Tag Archives: food

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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Lamb and mutton from Yarnauwi Farm

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in food, livestock

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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!

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Hides available later in 2016

The 2016 Drop

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in livestock, planning

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Triplets wait patiently for their mother’s attention again.

The 2016 lambing season has begun at Yarnauwi, with seven lambs dropping so far. One set of triplets, two lots of twins (with three survivors) and our first, puppy-like Damara lamb.

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Damara x Dorper lambs. You may have noticed we also have soursobs.

It’s also our first season experimenting with Manchego the Damara ram. Our initial flock were Wiltshire horns, a British breed that we found were more selective than we would’ve liked in their grazing habits, and sensitive to the exposure of our blistering summers. A few of their lambs were part Dorper, and in the culture of the flock, they’ve mimicked the habits of the Wiltshire Horn matriarchs.  Continue reading →

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 →

Snag-a-Palooza: Celebrating with sausage!

02 Monday Feb 2015

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IMG_5603We 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:

  • Don’t tie the end of the sausage while you’re making it to allow air pumped out by the sausage-maker to escape,
  • Allow about 10cm of empty casing either end of the sausage to allow for squeezing the filling to eliminate air bubbles,
  • Construct one big sausage, then make the links afterwards by pinching, then alternate your twists forwards and backwards for each small sausage,
  • Feed the casing out slowly, allowing the mince to inflate the casing with minimal air bubbles,
  • Avoid making sausages in your loungeroom, as explosions, followed by mince showers, are possible.
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Guiding fresh sausage into its spiral.

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Making the most of mutton

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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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 →

The Farm Year in Review: 2014

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in events, livestock, planning, regeneration

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2014 was a year where the dry season came early and stayed late. It seemed as if the rain barely had a chance to soften the ground and throw up some soursobs before our clay soils began to crack again and the pasture browned off. Despite this, after two years observing the rhythms of this patch of ground, I feel like we’re becoming more resilient and optimistic: where previously we despaired at every lost seedling, now we celebrate every survivor.

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Summer: a shingleback lizard soaks up some sunshine.

In the spirit of permaculture, this year also marks a transition from our observational period towards beginning to implement infrastructure for a sustainable farming enterprise. With fencing and water infrastructure for livestock, our appreciation of the need for water only deepens, and despite its challenges, we’ve learnt to stop worrying and love winter.

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Life and Death

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in food, livestock, Uncategorized

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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.
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Propagating Oaks 1: Germination

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in diy, livestock, planning, propagation, trees

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An English oak seedling (Quercus robur) reachers towards the winter sun.

An English oak seedling (Quercus robur) reaches towards the winter sun.

Back in autumn, we gathered freshly fallen acorns from the base of a row of massive old English oaks (Quercus robur). Inspired by the dehesa agroforestry systems of Spain and Portugal, we’ve often pondered how a livestock-grazed oak plantation could work on the property. Acorns for pigs, and perhaps even human consumption, timber for the use of our great-great-grandchildren, and in the meantime, a carpet of fallen leaves offering organic matter for composting and mulch. So, with some bags of acorns and few containers of the topsoil and leaf litter from around the parent oaks, we set to propagating them.

We mixed the leaf litter and gathered topsoil in with our potting medium, hoping to inoculate our own medium with beneficial fungi, and then planted the acorns. We planted some close to the surface, and others about an acorn-width deep. After about eight weeks of being kept damp and left in the late autumn-early winter sun, they began sending their first shoots upwards, red furry things with a cluster of jagged leaves at the top. The depth of the acorn doesn’t seem to have had any bearing on their readiness to propagate. Once they’ve all emerged and are about 8-10 cm tall, we’ll carefully thin them, planting out excess strong specimens to their own pots until we have one decent plant per pot.

Grow little seedling, grow!

Grow little seedling, grow!