In the spirit of making more regular contributions I am determined to keep progress on the property more up to date to avoid data-dumps like the last post.

The weather has well and truly turned the corner into the cooler end of the year. This is my absolute favourite time of year. Spring may be heavy with blossoms and perfume, but there is something flimsy about them, a tinge of unearned riches. Autumn is the best time of the year for preparation, hard work, long term planning. The air is cooler, the sunsets glorious, and the rain light and reliable most years.

Firstly the vegetable garden. The old summer crops on the lower end are gradually finishing up. I am still getting a fair amount of okra, snake beans, and the winged beans have finally come through (quite neutral but tasty). Rosellas are prolific and jam is piling up for winter. The capsicums and eggplants that finally made it past the slugs at seedling stage are fruiting. Eggplant "redskin" from eden was prolific with tiny fruits full off seeds and quite evil tasting. Result- root pruning and binned the seeds. The italian varieties like rosa bianca by comparison are big and meaty and heavenly when grilled to perfection. Conclusion- varieties matter, so don't beat yourself up when something doesnt perform the way you would like. The jicama did the same thing. I compared two seed sources- one made tiny inedible tubers, the other large crisp ones. If you really want to grow a particular kind of crop buy several varieties of seed from a few different sources and compare the results. It can be truly eye opening.

I have changed the summer veggie rotation to reflect moving a lot of the staple type crops out into the field. So now the most soil pathogen sensitive tomatos get a full six beds in a coordinated assault through spring to give one massive harvest of roma types for bottling and drying. These are followed up by heat loving and more disease tolerant capsicums and eggplants, grown in pots through spring to a decent size, giving them enough time to crop lightly going into winter. They are then over-wintered, allowing them to give early crops the following spring. After that a mix of beans, greens, okra and soft roots (like perennial leeks and spring onions) will follow on in the other half of the rotation. The summer bed is now gradually disappearing under rows of green manures. The bulk oats and barley I got through demeter are alternating with lupins from green harvest and commercial faba beans and lupulini beans (from a commercial wholesale food place in West End-much cheaper). One bed has been left as a trash pile to compost everything down in situ. And sweet peas have been dotted here and there on trellises to spice up the garden over winter/spring. The lobelia weed that went mad in summer is being eradicated, always starting from uphill and working down.

On the upper winter side the unturned raised beds with the manure sandwiched between soil layers have worked quite well. Apart from a little local subsidence as the manure decomposes there were no obvious penalties for not mixing the beds up like dirt smoothie. Lesson learned- endless turning and crumbling of already decent soil can be a waste of energy. Brassicas have been a magnet for pigeons again, meaning having to resow and improve the protective bird netting several times. The broccoli bed received the entire 6 months of food scrap compost to test how much nutrient they could use. As a result the bed shoots out a stream of massive worms any time you stick a trowel in it. The ducks figured this out and started jumping up and down on my broccoli seedlings, meaning I had to build a small fence to slow them down. To take up the space from the potato crop leaving the veggie garden I have added a strawberry rotation, hopefully avoiding the problem of choked permanent strawberry beds that people put in and never get around to thinning out, and giving us a massive crop to bottle. The root crops have been scaled back to onions (a trial, tricky to grow fast enough to bulb well, and daylight sensitive so you need dedicated subtropical varieties while most in circulation are temperate), leeks (a bit fussy) and a smaller amount of turnips and kohl rabi than last year (they tasted pretty ordinary to us). Lettuces have been planted alongside single trellises of snow peas to improve air circulation around the peas and minimise powdery mildew. These combo beds have been staggered (two started in March, one in April, one in May) to spread the harvest of lettuce and peas. The scraped out paths have definitely had less weeds, but the soil moved to the top of the beds needs a fair bit of time to weed by hand and butter knife, though as planned everything comes out very easily, and it is hard to ignore when it is right beside your prized seedlings.

The chickens in the middle of the veggie patch peaked at 5-6 eggs a day from six hens a month ago and have reduced down to 2-3 a day as their moult approaches. One has an injured eye and was always flighty and fearful, and another has a classic spinsters build (while the others are as boxy as tissue box covers) so these two will be culled shortly to make room for a batch of chicks in spring. This way we can replace half our laying birds each year. The gorgeous glossy rooster has turned out dumb and sweet natured, though he does crow when the moon is full, but it is a pleasant enough note since he isn’t a screechy tiny bantam.

