potato planting

The show must go on here at Brindabella, regardless of the fact we are leaving. And so planting time has rolled around again on the farm...

Mr M has been doing a lot of tractor work of late, early mornings and late nights to work around the rain, ho-ing with the big new fancy rotary hoe.

The idea of growing potatoes is fairly simple really. I'm always surprised how many people ask me how to grow potatoes. Well...you get a potato...you put it in the ground...you wait. Ok so there's a lot more to it than that, but you get the general jist.

We use certified seed (from seed growers, not ware growers like us who grow potatoes you actually see in Woolies and Coles and end up eating). First you can see Mr M in his tractor going along and hoe-ing the earth, preparing it to plant the little 'taties. Then our farm manager Rod goes along in his tractor with the planter on, filled with the certified seed potatoes. We use un-cut seed, meaning a whole potato is put in the ground, some people use 'cut seed' which we used to do when I was growing up (back in the good ol' days). Cut seed is now seen to let more diseases into the potato as they have exposed flesh, but a lot of people still use cut seed - some say pot-ah-toes some same pot-ey-toes! Next my Dad goes along in his tractor and 'moulds' or 'bed forms' the rows. 

Dad pacing out and counting the rows

This is on the south side of Brindabella, across the Narracan Creek - you can see the ramshackle farmhouse over on the hill there...

Mr M on the left ho-ing, Rod on the right planting

With a little bit of luck these spuddies will be poking their little green shoots out of the ground in no time, given some spring showers and sunshine. Then they will grow big and tall, flower and die, we will harvest, work the earth again and sow down to pasture before the whole process starts again.

All in a days work. Ok, enough of the tractor photos already...

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella  



our farmers, our future

As an almost farmers wife, I feel strongly about supporting rural women and their families. Despite what might be portrayed on The Farmer Wants A Wife, this gig isn't all sitting on wide verandas of your country estate sipping cups of tea and flicking through Country Style magazines.

Oh no. Sometimes it's hard. In fact, a lot of the time it's hard. Bloody hard.

Some nights your husband won't crawl into bed until 3am because he's out ripping a paddock preparing to sow because the rain will be here later in the week. Some days you will find yourself literally up to your armpits in a heifer trying to help her with a difficult calf. Some nights you will find yourself in the pitch black holding a torch trying to fix a trough so your livestock can be watered. Some days you will be screamed at by angry farmers who are at breaking point financially due to market conditions. Some days you'll spend all morning preparing a beautiful lunch whilst caring for a sick child to be told there's 'just 60 more to go' when you're AI'ing (true story). Some days you'll be knee deep in mud (it's mud right?!) and directing wayward cattle dogs to 'get away back and push push push!'. Some days you'll be hurtling through a blizzard on the back of the motorbike trying to muster ewes and lambs, the next day you'll be cursing the flies and heat and dust - so much dust - whilst helping to needle 200 stroppy mama cows.

Yes, some days it's hard. You are a cook, a financial planner, a counsellor, a trainee agronomist, a livestock agent, a plumbers apprentice,  a vet nurse, a jillaroo of all trades. But you have your best friend beside you.

If you have ever walked into your local supermarket and picked up a potato, an onion, some flour, some bread, some sugar, some meat and thought you appreciated where it comes from - please please please think about what you are truly appreciating. That cup of sugar, that piece of bread, those eggs and milk, have all come from hard working families. Families who sacrifice an awful lot to feed your family. Farmers are undervalued, underpaid and overworked. But for most they would not do any other job. It's not a job, it is a vocation. It's a misconception that farming is a low skilled industry, please take five minutes to watch this video to mark 2012 - the year of the farmer, and hopefully come away from it with a greater understanding of just what goes into producing the food you eat this evening.

the little lambs

Lambing started here at Brindabella in the first week of June. To start with the lambs are pretty scrawny looking, all white and wrinkly. They try and find their feet stumbling along very close to mum, who can get a bit miffed if you try and get too close to take some photos.

