this winter) will rocket skywards. Continue reading →

Winter and the One Rock Dams: erosion control after the rain

24 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by nopalito in ecology, planning, regeneration, waterways

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

before and after, ecology, erosion, farm, Fleurieu Coast, one rock dam, planning, reuse, seasons, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, water, waterways, winter

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Rain, and a full dam.

By late July this year we’ve already exceeded our entire rainfall for 2015, and for now, the rain shows no signs of abating. This is fantastic news for our revegetation efforts, and our dam is now almost full for the first time in two years. With heavy rains – we managed to top 100mm (4 inches) in a single day – it’s also a chance to test the effectiveness of the erosion control strategies we’ve employed.

With significant erosion in some key areas of the property, we’ve worked to adapt erosion control strategies such as those practised by Bill Zeedyk and Craig Sponholtz (see April’s Waterway Restoration workshop/working bee and our Resources page for more information). In particular, we’ve constructed Zuni bowls, for arresting headcuts, and One Rock Dams, to slow water flow, catch sediment and gradually lift the floor of erosion gullies. After the recent deluge, we toured the works to see how we went. The Zuni bowls have had mixed success: those in relative stable locations have been effective, those in dispersive soils have been unpredictable. The One Rock Dams (ORDs) have been generally successful, if swamped by sediment!

The impact of 100mm of rain in one day is significant: exposed areas lose significant amounts of soil (some areas of gully floor had almost 30cm of freshly deposited sediment), and areas of dispersive soil go berserk, collapsing in all directions. For some of these areas, we’re continually seeking further advice, but for those we can manage, we monitor and tweak over time, and try to “let the water do the work” in healing the landscape.

Continue reading →

Waterway restoration at Yarnauwi

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by nopalito in ecology, events, regeneration, waterways

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ecology, erosion, events, farm, Fleurieu Coast, picnics, recycling, southwestern Fleurieu, waste, water, waterways

In April, we belatedly participated in Clean Up Australia Day, focussing our attentions on the final lode of rubbish in the gullies and constructing erosion control structures in areas of active erosion. Kitted out in dust-masks and gloves, our amazing team of volunteers completed in an hour what it would take us weeks to do alone, and by day’s end had removed six trailer-loads of steel, and about 20 sacks of rubbish, together with miscellaneous sun umbrellas, fitness treadmills and bmx frames. (See our Curated Junk page for similar treasures – undoubtedly there are more to come!)

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Continue reading →

Exploring the Fleurieu’s climate future

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by nopalito in ecology, livestock, planning, regeneration, reviews, waterways

≈ 2 Comments

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books, climate change, design, ecology, farm, future, livestock, permaculture, planning, southwestern Fleurieu, water

Handbook
2PercentSolutions

We’ve recently read a couple of books that have served as a catalyst to revisit what a future climate scenario might be like for the Fleurieu Peninsula, and how we can ensure the greatest resilience for our patch of ground. The books are two practical volumes on climate change, the first The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change, by Jane Rawson and James Whitmore, is a tour of practical household and community strategies for adapting to climate change in Australia. The second, Two Percent Solutions for the Planet: 50 low-cost, low-tech, nature-based practices for combatting hunger, drought and climate change, is a farming and land restoration-focussed collection of case studies collected by Quivira Coalition co-founder, Courtney White. For readers that may’ve grown weary of the political inertia around climate change, not to mention the vast scale of the problem, the practical, household-, community- or farm-scale focus of both books offers a practical way of re-engaging with the climate challenge. Two Percent Solutions serves as an optimistic companion read to the sometimes gloomy vibe of The Handbook, with its strategies offering scope for both climate mitigation and adaptation. Continue reading →

Book review: Going ‘Feral’ with George Monbiot

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by nopalito in ecology, regeneration, reviews, trees, waterways

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books, ecology, farm, history, livestock, revegetation, southwestern Fleurieu

17160008Our experience and vision for Yarnauwi has always sat in a tension between the wild and the cultivated. On one hand, we’re seeking to restore habitat long altered, while on the other, we’re determined to cultivate food, through both livestock and horticulture. It’s hard to say if one holds priority over the other, and, at risk of lurching into cliche, we try to ‘listen to the land’. Connor Stedman’s Essay on Soil in the 2015 Greenhorns’ New Farmer’s Almanac offers ideas that resonated with us, writing that to know how to be a steward of a landscape, “…it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore, and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as with the planted field” (2015, p. 35).

