Horticultural Hoarder

I admit it, I'm a hoarder, it's a sickness. But I'm not your typical rubber-band-balls and other-people's-photographs kind of hoarders. I hoard seeds...hundreds and hundreds of seeds that are slowly losing their viability, tucked into small cardboard boxes and catalogued by alphabetical order and preferred sowing date. Parsnips? When am I ever going to have the time, soil or climate for parsnips? And just how many colours of tomato do I need? Let's face it, I've only ever managed to grow cherry tomatos until now. The rest die an early death at the hand of my nor-westerly wins and casual watering routine. But it doesn't matter, I love them all...the shapes, the colours, the varying sizes and (often unfulfilled) promise of potential bounty. In fact, after all these years of shaking that box of seeds around from house to house I now have an envelope labelled 'random peas and maybe lettuce or coriander'. THAT's the envelope I'm planting out this weekend...before the next order of seeds arrives in the mail from Diggers ;)

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

I like a plan. I like a dream. I hate doing work twice. So here it is... Things my hobbyfarm home should (eventually) have: In the garden; • Fruit trees – lemons, limes, peaches, apricots, mandarins, oranges, mulberries, avocados, figs, pears, blood oranges • Vines – grapes, kiwis, blueberries, passionfruits, raspberries and strawberries • Herbs – rosemary, sages, coriander, lemongrass, basil, thymes, chives, oregano, marjoram • Spices – chilli, garlic, bayVeges – tomatoes, asparagus, peas, beans, onions, capsicum, lettuce, cucumber, potatoes, sweet potato, squash, zucchini, pumpkin, broccoli, mini caulis, rock melon, watermelon, carrots, brussel sprouts, parsnips, corn, eggplant • Decorative trees – crepe myrtle, butterfly bush (buddleia), eremophilas, gardenia, frangipani • Decorative plants – lavender, jasmine, hardenbergia violacea, wisteria, clematis &, of course, the rose garden, tulips, jonquils, daffodils & ranunculus, snapdragons, sweet peas, sunflowers, ornamental grape vine, nasturtians, violets & pansies On the property; • A tank, connected to an outdoor shower, bath and composting toilet in the corner of the property, on a slightly raised deck, looking out over the wheat fields (for stinky fishermen, muddy children and hot champagne nights) • A biocycle/greywater system • Water tanks • A worm farm • A mushroom farm In the house; • An entertainment deck with outdoor kitchen. • A pantry • Double fridge & chest freezer • Breakfast bench and work island • Dishwasher For the children; • A trampoline, sandpit & cubby house • A memory walk (with coins, marbles & shells pressed into the concrete) • A lavender seat • A fountain & carp pond Animals; • Different varieties of chooks including frizzles & silkies (from there, we’ll experiment with other fowl like ducks & geese). • Alpacas • The obligatory dog and farm cats, which we already have • & one day, guineapigs for the grandchildren.

A Rosy Future

I’ve been the voice of caution throughout this whole process. Don’t get ahead of ourselves, don’t want too much, don’t rush into something we can’t afford. But I’m starting to get excited now. The subdivision is already in the process. MyMan moves in to the old farmhouse this week, which frees me up to start cleaning out my current home and life in preparation for moving in together at the end of the year…maybe, hopefully. So, to celebrate this first milestone, I bought him some rosebushes for the property. Now there’s a story here. MyMan and I are both fans of the ‘if you can’t eat it, why water it’ philosophy of gardening. But, in particular, I think roses are way too much work for too little reward; three months of flowers, 12 months of thorns and invader roots and escaping suckers. But my one-day Mother-in-Law loves her roses so, as a tribute to the family past of EastWinds, we’ll plant a rose garden at the property’s entrance where a tap has been handily situated for our use. I did my research, chatting to members of our regional rose club for hardy varieties to suit, and presented MyMan with an armful of thorny bare-rooted branches which have since burst into leaf as they waited in water in my sunny little kitchen. At first, when I said I’d bought him roses, he gave me a very doubtful sideways gaze. Apparently he thought I meant cut flowers, not plants, which are perhaps less than manly. So our first roses will be fragrant white Icebergs, the Spanish dry-weather variety La Sevillana with its velvety red semi-double blooms and Blue Moons. I’ve also been given a red and yellow striped rose called Abrakadabra which seems almost reptilian; it’s not fragrant but has novelty value. And in choosing just these few blooms for a garden I swore I wasn’t interested in, I’ve fallen in love with roses. I remember now, why, as a little girl I’d wander past the old-fashioned cottage gardens in my neighborhood, collecting the petals of the loveliest blooms (much to their owners’ disgust, I’m sure). For my daughter, next, I’ll buy the long-stemmed pink ‘Eiffel Towers’ to remind her of her future travel ambitions; and next time the Show comes around I’ll take note of the winners in the ‘most fragrant’ rose competition. In the meantime I’ll rifle through the selection of heritage roses at diggers.com and maybe, in the far future, when I’m sitting on the deck of my ‘one-day’ house on a hot night I’ll smell the scent of our family roses rising on the east winds.