In the field the fruit trees have made surprising growth after being waterlogged all summer. The odd precocious fig has been offered up and savoured, and our elderly neighbour let me collect about 20kg of persimmons that were ripened, pulped, and frozen for gradual use. Rough pineapple with persimmon pulp over the top is one of my favourite desserts now- the intensity and mellowness contrast beautifully. The two squares (4x4m each) of trial sweet potato varieties were harvested last week, giving around 50kg despite the lack of weeding, watering (well it was pouring this year) and minimal fertiliser. The interesting thing was that some varieties gave 10kg easily, and others gave zero usable roots. This again emphasises the importance of variety choice, and of not beating yourself up if things go poorly. Imagine if I had only planted the worst variety (“Im a failure”) or the best (“I’m a genius”). The parsnip crop is in and away, with seven squares planned, another one of carrots, probably giving 200kg of roots to get through. I am currently savouring a dish of mashed spiced sweet potato, now making about 30% of my total diet:

Ingredients
4kg sweet potato (or potato or parsnip). Peel, boil and mash. Set aside.

2 Onions (or equivalent with shallots, leeks, garlic, etc)- chopped and fried lightly in olive oil
Spices and herbs (combine to taste: oregano, thyme, basil, rosemary, sage, sesame, black sesame, chilli, pepper, coriander/cumin/fennel seed, cardamom, etc) and fry to release the flavor. Consider timing of adding these ingredients. My failsafe method is to divide all these into 2-3 lots and add them at intervals to the frying onions. This gives a much deeper and more complex flavour as the volatile components are released by the heat in waves.
Put mashed roots into the pan and stir vigorously until a light browning is observed at the base of the pan (scrape it off as it forms to stop it burning). This will add that delicious baked vegetable flavor to the dish, without needing hours in the oven.
Optional- Add peanut butter, tahini or good quality butter (1-2 teaspoons max) to add an element of fat and enhance the mouth feel. Take off the heat immediately and stir it in to avoid oxidising the unstable vegetable fats.
This meal freezes and reheats beautifully, much to the envy of all my work colleagues who must sniff it on a daily basis.
A side helping of braised mushrooms and beans, or tomato sauce and chickpeas adds variety and protein. I also eat it with a boiled egg from my hens or ducks.

The rest of the parsnip field row has newly sourced varieties of quinoa. Local quinoa is hard to source (only from Eden seeds after needling them) and appears to be a food grade dead seed. These just went in after resolarising the bed to remove a fuzz of grassy weeds, so fingers crossed. The next row over has a mass of staggered shelling pea and broad bean plantings. I am trialling about eight varieties of each to compare performance and taste. They have been given old sorghum and cowcane stalks to climb up, saving money on stakes. At the top of this row there are chickpeas (from edible sources mostly, good germination), a few lentils, massed beds of garlic (oriental purple and Italian from NewGippsland seeds bulbed well for me last year growing from April to November- they must have their own space to dry off at the end of the season). The spelt sourced from Eden seeds have ~1% germination. The few plants that made it through will have to serve as a very bottle necked starter population for a better crop next year. Of the remaining two field rows one is being solarised in sections in preparation for a spring sowing of maize, dry beans and pumpkins/melons. The other is still pasture but has been oversown with wheat/barley/oats, lupin/field peas/vetch/fenugreek, sunflower/cosmos/marigold, mustard greens, coriander/parsley etc etc. It is fun to crawl around the grass looking for new species emerging. It will be cut low in late winter, solarised and then planted with a big spring buckwheat crop. I had better get busy on making a hand thresher to process the crop. It is basically a rotating drum covered in a gripping surface that turns against an adjustable board. Once it is spinning the reaped crop is fed into it and the lumpy seeds are stripped off. This mass of seeds and leaves is then spread out to dry and threshed again before winnowing to remove the chaff. Based on last years trial the 15 square row should yield 75kg of unhulled buckwheat.

The best news is that the muscovy ducks, which I was ready to give up on, are now sitting on two large batches of eggs. After blaming the poor sitting duck after several tries at breeding I finally caught the thief (a swamp hen) with an egg in its beak. So a bit more netting and security later and we should be weeks away from having a plague of little baby ducks. Two months of chaos later and we should have a freezer full of succulent dark duck meat.

The scale up continues, but the end is in sight of this phase. By the end of this year we should be producing most of our own calories for the immediate family (meaning plenty to share with the extended family). Up until now I have dealt with a measure of derision from my siblings, and bewilderment from my parents, without feeling massively unappreciated for the endless days of digging and hoeing. By the end of this year they will hopefully be able to see what one person with one set of hands can contribute. Growth in everything is exponential, painfully slow to begin, terrifying by the end.