Stedman’s assertions provide a concise summary of our motivations for obsessing over the past ecological history of our particular patch, and theorising about the patterns that might’ve governed the landscape before colonisation. Fixated as we are on what was here before, there’s much to delight in in George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (Penguin, 2013). In it, Monbiot confronts what he describes as ‘ecological boredom’ brought about by the absence of the wild, and asserts the need to ‘rewild’ our landscapes. His vision of rewilding is not one of meticulous restoration of past habitats, but rather letting landscapes return to their own ecological stability. Continue reading →

The plastic-free wrap-up: reflecting on reducing waste

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by nopalito in ecology, waterways

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ecology, farm, food, Plastic-free July, recipes, recycling, reuse, southwestern Fleurieu, waste, waterways

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The contents of the Plastic-free July dilemma bag: 494 grams of plastic waste.

A month ago we embarked on our attempt to avoid single-use plastics for the month of July. We were inspired to experiment with this waste-reduction challenge by our concern both about the plastics in our home and farm (the legacy of which we’re still hauling from our gullies), as well as the presence of plastics of all descriptions in the rockpools and high-tide marks of the nearby coast.

Collecting our ‘unavoidable’ plastic waste in a ‘dilemma’ bag, at the end of the month, our household total was 494 grams, down 288 grams from the previous month, although a significant portion of this month’s waste were leftovers from previous purchases or packaging from gifts from others! As the photo above shows, the volume of plastic waste was noticeably less. Continue reading →

Book review: Restoring rivers with ‘Let the Water Do the Work’

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by nopalito in ecology, regeneration, reviews, waterways

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, design, ecology, erosion, farm, permaculture, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, water, waterways

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Weirdly, one of the elements we found appealing about our property was the erosion. In a fit of masochistic optimism, we were excited by the prospect of working to restore a degraded landscape to a level of ecological function, of seeing gully walls stabilised with plants and creeklines resounding with a froggy chorus. As we’ve explored the best strategies for managing and restoring these sections of the property, the advice we’ve received has often tended towards paying someone to think about it and do the work for us, purchasing expensive, industrially produced tools and materials, and utilising heavy machinery, all of which bring with them a substantial price tag. This disturbed us, because it seems to suggest that land restoration is the domain of those with cash to splash, and that those people or places without the necessary resources may just have to resign themselves to the continued collapse of their landscapes.

Thankfully, we came across the work of the likes of Craig Sponholtz, Brad Lancaster, Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier, and in Australia, Cam Wilson and Peter Bennett. In their work, these thinkers and practitioners of water management and restoration, offer a radically different approach to watershed restoration. While they don’t flinch from the importance of technical understanding, they cultivate strategies that are based in the thoughful observation of those who are connected to a landscape, that utilise locally available materials, and that draw on community power to create modest interventions that can be tweaked over time. Rather than advising that landowners simply save up and pay an expert, their work seeks to empower communities to manage, monitor and maintain water in their landscapes through accessible, practical and locally-adaptable erosion control and water harvesting responses. In his foreword to Zeedyk and Clothier’s book Let the Water Do the Work, Courtney White articulates the characteristics of this approach: it is evidence-based, its affordability and relative simplicity make it accessible, it is based in ‘soft engineering’, challenging “the dominant paradigms of river and creek restoration”, it requires “humility, attentiveness and patience”, operating at the pace of the ecosystem, and finally, it’s at a human scale, flourishing with the participation of community, that offers “joy in companionship, in learning together, and sharing knowledge.” Continue reading →

A break in the season

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by nopalito in ecology, regeneration, trees, waterways

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ecology, farm, photography, revegetation, seasons, southwestern Fleurieu, summer, trees, water, waterways

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The rain gauge almost full!

