New linocut print: Fear the deer!

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in art & craft, diy, ecology, regeneration, trees

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“Fear the deer, rue the roo, but keep on planting!”, linocut inspired by efforts to revegetate the southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia, by Joel Catchlove

After months of chipping away at this latest linocut in spare moments sprinkled throughout family life, I’m pleased to announce it finished! “Fear the deer, etc.” was begun earlier this year in the lead-up to the 2015 tree planting season and depicts the view looking west from Yarnauwi, with a selection of local birds eagerly awaiting the maturation of our and our neighbours’ revegetation efforts! In the meantime, they perch in the antlers of a red deer skull, one of the many voracious herbivores in the neighbourhood that present challenges for raising seedlings.

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The carved block, ready for inking

The birds shown are, on the left, a tawny frogmouth, a family of which we’ve spotted 500 or so metres from our back boundary, but our property still lacks the habitat to tempt them closer, a black-faced cuckoo-shrike (aka. shufflewing, due to its habit of shuffling its wings upon landing), common in nearby woodland but still only a passing visitor to Yarnauwi, and the Australasian Pipit, an enthusiastic resident of the farm.

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Ready for inking.

Special thanks to Jess S, patron of the arts, for donating part of her stash of lino for the creation of this particular piece! Thanks again to our community of friends and neighbours who continue to contribute to the broader effort of restoring habitat on our property and beyond!

Book Review: “Sheepish: two women, fifty sheep & enough wool to save the planet”

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in livestock, reviews

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“The primary purpose of many small farms is to provide an opportunity for open spaces, fresh air, scenic landscape, privacy, peacefulness, or other unique qualities of rural life. Others are looking for a good place to raise a family … Others farm because they want to live close to nature; many are stewards of the land by choice, because stewardship gives purpose and meaning to their lives. For them, farming is an expression of spirituality.”
– John Ikerd

I wanted to read a memoir about women farming, as I often feel intimidated about participating in male-dominated farming in Australia. But in many ways it’s probably just the usual intimidation felt by city-dwellers feeling our way in completely new territory – it has certainly improved over time as we’ve made connections with local contractors, neighbours, shopkeepers and felt more part of the local community.

I came across this light memoir by Catherine Friend, about a female couple who run a 50 acre farm in Minnesota, USA (same size as ours!). They run about 50 sheep, as well as a menagerie of other animals, and sell their meat and wool commercially. Lambing season for them involves about 100 little white bundles sproinging around the place, which is my idea of heaven, including many bottle-fed lambs from ewes dropping twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Continue reading →

The drop: lambing season begins!

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in livestock, planning

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A young ram lamb takes shelter with its mother.

After weeks of expecting a lamb at any moment, the season has begun with five dropping at once! Fathered by the late, great Damara x Dorper ram Pecorino (sheepish in all but his appetites, he came to an untimely end after over-doing it on lupins), these little crossbreeds have a distinct Damara bearing and appearance, with their floppy ears and dappled coats. While the alpacas typically have an adolescent aloofness, now that there are lambs about they’ve switched into vigilant mode, keeping a close eye on their young charges and leading the flock to water and fresh pasture.

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After starting the flock with Wiltshire Horns, we found that this breed didn’t exactly relish our pre-treed (ie. open, windswept and exposed) environs, so we’ve started breeding the flock towards hardier, less selective grazers like the Dorper and Damara that also offer a yield in meat and hides. So with last year’s lambs being Wiltshire Horn x Dorper, these are all of the above, but mostly Dorper. As with virtually every aspect of this farming project, it’s an experiment!

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Seeing the forest for the trees: piecing together past ecology

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in ecology, planning, regeneration, trees

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Tall stringybark forest, Deep Creek Conservation Park, southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula.

It’s a preoccupation of ours to develop our understanding of the historic ecology of the farm. We’ve pored over books such as Mangroves to Mallee (Berkinshaw 2009), and The Native Forest and Woodland Vegetation of South Australia (Boomsma & Lewis), but their listings of different plant associations were often bewildering as we tried to nut out which was the best fit for our patch of ground. We had some information about climate, and a basic knowledge of soils, but only limited local remnant vegetation to refer to for an idea of what might’ve been here before colonisation. Our property has a couple of old red gums, but little sense of what the landscape might have looked like two hundred years ago. Early advice we received suggested that our landscape was once “pink gum woodland”, yet most of the initial pink gums we planted died. Having a sense of how our landscape was in the past not only assists our success in habitat regeneration, but also offers insight into how our landscape works in general.