New Beginnings

It seems like there’s new beginnings everywhere…and it’s not even spring yet. Tomorrow, after more than 20 years as a newspaperwoman, I will embark on my first permanent (part-time) contract as a teacher. TheGirl has won a scholarship to my own long-ago boarding school and will move away next year. After all this time, there’s a toddler in the house again. The last time I lived this life I had another toddler boy who would collect the eggs in bare feet every morning and hide under the snowpeas to eat them warm from the vines. Now TheBoy is a lanky gel-haired, skinny-jeaned giant who has spent the past few months chopping down trees, tearing down fences, burning both and enjoying his first informal driving lessons in the farm beast BigRed. This time around, the newest terrible two-year-old is already enjoying the adventure of leaping through chest-high grass in his gum boots, climbing the fig tree and parking his mini-mower alongside of Dad’s. MyMan is starting again too, after a failed 14-year-marriage and his own family…here he is in his childhood town, with ‘the one who got away’ in high school, building a new life. Eternal optimists – that’s us.

Learning to be Hopeful Again

Some ancient civilisations describe time as a spiral, within which we are destined to keep coming back to the same hurdles and challenges, over and over again, until we overcome them. And the closer we come to the end of our lives, the further we head into the heart of it all, the more often we are faced by the same situation. Perhaps it’s true, because here I am again; a different partner, a changed and expanded family, another little hobby farm filled with more hopes and plans than actual animals or plants. Today I am a teacher, no longer a journalist. After 20 years I gave up the career I’ve always loved, always believed in, because suddenly with a family of teenagers almost ready to fly from the nest I discovered I was hatching a new addition to our little clan. A 70-hour-a-week career wasn’t going to cut it, not if I wanted to be a good parent to toddlers and teenagers. And I’ve only ever wanted to be a good parent. Not the other kind. So, with a brand-new baby on my knee, I went back to school. Learning by laptop from a university a state away, all with an eye to being home on holidays and making a government wage. And in the middle of all my planning and worrying for the future something I couldn’t plan for, happened. An old friend, turned into a new partner. And an old dream became a new dream. A shared dream. Here we are now, moving into another ramshackle farm house bought for the sake of the view and the rolling space around it. This little corner of a once-greater property originally belonged to MyMan’s parents in the 80s. They started their own family here, after his father had returned from the Vietnam War, before the droughts came and they sold up. But they lived here long enough to give it a name – EastWinds. MyMan brought me here one day, to show me where he’d lived as a child, the route he’d cycled down as a toddler to his neighbours’ property. We stood there, looking out to the sea on one side and the hills on the other thinking what a wonderful place to build the enormous home we’d imagined for our combined seven children…and on a whim he picked up his phone and called the owner. We’re now in the process of subdividing the land and saving for the home we’ll build on it. My little house, the one I bought for myself and never quite did anything with while I worked every day and most nights holding it all together and paying the bills, will be plastered and plumbed back up in the simplest way for rental, so that I can finally have that hobby farm I hoped for. MyMan promises me fruit trees and chickens and laughs at my plans for alpacas. My teen son – who was the same age his toddler brother is now when he used to collect eggs each morning and pour out the homebrew dregs into yoghurt containers for invading earwigs – has been busy with his one-day Step-Dad pulling down old fences, chopping up rotten trees, collecting scrap metal and learning to drive at the property. His big sister is more doubtful, she worries that this hobby farm dream will end like the other so she won’t get her hopes up. And frankly, she’s not that keen on dealing with spiders and rotten floorboards and musty rooms all over again if it’s not going to end better than it did last time. But she can’t help joining in the game. Remembering the best things about the old house and planning the same for the baby – trees to climb and cubbyhouses beneath, sandpits and fresh veggies, not to mention MyMan’s promise of motorbikes and (eventually) a home to be proud of, a home fit for entertaining her many friends and scattered family. For me, it’s hard to be hopeful. Hard to keep in mind that this is a different future, with a different kind of man, and it will end…or not end…differently. MyMan too, finds it hard not to be cynical, to believe in a new beginning. But I was never meant to be a pessimist. I’m not built that way. And I don’t want my kids to think that they shouldn’t hope for good things. We’ve worked hard, we’ve got through the rough times, and our family is big and loud and wonderful. One day (not too soon kids) I’ll have grandchildren and they’ll visit us at East Winds and look out at the view, collect the eggs every morning and eat apricots and oranges when they come into season, they’ll pat the old parti-eyed husky and tug the tail of the fluffy ginger farm Tom…marveling at my alpacas and my mis-matched multi-coloured hens. This will be the place for family Christmases; for summer holidays with Nanna and Pop; they’ll talk about how yellow the egg yolks are and how big the peaches grow; they’ll dig in the garden with Pop and sit around a fire at night; eat too much and stay up too late. That’s what I’ll think about while I’m walking over rippled wooden floors and chasing mice out of the lopsided kitchen (oh, mice again…I’m not looking forward to that); renting my beloved little home out to hordes of 20-somethings to save money for the ‘one-day’ house.