Now the lambs are a few weeks older and wiser, the ewes don't seem to mind too much if they wander off together and play. The lambs these days all hang out together in big groups which is pretty funny to watch as they run about, jumping and wriggling in the air. They get up to some pretty crazy antics and maneuvers, hard to capture in photos, perhaps I should take a video. 

I'm sure there is a clique-mentality going on in the mob that lives in the farmhouse paddock. There seems to be the toughies up on the hill by the tank and the losers down by the gate. 

Twins are very common, and this year we've had a fair few sets of triplets as well. Coming from farming cows and calves at Ythanbrae I'm still adjusting back to the mortality rate of farming sheep here now. In the blizzard like conditions we had a few weeks ago we lost a fair few lambs over on another farm, being born wet, cold and hungry in the wind is a tough gig. At least we don't have to deal with super-stroppy cows trying to steal another cows calf or nail Mr M between a fence post and the motorbike anymore with me trying to weigh and tag it's 50 kilo calf on the side of a cliff. Those were the days.  

These little lambies have made it through the toughest part, their first few weeks, and now get to run about and play in the sunshine with their mates, getting nice and fat and healthy.

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

the harvest

Firstly, thank-you to all the lovely people who have already taken part in my little survey (if you don't know what I'm talking about you can go here to read all about it). It is so refreshing to get a clearer picture of where I'm at as a blogger, a photographer, a writer - so thank-you. One of the surprises which has come out of it so far is that more people would like to hear about farming and our rural lifestyle - who knew?! Well you asked for it so here it is...

We start harvesting our potatoes here on the farm in January (depending on the season) and this year we are just about to wrap up the whole show. For those who don't know much about growing potatoes they take 120 days to grow, which is quite short. So we plant them in Spring and harvest in Summer, we spray them to kill the tops off after they have flowered (some modern varieties don't flower) and to harden the skins. If you ever see 'new potatoes' advertised that means they are harvested a little earlier and have quite soft skins that you can rub off with your hands. These will almost always be at farmers markets and the like, where the potatoes are less handled from paddock to plate.

Mr M has been doing most of the pulverising this year, which is the process of chopping up all the plant tops before the harvester goes over and digs up all the tasty taters, so the actual plants don't clog up and get caught in the harvester. The harvester has a boom which sends the potatoes on a conveyor belt over into the bin trailers which are driven by another tractor. Lining up the harvester and the bin trailers can be quite the skill, our harvester driver Des and his bin trailer drivers have it fairly down pat.

The bin trailers are then carted to our packing shed (hence two bin trailers, tag team whilst one is in transit) where they are unloaded and the potatoes put through a grading line, then either packed into bulk bags (approx. 1 tonne +) or smaller bags (50kg, 20kg) or cartons (20kg) or crates (14kg) like you might see in Woolworths and Coles. Once they're packed it's off to markets in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane on trucks - which is where I come in, my 'day job' is the organising of the transport, liasing with our customers in the capital cities and all the fun that goes along with the produce industry!

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella

click go the shears

It's May. Well, almost. And here in the rolling hills of Thorpdale that can only mean one thing: shearing, and lots of it. Every May we shear our ewes prior to them lambing, it's generally over three or four days and involves a fair bit of work for not much return really. We basically just look at it as 'maintenance' as we don't grow fine Merino wool, so if your husband goes to work every day in the city wearing a lovely wool suit chances are it didn't come from our farm (sorry to disappoint and crush the fairytale). 

The hub-bub of the shearing shed floor

I'm going to be pretty basic here as according to my blog stat's about 90% of my readership lives in the cities of Australia (and I am assuming has little knowledge of lamb and potato farming, but maybe you'll all surprise me?!) No Mr M and my dad and all the other guys who work on the farm do not shear our sheep. That's what shearers are for, and we contract them to shear our mobs every year. They can be a motley crew, but are generally all larrikin Aussie blokes, endearing and hard working. It's a bugger of a job, I have a fair bit of respect for anyone starting off in a shearing career but the industry needs young, keen shearers. 

