Tag Archives: southwestern Fleurieu

The Salvage Season

23 Monday Mar 2015

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The steely gaze of a doll, complete with an electrical tape necklace.

With the chilling of the air, it’s time for us to don our gloves and get stuck into mining the junk that lines the banks and bed of our erosion gullies. It’s become an annual tradition to pick a path through chest-high phalaris, filling bags with debris. It’s scratchy, dusty work, with plastic milk bottles and the remains of plastic bags collapsing into confetti with the gentlest of touches. Yet despite the discomfort, we can’t help but have a forensic fascination with what we unearth. Each discovery is a cryptic clue into the lives of our predecessors, those who decided that the headwaters of a creek would be the best place for their unwanted bric-a-brac.

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A broken clock amid bones. We’ll leave you to come up with your own metaphors.

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The Whole Beast: harvesting hides

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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IMG_5994When we took our sheep to be slaughtered towards the end of last year, in the spirit of using the whole beast, we asked the meatworks if we could keep the skins. Wiltshire Horns are not renowned for their hides, and while the abattoir workers looked at us a little askance, they played along. As soon as the animals were killed, we drove the skins across to Port Elliot, where tanner Tony Scott salted them and enthusiastically took us on a tour of his tannery, one of the few surviving such establishments in Australia.

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This week a package arrived from Port Elliot. Inside were the skins, transformed from their dusty, paddock hue: the lamb skins soft and creamy, the elder beasts a light, dappled grey with black spots. While there’s no doubt that draping one’s home in animal hides brings with it a whiff of hillbilly, it’s also deeply satisfying to use as much as we can of our animals.

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As an experimental run, most of these skins are already accounted for, but if you would like first pick on future hide harvests, let us know.

Ram update: The Pecorino Support Group

08 Sunday Mar 2015

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Pecorino, with new BFF Ernesto the Alpaca

A few weeks ago, Pecorino, our new Damara-Dorper cross ram arrived at the farm. Initially, he seemed a little coy, intimidated by all from the alpacas to last year’s lambs. Within even a week, it was clear that he was becoming enculturated into the flock, following their cues to move to new pasture, and joining the usual welcoming committee whenever we come to visit.

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Friendship is parallel grazing. Note Pecorino’s fat-tail, a Damara characteristic, it’s the camel’s hump of the sheep world.

Now, Pecorino’s assembled something of a support group around himself, composed of alpacas Fidel and Ernesto and a wether lamb. They tend to remain aloof of the rest of the flock, grazing a little away from the rest. While other sheep-farming pals tell us that this is not uncommon, we’re genuinely amazed to see how Pecorino’s robust desert breeding is exhibited in his grazing habits. Where the Wiltshire Horns hurry for shelter at the first glimmer of sunlight and sit panting until a cloud covers the sun again, Pecorino and his clique munch on, apparently regardless of temperature, and far less selectively than the others. Now all we need is for him to start sharing those genes around.

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Pecorino joins the party.

Maintain the rain! Piecing together the past to imagine a future

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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

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It’s been a dry year on the Fleurieu Peninsula. After the inundation of 2013, 2014’s rainfall came in almost 200mm shy of the year before, and about 100mm short of the average. By February 2015, the dam had receded to a few centimetres of sludge, and the water carter had come to top up the stock water tanks. While there’s no doubt that the Fleurieu Peninsula has had the Mediterranean pattern of dry summers and cool, wet winters for some time, recently I’ve begun to wonder whether this pattern has shifted towards greater aridity as successive land-uses have cleared the landscape.

Curruckalinga, looking over St. Vincent’s Gulf, 1846, George French Angas, depicting a mosaic of woodland and open grassland. From the description: “This view is taken from the rocky hills near Mr Kemmis’s Station, to the northward of Rapid Bay … The undulating appearance of the country here represented, together with the singular manner in which the trees are dotted about in all directions over the landscape … principally ‘casuarinae’ or she-oak, with ‘eucalyptus’.” From the collection of the State Library of South Australia, B15276/33.

At the time of European colonisation, the Fleurieu Peninsula was most likely covered with a mosaic of woodland, forest and grasslands, maintained through Aboriginal burning and land management practices. In his paper on the discovery and settlement of the Fleurieu (1986), Rob Linn draws from the diaries of settlers in his descriptions of the landscape of the South Western Fleurieu. Writing in 1838, William Giles described the landscape around Rapid Bay, as “a most beautiful valley, the soil of great depth covered with most luxuriant herbage … on the sides of these hills we found plenty of keep for sheep, and wherever the grass had been burnt in these places it was looking beautifully verdant … fine land, excellent water, plenty of timber …” This was echoed by John Stephens in 1839, describing the “country from Cape Jervis upwards” as “very picturesque” and “well-timbered” (Linn 1986). Continue reading →

Year of the Sheep: Introducing Pecorino

15 Sunday Feb 2015

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Despite his noble bearing, thus far Pecorino has demonstrated a rather sheepish personality.