History Revisited

So, after a bare few weeks of proper (if unorganized cohabitation) MyMan is settled into his historic but dilapidated family home on the farm block, while I’ve been sent home to prepare the family for a new term of school. We’ve spent the weekend nurturing our plans for the block. I walked the boundary of our 5-acre plot for the first time – from white survey peg, to peg, to peg and back again. As we walked MyMan spoke to me about the original farm. Just to fill you in – just two years after MyMan was born in the 1970s, his family moved to this large-sized mixed enterprise farm on Eastern EP with a dream of starting out on their own. But the 80s came, and with them, the droughts. And, according to MyMan, his father was too proud and too careful to risk his family’s future on such a large operation. So he sold up, down-sized and moved his wife and four young children to a smaller farm. But MyMan’s parents had been there long enough to give the property a name – EastWinds – because that’s the only kind of wind they saw during those dry years. They had a lot of dreams and hopes wrapped up in that little home with its sliver-view of Gulf to the East and the ranges in the North. When MyMan took me to see the property on a nostalgia trip the ranges sported a series of windmills, like spines on a sleeping dragon’s back, and we both fell a little bit in love with the space and sky and remnants of a family farming past. So, now the current owner is busy sub-dividing the 5 acre rectangle that will be our home. The home we plan to live the rest of our life in. But, until then, MyMan will live out there in the lopsided Shouse (shed-house) cleaning up forgotten iron and thriving boxthorn while here, in town, we will concentrated on getting my home rent-proof. The eventual plan is to build a house on the Eastern corner of the property (the Shouse is on the Southern corner) but we’ll make do until then. We’re both good at that – making do. So, ignoring that little wander into the past and future, it’s back to the present: We spent the weekend at EastWinds, mowing & burning & unpacking cardboard boxes full of man-effects. The giant, rusting skeleton of a ship overshadows the Shouse. Apparently, an overly ambitious renter, a decade ago, thought he could rebuild the boat. Despite my suggestion that we borrow a crane and move it out to the road (imagine being able to say; “15km off the highway and turn left at the ship”) tomorrow it’ll become scrap when the metal-man comes to town, along with most of the weed-shrouded piles of old farm machinery, 40 gallon drums and corroded sheds. Sadly, it won’t be us collecting the money – but on the upside, it’s less work for us. One corner of the Shouse has slipped massively in the 30+ years since MyMan’s family first colonized it. But at least the kids will never fall out of bed, with the slant in the bedroom floor rolling them up against the wall. In a tiny floating cupboard randomly hung on the loungeroom wall, we found a roll-call of Shouse residents, beginning with MyMan’s Clan 1977, and ending most recently with the ambitious shipbuilder. Now our names will join the list. On our walk around the property, MyMan demonstrated for me the cow clamp – a wooden frame with a sliding plank that used to trap a cow’s head and shoulders while a cold-fingered child milked the relunctant bovine many years ago. In fact, there’s the crumbling remnants of a whole stock yard including the stock run which we will recreate as my vege garden. It’s a great way to create a space that can keep