With the big rains of the last couple of weeks, it feels like we’re approaching an break in the seasons. In most parts of the property, the cracks that open in the clay over summer are softening and closing, and there’s a green fuzz of new growth on the ground (especially in the areas with existing, dry ground cover, we’ve noticed). The sheep march briskly between discoveries of fresh grass and happily fan out over new paddocks.

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A self-sown red gum pushes through the cracks.

Continue reading →

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A new prototype from our farm-raised sheep hides, this time a belt pouch for bringing Viking mystique or outdoorsy practicality to any outfit! Learnt plenty about pattern design, stitching with two needles and the right amount of waxed thread, attaching hardware and more! We're continuing to refine ideas for crafting items from our sheepskins, get in touch if you have ideas and we hope to release some concepts for purchase in the coming months. #leather #leathercraft #handmade #sheepskin #farmraised #fleurieucoastmadebynature #fleurieucoast #fleurieupeninsula #farm #australianmade #sheep #viking #pouch #belt #yarnauwi #prototype #bag #crafts #craft #custom #handstitched #damara #dorper #thewholebeast
The "Bardi Gras" is ON! With a few good days of rain after a long dry summer, bardi grubs have surfaced emerging from their underground pupal cases as giant rain moths. #rain #bardi #grub #moth #rainmoth #bardigras #autumn #fleurieucoastmadebynature #fleurieucoast #fleurieupeninsula #farm #yarnauwi #seasons
Prototyping a new camp stool concept for our sheepskins, raised, grazed, butchered and tanned on the Fleurieu. Scroll across for the finished product, via pattern making and a test run in denim, the tripod base in Eucalyptus obliqua, then the final product, timber oiled, hardware tested, sheep hide in position. Perfect for warming by a winter campfire! #prototype #camp #stool #sheepskin #hide #pattern #stringybark #fleurieucoast #fleurieupeninsula #madebynature #fleurieucoastmadebynature #leather #fur #craft #handmade #farm #sheep #handmade #timber #leathercraft
Inspired by an idea in Maryanne Moodie's "On the Loom" book, we whittled some suitable forked sticks at Kuitpo forest to use as the loom for some experimental mini weavings, such fun! #naturalweaving #Kuitpo #naturecraft #whittling #kidscraft
Today's inspiring library haul, including: 'Grass, soil, hope', exploring land regeneration and tackling climate change through increasing soil carbon; 'Call of the reed warbler', looking at regenerative grazing and holistic management in Australia; 'The permaculture market garden' for its awesome illustrations and farm planning processes and 'Homecamp' for artfully styled outdoorsy excitement. Dewey numbers are included for your book requesting convenience. Much to ponder here for the next steps at Yarnauwi and beyond! #farm #bookstagram #dewey #deweynumber #onecardtorulethemall #permaculture #books #librarybooks #agriculture @home_camp @zachloeks @quiviracoalition @jcourtneywhite @adelaidecitylibraries #holisticmanagement #holisticgrazing #carbonfarming
Most of the farm is pretty dry now, but last winter we planted an embankment with Atriplex semibaccata and it's still growing, oblivious to the heat and dry. It's also covered in clouds of these tiny butterflies, a little island of habitat in the middle of a paddock! #yarnauwi #butterfly #saltbush #atriplex #revegetation #habitat #farm #fleurieucoast #fleurieupeninsula #madebynature
A morning spent at a Family Crabbing workshop with @natureplaysa and PIRSA Fishwatch inevitably leads to pre-dawn Sunday craft! Caught and released maybe eight blue swimmers, made and kept two cardboard crawlers. #crab #blueswimmercrab #natureplay #crafts #making
Second Valley market stall in progress, with first two sales made!
Yarnauwi will have our first stall at the Second Valley Market this coming Saturday 10am-3pm in the Soldiers Memorial Institute! Items for sale include these two new embroidered artworks (Ross the Tractor and The Topography of Second Valley), linocut art prints of local scenes, sheepskins from our sheep tanned by Southern Tanners, and our first 5 years commemorative publication. Head along if you're willing to brave the heat - a swim at Second Valley beach is thoroughly recommended post-market! #yarnauwi #fleurieucoast #madebynature #fleurieupeninsula #secondvalley #fish #embroidery #linocut #tractor @fleurieucoast @fleurieucoastmadebynature

What We’re Writing About

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