“I may not always be with you But when we’re far apart Remember you will be with me Right inside my heart” Marc Wambolt Hey, Lovelies! Ben sent me this grainy photo yesterday, taken with his phone on maximum zoom. It’s our Tawny Frogmouth Mumma and her two chicks. Dad is just out of shot, […]
What If You COULD make a positive difference to the planet?
It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your […]
The Chestnut Tree
“How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.” Nikos Kazantzakis Chestnuts. They’re not really a popular Australian thing. The closest […]
Tiny Treasures!
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ~ Henry David Thoreau My morning meditation […]
I was going to write something else…
“Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time.” ~ Hermann Hesse This morning started as it always did. I meditated at 4am, and then rose with the […]
Holiday At the Farm!
“There is more to life than making a living. Do not work more than you live.” ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana Hello, Lovelies! Right now we have a friend and her little girls vacationing with us here at the farm. Each day the girls have farm chores to do – watering the gardens and fruit trees (it is very […]
Frost On The Flats!
“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again […]
Hay, Hay, Hay – it’s a drought!
“Without water, life would just be rock.” ~ Anthony T. Hincks It’s been a strange winter. I can count the number of really cold days on my fingers. Mostly it has been as warm as spring, and sometimes warm as summer. No-one jokes about global warming anymore. It’s here, and the evidence is all around […]
A Posy Of Weeds For My Friend
“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” ~ Muhammad Ali I have a friend who waits for me every day. Our big tough bull – or Red Bull, as we […]
Why We Vaccinate
“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition […]
Red Bull’s Beautiful Babies
“To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.” ~ T.S. Eliot Do you remember Red Bull, our miracle calf? That’s him in the photo above, taken about eighteen months ago when he was just a […]
A Day At the Farm
“I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.” ~ Emma Goldman I slept in yesterday. Til nearly eight am. Pure luxury! I’ve had a month of restless nights thanks to Lyme disease, so to sleep so deeply and completely was bliss. Our farm is a hive of activity right now. […]
Adapting to Change
“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the […]
Sowing Seeds
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson Yesterday afternoon the sky over the farm grew heavy and dark. The air was hot and humid, with not a hint of breeze. I had finished a busy day of phone readings and retreat […]
A Little Light Rain
“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” ~ Joel […]
Roadside Bounty and Shared Harvests
“We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest.” ~ Orison Swett Marden On the back roads around our own little farm, many farmers and those folks with large home gardens have set up roadside stalls to sell some of their surplus produce. I […]
Making a Cosy Nest
“The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship.” ~ William Blake There’s a cold change in the air. Autumn is well and truly here at the farm. That means stoking the fire each night, and digging out our jumpers and extra blankets for the beds. A few weeks ago I sat on the veranda, discussing the Bluesfest program with […]
Clearing Sales – and their special charm
“A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.” ~ Franklin P. Jones I had quite the romantic outing yesterday. It started with the Lismore Farmers Markets and their Saturday auction in the showgrounds, where we enjoyed an excellent coffee and perused the wares. We came away with a bargain lawn mower, […]
Hay, Hay, Hay! (because lame jokes & Nicole go so well together)
“Nic, step away from that computer. Sometimes you just have to get going!” ~ Ben Phillips, husband. We got up so early this morning there was no time to blog. We were in the ute and rolling out the door just on dawn. Why? To buy hay at the Saturday Markets of course! The […]
Easy Pecan Pie Recipe
“Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.” ~ Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857 Something very cool happened yesterday afternoon as we went for a family walk to wheel the rubbish bin (it’s a glamorous life on the farm LOL!) down our long driveway to the road. As I trailed […]
An Afternoon Walk On My Farm
“When I woke up I was changed. The land had recognised me again.” ~ George Djilaynga, Neil Murray, Warumpi Band I’m home again, at my little farm at Possum Creek. Yesterday I went for a walk in the late afternoon sunshine. The wind was rustling the branches, the giant wedgetail eagle flew above me, fat […]
Meet Red Bull!
“Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist.” ~ David Ben-Gurion Do you remember me posting recently about a very fat cow, who couldn’t possibly be pregnant, giving birth to a baby bull calf. He’s our little miracle, and he came into the world after we’d lost both of our young bulls to […]
Rain is better than drought…
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. ~ From ‘My Country‘ by Dorothea Mackellar We endured eight hard years of drought at our old farm – a cattle property in the Lockyer Valley. Slowly the grass turned brittle as straw and the dams […]
What the Frack?
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight […]
What Real Food Looks Like…
On Saturday morning at the crack of dawn my husband and I went into Lismore, a small country town about 25 minutes drive from our farm. We needed to buy some hay for our weaner calves, and there was a truckload of bales for sale at the showgrounds, which is also home to the Lismore […]
The Bee Tree
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” ~ Albert Einstein One of my favourite afternoon farm chores is filling up the cattle troughs. When I walk down to the pump house that sits beside our spring-fed dam, I go through a fenced off area […]
Koalas in My Backyard! or What is Biodiversity?
We must be the change we wish to see in the world ~ Mahatma Gandhi One of the hats I wear in this lifetime is ‘Organic Farmer’. My husband and I have a strong commitment to food production that nurtures and values the land, and that uses no chemicals or harmful practices. We […]
Nothing Grows Well in Depleted Soil
Today it looks like I’m blogging about farming. But I’m not really. I’m blogging about you. Read on… Life on the farm is always varied. Yesterday we went down to the flats by the river to inspect the pasture regrowth. Once upon a time (long before us) this paddock was heavily cropped, year after year, […]
Everybody needs a place to call home, or, my little farm and what it means to me
One’s home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening – the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life – and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a […]