the chooks out when I don’t want them, let them in when I do, and not lose that family-remembered feature which, otherwise, would just become another pile of weathered wood and wire. The giant machinery shed alongside the yard will protect my delicate veg from the Gulf winds in summer, retain heat in winter, channel water into the sidealong tank and play host to a variety of climbing fruits, grapes, peas and beans. Heading back towards the western corner we will run our fruit trees, melons and pumpkins all the way to the scrub and the chook shed which MyMan’s father built. In the middle of our future orchard are the remains of a basketball court which we will relevel and name ‘The Orange Court’. I can imagine my future (long-way-in-the-future) grandchildren giggling out there as they bounce the ball between them on a summer evening, hidden from the grown-ups by the trees. Note to self: lighting will be necessary. Two edges of the block are lined by native scrub and landmined with little piles of forgotten metal and wire. It’ll be MyMan’s job to thin the trees out and clean the undergrowth so that I can replace the sad, gnarly scrub with flowering natives like grevillea, bottlebrush and buddleah. One of my favourite things already – between the open sky and spin-in-a-c ircle-till-you-fall-down space that we are beginning to open up – is the sound of birds in the trees. When the sun came sneaking in through MyMan’s kitchen window this morning it sparkled off a pair of ageing, lichened trees – a mulberry and a fig that we hope we can save from years of neglect – hosting a noisy crowd of magpies. Inside, the view isn’t quite as picturesque. Wooden floors float in different directions beneath the musty carpet. When the current owners removed the flue…and the potbelly (oh how cold we all are now)…they left behind a pile of toasted bird carcasses. The loungeroom door opens up onto a shed full of wool bales and an old Bondwood caravan. The leaky roof is covered in lichen, moss has invaded the windowsills, the cats are feasting on unwelcome mousy squatters and we’ve already been warned about the local ram’s late-night visits to the not-quite-outdoors toilet. And I don’t care, I love it. I love it because in a handful of years it’ll just be another funny story of how MyMan and I began the-rest-of-our-lives together. Despite my original hobbyfarm disappointments I trust that MyMan would rather sit on his John Deere ride-on than his laurels and he will always work to make my big imaginings come true. And best of all, he makes me want to work hard, just by working alongside him. He is excited by my excitement. He has always wanted acreage, I have always wanted to be able to cook for my family from my own garden. He laughs at my alpaca ideas but grew up raising pigs for pocket money. Chooks are a given, although I suspect he secretly thinks that’ll end in me baking him cakes and meringues every day. Neither of us, both nearing 40, has ever built our own home, and we’ll now get to do that together. The lovely thing is that we live in an area where other people have lived this life, and succeeded. So many farm families have spent their young family years doing up old properties, or making do in them while they save for a bigger, better place of their own. So, when we laugh about the Shouse we aren’t met with negativity, but offers of help and shared stories of ‘the hard years’. As a result, I feel uncharacteristic optimism rising in me like a tide, washing away all my sensible concerns about dodgy water heaters and mouse-plagues.