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Active Living On Our Farm

April, 2016

What an amazing day we had hanging out with this guy. He taught us some tricks with gardening - basically, food can be grown in anything, even the pockets of your old jeans hanging off the wall. How to remove weeds effectively. His story, his love for growing food, and the reason he loves having such a long beard :-) He was naturally such a gorgeous funny guy and I was more than happy to get a hug at the end of our time together plus a photo with my book, which I was honoured to give him to share with his family.

Costa Georgiadis, the host of Gardening Australia. 




We headed up to the Gold Coast again for some more shifting - a whole container of furniture can be moved to our farm now that we're settling for good. 

I was born, grew up and lived on the Gold Coast and the Main Beach area for 30 years. Now after only 1 year living elsewhere, I have come back to this beach (Main Beach) and floated on the surf and felt 'home'. Isn't it amazing how the water temperature, the breeze, sunshine from your home town are just you? Other places are awesome, but there's a special feel to your home surf spot isn't there. So much has changed at Main Beach in 20 years but the salt water here is exactly the same.



Then back at home there was this morning. Too breathtaking to not take a few photos. Love this place. To work a couple of hours in my business in the early AM. The rest of the day with my family right here on the farm. Bliss.








Tim's had it in his imagination that we can become exceptional garlic farmers. He's been doing his research and has purchased more garlic than I care to mention! My one say in it was that I wanted the Australian or Italian variety, as I'm not too much of a fan of the Russian variety that grows so well in these parts. So we're taking a risk and having a crack at something that will make us hungry and happy.

Here are Dusty and Max working on splitting the garlic bulbs into individual cloves. By the end of this massive commitment from us all, including visiting family, we had 80,000 individual seeds to plant. I can't even describe how much fun we had sitting in the shed together chatting about everything that crossed our minds. I hadn't known this was coming up, but I did thoroughly enjoy the experience.

After we finish separating them here, we will store them briefly in the cool room until it's the season to plant.



The separating of the seeds of course was only part of the mission. There was also clearing and preparing the paddock for the planting and fertilising.

Tim has built a special planting attachment to put behind the tractor, with a seat that 4 of us can sit on, pushing seeds down the pipes and straight into the soil.



And after we tidy up the rows by hand, we will be the mulching, weeding, and watering for the next 6 months. 

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