In Pictures

That bunch of teeth there is a group of ecstatic city dwellers being herded to their garlic planting work stations in the back of the ute – a nice little thrill for all concerned. Planting 2,500 cloves of garlic seemed to Karen and I a nice reason to get some help. But before they came for the day, we had to turn a patch of grass into a field.

There’s a lovely flat on my patch of land edged by Yandoit Creek (named Hermit’s Hollow on account of the fact that it’d be an ideal place to spend time unnoticed).  It’s in a valley, completely private and downhill from a (broken) dam.  Critically for gardeners, there’s topsoil.  About an acre of arable land will easily do for a four-yearly garlic crop rotation with the sort of modest production Kaz and I are interested in.  If we do want to go bigger there’s a much larger flat a little further along over the next hill.

Craig helped out with a tractor – fossil-fuelled muscle worth many times the $150 he charged.

Craig’s $150 Muscle

The Patch

Wanting to do this whole thing as cheaply as possible, we spent a good couple of days gathering generously donated horse manure and spreading it over the ground.  Then Kaz went home to Melbourne and I thought “more poo.”  The beauty of living in the country is that there is no shortage of this stuff, so I went visiting Paul’s shearing shed.

Why the Garlic’s Not Going to be Cheap

Won’t be displaying that kind of solo enthusiasm again.  Crawling on my knees and dragging sheep pearls out hurt a lot.  Even with an admittedly genius tool – a family heirloom of sorts apparently, which shows what you can do with a foraged road sign.

Shit to Shovel

Another weekend later and after application of gypsum, a little agricultural lime, blood & bone and some pelleted chicken poo, we hoed.  As I drove to the hoe hire place I thought grimly again about fossil fuel and how much of it we were using to grow this garlic.  Hand digging such a plot would have been possible, but not pleasant.  I imagine a future universe in which a horse-drawn plough might again be the norm and that idea doesn’t seem too dark to me but for now it’s a drive to Maryborough for soil improvers and another drive to Carisbrook to hire the rotary hoe.

Karen Getting Owned by the Rotary Hoe

Now Karen’s a seriously athletic person but the rotary hoe can get away on you until you’re used to it, so that picture above is not Karen driving the beast masterfully, rather chasing it.  40 minutes and a full circuit later I had a go with less finesse.

Some fencing (thank you Michael) about which I’ll write little because even the memory of fencing puts me in a bad mood – it’s bloody expensive, looks ugly and the process never goes as smoothly or quickly as you’d like.

And then the big day.  We retrieved the garlic seed from Gerhard’s cellar and spent the whole morning breaking up the bulbs into individual cloves – dividing them into varieties, weighing it all.  Something we should have done the day before as it took us about four hours.

Preparing to Separate

Holding on Tight

Friends arrived.

Help Arrives

I stuck everyone in the ute and we got down to the patch.  Garlic doesn’t like getting soggy so the first task was to make raised beds – a bitch of a job frankly, with metal rakes and consistent use of stomach muscles.  After the raking, the planting.  The bigger the cloves you start with, the bigger the bulb you end up with and our champion seed needs space.  So a good 15-20 cm between each and more between the rows did the trick.

Working the Field

Your knees need to be in good order to plant garlic.  You need two men for a gate-making project.  There will be children who make a cubby house of the round straw bale and spread the stuff everywhere except on the beds.  One kid will jump out of a moving ute and land on her head.  The dog will generally annoy everyone and the whole job will get tiresome before it gets finished.  The ceaseless repetition in handling anything larger than a backyard gardening project is a reason for machines I guess, but I really enjoyed the day and I hope it felt like fun for everyone else.  The provisioning was excellent, we drank a lot of tea.

Mulched

On a sunnier day a week later I got to planting the last of the seed.  So we’ve got up to 3,000 seeds in varying amounts of Italian Purple, Austral, California White, Hollingsworth White, Rojo de Castro and a tidbit of Mystery Purple A.