Mr M is a wool classer (meaning he has a qualification he received whilst at university to correctly 'class' the wool into it's different grades). A lot of the time he spends at the wool table classing or drafting (separating) the lambs off their mums (the ewes who will be shorn) out in the yards with the dogs. Coming from an all beef property at Ythanbrae to the excitement of a shearing shed full of ewes and lambs has been great for our working dogs Lily and Pippa. 

Our shearing shed is the oldest building on the property probably. Once upon a time it was my grandfather's milking sheds when Ballina Park was run as a dairy farm, there are photos of my Dad and his sister in the hay loft of the shed in the early 1960's. The shearing shed was our favourite hangout when we were kids, you could play a mean game of chasey in the yards and through the shed itself with all of those gates and and pens. The shearers stage held many of my finest performances as a five year old and we pretty much thought the slides (down to below the shearing shed floor where the sheep are shoved - ahem, gently pushed - after being shorn) were the best invention ever. Even if you did land in a pile of dried out sheep poo at the bottom. Mum would gladly send us over the hill with a shovel and wheelbarrow to bring it all back for her garden anyway.  

Some of my fondest childhood memories are in this shearing shed. I can distinctly remember my grandfather throwing fleeces out on the orange wool table, and fetching one of our regular shearers 'Fatty' more chalk to add to his tally of sheep shorn for the day on the splitting wooden sideboards of the stage. In the early nineties when I was growing up we didn't have a mechanical wool press (a machine which pushes and compresses the wool into the bales) like we do now, we had a hand operated one and my father, grandfather and uncle would throw us girls on top of the soft squishy wool to stand on it to help push it into the bale before pulling the giant rusted handle to seal it all into a neat bale, ready to be sent off to the big Melbourne wool sheds for sale. 

Possibly Australia's best view from a shearing shed?

But the best part of the shearers arriving on the farm in May was always by far the food. Oh the food! You see shearers expect to be fed. It's an unwritten rule in the Australian bush: farmers wives must feed the shearers immense amounts of good home cooked hearty food. And the first rule of feeding shearers? They don't eat salad. No joke. So come the first week of May my mum would be cooking hot roast lunches, corn beef rolls, lasagnas, apple scrolls for morning brew, scones with jam and cream for afternoon brew and I'd help her cart it out the front gate and over the hill to Ballina Park (my grandparents farm where the shearing shed is). Now it's my turn and due to me being the modern almost farmers wife that I am, I have a full time job so we generally get the lunches catered, but the morning and afternoon brew I have stuck my hand up for. So muffins, carrot cake and apricot slice are baking in my oven late into the night this evening...

Images by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella.

wide open spaces

Amanda over at Calico & Co. is going to attempt to do one thing off a list of 55 things this year. One which appealed to me was to write a favourite scripture on your mirror. I want to get one of those chalkboard white thick pens to do that to my mirror which is standing upright in our bedroom (remember it used to be above our mantlepiece in the cottage?).  In this case though I thought I'd have a crack at all of those photos you see on flickr and tumblr and weheartit with scripture or quotes. This photo really resonated with me, and my favourite verse from Jeremiah seemed fitting.

 

Between Christmas and New Year we headed north. A whole five hour drive north now we live way down here. Our friends up in the Mallee were (still are) harvesting their wheat crop, and Mr M loves nothing more than to jump in the header for hours on end. Crazy much?! Grass is always greener I say, or in this case the wheat is always calling him and if he sat in a header for too long the green hills and spud dirt back here would be calling him too. I can tell he is already missing his Angus and Charolais of Ythanbrae when so many times he would come storming into the cottage from a bad day in the yards swearing that he hated cattle and wanted to farm sheep.

The beauty of the area around Boort always captures me at this time of year, the wide open plains of cropping and stubble, big skies, glorious sunsets and starry, starry nights. It all seems very Australian and I love it. Tyler and Matt spend all day and basically all night harvesting whilst Kate and I have endless cups of tea, made yummy caramlised bananas, lunches and dinners to pack up and take to the boys out in the paddock. Dinner delivery is at an amazing time of day and I was only too snap happy with the beautiful light.