We’ve looked at historical photographs, and they seemed to confirm our sense that there were once more trees than there are now, but by the late 1800s they already depict a deforested landscape. Through early colonial accounts we’ve also pieced together a rough picture of what the landscape may have been like, with a particular focus on how water may have been managed in the vegetation and soil. We’ve even brainstormed a sequence of events for how the landscape may have changed between colonisation and now, but what we lacked was local ecological detail. It was time to go back to the library, this time to trawl through past ecological studies of the region. With many written in the early 20th century, the papers we found articulate connections between soils, rainfall and then-living memory of plant communities throughout the Mount Lofty Ranges.

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Vegetation Map of the Mount Lofty Ranges and Murraylands, from Specht 1972

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The “wild zone” blooms…

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in ecology, regeneration, trees

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ParadoxaBlossonWe recently celebrated the appearance of our first blossoms on the wattles planted in our revegetation area. At almost three years old, this Acacia paradoxa has offered a few tentative blooms and while it’s a modest showing, we’re absurdly excited about it. It marks a shift in our ‘wilderness’ zones, from plants that we’ve cultivated and maintained towards plants that have survived through dry years and the appetites of kangaroos, to become plants that are beginning to thrive and reproduce independently.

The ground beneath your feet: resources for exploring soil

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in ecology, regeneration, tools

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Soils of South Australia, divided into 16 subgroups, from the 1986 Atlas of South Australia.

Recently we’ve been thinking a lot about soil. After all, it is the International Year of Soils, and really, without dirt, there’s not much else. Understanding how our soils work and how to restore them is an essential part of our regeneration project and their structure and composition help define the boundaries of what’s possible on our patch of ground. As Adamson and Osborn asserted in their pioneering 1924 study of the ecology of the eucalypt forests of the Mount Lofty Ranges, climate and soils are the primary factors in determining ecological variation in the region, so even where the scrub has long been cleared, soils can also offer a memory of past ecosystems.

However, it’s taken us a while to unravel meaningful information about soils. There’s a whole new vocabulary, and when you don’t yet know your Kandosols from your Kurosols the whole experience can be a bit mystifying. To make things even more complex, there are oodles of different technical terms for describing any particular soil type, depending on era or classification systems. So we thought we’d share some resources that we’ve come across that may be of use in working out what you’re sitting on. Continue reading →

Alpaca fleece spinning party

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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IMG_5494After shearing our alpacas Fidel and Ernesto last summer, we wound up with 4 gigantic gar-bags of brown and white fleece. Despite fleckings of weed seeds, burrs, dust and a million little bits of last year’s dry grass, it was lovely soft stuff, and we knew a spinning day was in order if the fleece was to do anything other than sit on top of a wardrobe.

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Fleece ready to spin

We called on my mum Angela, a spinner from way back who wanted to get back in the habit, a few friends interested in spinning, and asked our friend Mary to lead the day and share her extensive equipment, skills and enthusiasm for the fibre arts (see Local and Bespoke for more on her magical talents in that realm). Continue reading →

Planting for the future: exploring tree time

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in ecology, propagation, regeneration, trees

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Present-day badlands, future cloud forest (?!): Sophie and Annika take a break from planting.

After three months, our tree planting activities are finally finished for 2015. The pattern is always the same. Sophie does her best to moderate my impulses, but when the opening rains come I always seem to get a rush of chlorophyll to the head and end up with boxes of seedlings more than we could ever reasonably plant. That said, with the support of our community of family and friends, this year we planted 1000-odd trees, shrubs and ground covers, 300 grasses propagated from seed collected on the property, and still had a few boxes to give to neighbours.

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Asher inspects a red gum seedling only a few months younger than him.

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

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in ecology, 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 →

Plastic-Free July: Making a feed-bag picnic rug

20 Monday Jul 2015

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Over the last couple of years we’ve assembled an impressive collection of woven polypropylene sacks. Typically used as bags for stock feed or pasture seed, in the spirit of Plastic-Free July, I thought it was time to put these single-use plastics to use and upcycle them into a patchwork, water-proof picnic blanket.

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