Planting the Hollingsworth White

I reckon the pointy end of the garlic market in Australia will become all about varietals eventually, much like it has for potatoes.  And when you’re small, that’s the market you’ve got to aim at.  But we’ll see if we’ve got any to sell first – and I’ve had a few concerns about the crop because in the last month it’s been quite wet.  And wet mulch lends itself to mould.  I anxiously observed the patch for signs of green and five weeks after planting was rewarded with some tufts.

Five Weeks Later

It’s always like that with seed.  You worry about the little babies.  And then you remember they’re quite tough and they’re going to get up all by themselves.

At Ground Level

Business as Usual

Well thanks for that Brie.  In a single blog entry you managed to convey more information than I’ll probably manage to in posts up to 2015.   And a reader might now even have a sense of exactly what is going on here out in the ‘doit.  Back now to the unfortunate business of writing about nothing much…

It was a beautiful day today.  Everyone in the neighbourhood (indeed, the whole of Victoria it seems) is done with winter.  It has been a long, wet, cold one with very few sunlight hours.  Today the spring sun shone and I busied myself with leather gloves, mattock and wheelbarrow.  It seems clear to me now that I returned to Australia after some decent years serving (& sipping) Cristal on private yachts only to dig dirt and get a farmer’s tan.

Receiving Top-secret Tanning Tips from Farmer Ross

[I’m looking pretty happy here because Ross is handing me my first ever envelope-full of farm income – cattle agistment fee.  39 cows @ $3 a head for 5 weeks.  They kept my grass down and I got their poo!]

The vegie beds are done – dug, edged, paths mulched.  I can’t stop looking at them.

Vegie Beds Sorted

Today I dug 34 holes along a perimeter fence.  There are no photos of these holes as by the time I finished it was dark and I needed to get the hell out of there and take my screaming muscles to a hot bath.

So, upon returning to my comfortable borrowed house I turned the bath on, poured a glass of red, fed the dogs, emptied the fire of ashes, prepped the pumpkin soup and set the timer to 30 minutes.  I usually can’t manage more than 15 minutes in a bath but I knew today’s needed to be a 30 minute soaking event.  Slid into the kitchen at the 15 minute interval to attend to the soup (ever stirred soup naked? feels silly) and raced back into the bath to think about what to write in my blog entry.  And that’s how you get this kind of quality material.

And so to the holes.  I am starting to think seriously about planting and while the soil is relatively soft and it’s not too hot I’m prepping soil for something to screen the estate (ha) from the road.  I’ve got about 20 more holes to do tomorrow.  And then I’ll think about what to plant.  Which, for gardeners, is like choosing which lollies to put in the pick & mix – it is just damn good fun (more fun, say, than digging).

The vegetable selection is underway.  Yesterday I helped Pep put market-garden quantities of seeds in trays in his greenhouse for his upcoming busy summer season.  In exchange for that small bit of labour, he’s going to supply me with seedlings for the vegie beds – enough to feed me, B and visitors.

But first I’ll need to do some exhuming to make space.

Workers’ Strike

When I got to the land this morning I saw these lovely little crosses on two of the vegie beds.  Someone’s got a sense of humour, but who?  I thought immediately of artist Gerhard, who has displayed his abilities with signage elsewhere in the neighbourhood (something along the lines of “No exit road, do not enter” on a perfectly exitable road going annoyingly past his house.)  Same nice neat handwriting.  But no.

Turns out it’s Langley with some spare time and a good line in sly workplace safety commentary (time to renegotiate wages).  Even better, he said he was finishing up early today to go play bagpipes at a funeral.  Bagpipers seem to secure a wide range of gigs.  When I came around a corner and saw him crouched by his ute, midway in a change into long white socks and a kilt I knew he wasn’t fibbing.

Langley on the Pipes

Langley needed to tune his bagpipes before racing to the funeral.  He gave it a couple of goes.  This first clip tells you a lot about a dog’s relationship with bagpipes – Zali’s ears perk up, then deflate, then she makes a quick exit stage left at the first ill squeak.

 

Having removed themselves a safe distance, the dogs settle in for a far more impressive Tuning II.  How he does this on a pack of rollies a week I’ll never know.

 

We made an outing of it and filed in a little procession down to the freshly dug graves.

Raising Pep

The dogs didn’t much care for it judging by the howling, but I have rarely enjoyed bagpipes more.