  

P.S. Notice the new blog header? What do you think? I have a feeling I may just miss my chippy flaky paint on the ramshackle farmhouse when we paint it...

P.P.S. I love the photo of Mr M and his best man Tyler above, working together, mateship.

to market, to market

Hello. When I re-jigged my blog and went from being Little Miss Emma to Cinderella at Brindabella I wanted my little space on the world wide web to be more real and more about me, us, our life, and that means more posts about farming. Some of you may find this incredibly uninteresting (maybe not?) and prefer pretty pictures but it's who I am and what I do so I'm not going to be all unicorns and rainbows about it!

On Friday afternoon the second lamb sale of the season was held in Thorpdale. We sell about 1000 lambs every year through the Thorpdale yards, which I love with their old falling down wooden pens and big gum trees. Might not be the safest or best for OH&S but hey it's old school. They are far away the prettiest sheep or cattle yards I've seen, if that's possible. Much better than the cattle yards I used to work in back in Yea when I did the pencilling for Elders, and yes it is either scorching hot or pouring rain when there's a sale on, Murphy's law. Two weeks ago at the first lamb sale of the year I huddled under this tree in the pouring rain with a lot of mud underfoot whilst the auction went on.

That's Mr M checking out some of the lambs. We personally (just Mr M and I, not my Dad) sold our four old ewes that we once upon a time purchased to use for training our kelpie pup Pippa. We were going to leave them or kill them in Yea but then sheep prices went through the roof so we went to the trouble to bring them all the way to sunny Gippsland on the back of Mr M's ute when we moved. Travelling circus I tell you.

These kids were 'working' at the sale, I'm pretty sure they are under working age but I remember doing similar work at a similar age in the sheep yards. The novelty started to wear off with the 4am starts when I was a teenager though. These boys probably got unlimited cans of soft drink and some sausages for lunch as payment. Nice way to start your school holidays. Their job was basically to make sure all the lambs were looking their very best, pushed to the front of the pens for potentials buyers to have a grab to see their fat scores and make sure none were lame, injured or on the ground. I saw them struggling to get one hefty lamb up off the ground, it was going to take two of three of them to do it so I told Mr M to go help them out, nobody else was going to.

So that's a quick snapshot of what I was up to on Friday afternoon. The prices were good, steady and very unusually even throughout the whole sale. Our four ewes made $110/head which we were fairly happy about, could've been better, could've been worse.

What did you get up to on the weekend? We did a heap more gardening, which seems to be a recurring theme these days, rushed around and did some last minute Christmas shopping in a nearby town and tonight I am going to settle in to watch the Griswolds Christmas Vacation! A holiday must and Mr M has never seen it - the horror!

This week I am playing along with fat mum slim's point + shoot.

down on the farm

Good morning :)

Over the weekend I got out and about with my camera again to take some shots of the farms, our growing potatoes and fattening sheep. If you an observant little follower you will see I have updated my tabs up there so you can read all about me, Brindabella, our old home the cottage at Ythanbrae and our wedding.

 

 



I also did a photography job last week of a little blonde cutie, feeling good to get back behind the lens after our move and starting my new job here in the family business, I feel the craziness is somewhat subsiding. Potato harvest will be upon us soon though (will start in January) and we will be busy little bees so am savouring the (short-lived) calm before the storm. The last photo I took just near our house at Brindabella, I love the giant gum trees and looking west over the dam.

Check some other people's weekends out here.

the rains

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Last night Mr M put a phone call in to our friends up in the Mallee - his best man and one of my bridesmaids - after the weatherman told us there was 54mm of rain in Boort. It was actually more like 100mm. In one day. Devastating.

After ten long hard years of drought this years crops were looking fantastic, only to be ruined by the irony of rain. My heart breaks for farming families and communities that have done it so tough through the drought and now this. Today they are forecasting another downpour in the north west.