With the Year of the Sheep just around the corner on the Chinese calendar, it’s fitting that we’re celebrating the arrival of Pecorino. Pecorino is a Dorper-Damara cross ram, adopted from our friends Stefan and Amanda from their property at Inman Valley. Although our Wiltshire Horn-Dorper lambs have been pretty unfazed by the blinding summer heat, their Wiltshire Horn mothers have not fared so well. Enter Pecorino and his robust African desert-survival genetics and fat-tailed energy-storing mystique. Continue reading →

Testing water quality

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

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

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The DIY water testing kit, including big buckets, little buckets, ice-cube trays, teaspoons, magnifying glass, pH strips, homemade Secchi disk, EC meter, pool net, boots, ID charts and recording sheets. If you have a toddler in attendance, you may consider a change of clothes for yourself and toddler.

Inspired by permaculture’s commitment to observation, over the last couple of years, we’ve become enthusiastic/compulsive gatherers of data about our farm. Everything we can think of to measure, we’ve tried to measure. Now, as we scale up our interventions, we can begin to track our impact and refine our management accordingly. As part of this, we’ve started a seasonal water quality testing program to monitor changes in the quality of our catchment as we revegetate the catchment and manage grazing more intensively.

We’ve assembled our own water testing kit, all stored conveniently in a secondhand mayo bucket from the local chip shop. Using this, there are a few characteristics we’ll test seasonally:

  • salinity and temperature (both tested using an EC (Electrical Conductivity) Meter from your friendly local hydroponics vendor),
  • pH (tested using pool pH strips from the hardware shop),
  • turbidity is a measure of the amount of solids suspended in the water (measured with a DIY Secchi disk or turbidity tube),
  • macroinvertebrate populations, the presence and composition of which is also an indicator of pollution levels (gathered with buckets and nets, and sorted with teaspoons into ice-cube trays).

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Fleurieu Foliage: River red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis)

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in ecology, propagation, regeneration

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After shedding two-thirds of its branches last year, one of our giant red gums is now a forest of new shoots.

As the two remnant trees on our farm, River red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) hold a special place in our hearts. Our red gums are bent and stretch up the hillside away from the prevailing winds. Red gums are not unique to the Fleurieu however, in fact, their high level of adaptability means that they have a distribution across Australia, most commonly occurring on floodplains and waterways as well as throughout higher rainfall regions.

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Not dead yet! After apparently dying in an unusually dry winter and spring, this year-old red gum seedling has re-sprouted from its base after receiving about 10mm of rain over several weeks.

With red gums as a significant species in the past ecosystem of our property, they’ve been a clear choice for revegetation. When planting, we’re constantly inspired by their resilience. I’ve heard it said that red gum roots grow at a centimetre a day, which puts them at over three-and-a-half metres a year. If it’s true, then it’s an indicator of their startling ability to find water and nutrients. We’ve been amazed by some of our red gums that have shot to almost 1.5 metres after a couple of years in the ground, but also by their apparent capacity for dormancy. Some seedlings will sit in dry, cracked clay soil for months on end, leaves green but not growing. Then, with a decent rain, they burst into new growth. Likewise, others appear to have died, leaving nothing but a dry stick until the opening rains of autumn when they reshoot from the ground, sending out a profusion of leaves and spindly branches. We’ve noticed some other plants behave similarly – the occasional melaleuca or acacia for example – but none so consistently and successfully resurrect themselves as the red gum.

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Visions of the Past: historical photos of Anacotilla

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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4567. Anacotilla Bridge

Anacotilla Bridge on Main South Road, with Lorna Kelly (riding side saddle), E.C. and G.F. Kelly (c1896). Image courtesy of the Yankalilla & District Historical Society.

Our farm, Yarnauwi, is one lot of the once expansive Anacotilla pastoral property. Just over the ridge, in the Anacotilla river valley, are the old workers’ cottages, and on the hillside opposite, the sprawling homestead and outbuildings. We’ve recently been corresponding with the Yankalilla and District Historical Society about our interest in the property’s history, and they shared with us a number of photographs from the late 1800s onwards.

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“Anacotilla”, Second Valley, home of A.C. Kelly in the 1880s. Image courtesy of the Yankalilla & District Historical Society.

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The Anacotilla cottage and outbuildings, 2014, viewed from Main South Road, near Paradise Drive. While the cottage has undergone substantial additions and renovations, the original two-room dwelling still exists at its centre.

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