A Quiet Place in the Country

Although home and garden provide a daily antidote to the high tech world in which I earn my living, there is yet another place for me approaching an almost sacred aboriginal connection to the land: Pine Hut Knob.

This name appears on no map, and yet it stands squarely in the mythology of this family – I have owned it since I earned my first pay packet way back before wife and kinder came onto the scene. This 30 hectare (75 acres) of marginal grazing land lies along a hidden valley off Pine Hut Road on the eastern slopes of the Mount Lofty Ranges and encompasses a knob-like hill with a marvellous view of the grandeur of the Murray Valley laid out below. And all that for $6000…

None of my early dreams of self-sufficiency and a farming life proved to be in the least realistic out there where rainfall is scarce and summer temperatures scorching. Nevertheless, in the almost forty years that I have owned the property, I have quietly planted my crops – trees that are native to this area and can survive without any input from me beyond the first autumn plantings and some protection from wandering stock and rabbits. Where once barren hillsides stood, now I can lose myself among my trees and discover wildlife of almost endless variety. In the ancient River Red Gums along the creek bed, corellas and galahs and cockatoos screech and wheel, while masses of Monarch (Wanderer) butterflies that have all but disappeared from the Adelaide Plains can be found flocking and feeding on the sticky hop bushes found on the lower hill slopes.Western Grey Kangaroos in small groups of two or three are a common sight. Wedge-Tailed Eagles soar gracefully overhead.

So it is here that the family brings visitors from overseas or friends in need of a change from the city life. I light the wood fire and cook lunch, then sit quietly enjoying the ebb and flow of bird life in and out of all the trees I raised from seed and planted all down the years.

But this doesn’t last long – the gardener in me soon has me up and about, tending to my crop of young trees, a legacy that can be enjoyed by members of my family for generations to come, provided they don’t get greedy and cash it all in after we’ve gone.

Autumn seedlings at winter’s end

For too many years we’ve had too little produce in the garden during the lean months of Spring.

But this year, thanks to mass plantings in autumn, the garden is full. With Spring only a few weeks away, all that’s needed is to free these earlier plantings from the mass of nettles and soursobs that have taken advantage of the winter rains and flooded those hard-won seedlings.

Despite our affection for this garden, these are tiresome weeks as we hack away this winter growth. Back and knees and hands remind us constantly of the personal costs of home-grown produce.

But there is a real sense of achievement once known vegetables reappear, reminding us of choices made in front of the seed-table: beetroot, feldsalat (Lambs Lettuce), parsnips, onions, all sorts of lettuces, garlic, parsley and coriander, cabbages, broad beans, silverbeet and so on and so forth.

Only physical labour can bring order out of chaos in a garden. But when that’s done,the garden offers its own rewards – down in the production garden, the almond tree is blossoming, harbinger of the coming Spring.

How to pickle olives

Winter is well along in southern Australia, yet we’re still enjoying our summer crops – some from the freezer, but also all those things the cook has pickled so that they last well in storage for the lean times in late winter and spring – pickled cucumbers, kimchee, sauerkraut and olives.

I had never set out to grow olives, but nevertheless, an olive tree grew. Perhaps I threw an olive pip into that piece of garden, or perhaps a bird brought it. However it got there, this olive tree grew so well that the darn thing was starting to cut out our winter sunshine and push aside orange and plum trees. And yes, it had olives on it, but now they were so high up only the birds could reach them. So the cook placed all the usual pressures on the gardener (knowing full well the action of water dripping on stone) until neither tree nor gardener stood a chance. One proviso got though the negotiations - that the last crop of olives from this one tree would be salvaged rather than wasted. In due course, the olive tree was felled and cleared away, pickled olives appeared, and harmony was restored between cook and gardener.

Felling a big tree like this can wreak havoc, so it needed to be dropped in exactly the right spot; this was accomplished by tensioning a nylon rope from the tree top along the line of travel to a stake set deep in the ground, then the chainsaw did the rest.

Once down, olive harvesting was much simplified. A week later, the chainsaw and wheelbarrow took care of the wreckage and the olive pickling process began to appear all over the kitchen table and cupboards. I missed most of it, but here’s the cook’s recipe, garnered from the old Italian lady over the road, who still thinks in pints and cupfuls rather than litres and kilograms: -

Soak olives in fresh water for two to three weeks, changing the water daily – this soaks the bitterness out of the olives. When that’s done, immerse the olives in six pints of water, one pint of white vinegar, one cup of salt, a bay leaf and fennel seeds and bring the lot to boil. Simmer for ten minutes, let cool, sterilize jars then fill them three-quarters full with olives and this fluid. Add garlic and chillies to taste. Keep the olives immersed by covering them with vine leaves, then clip on the jar lids. Let stand for two to three months.

It appears that there are alternative ‘experimental’ recipes to the one described above – these involve  salted water and letting the lot stand for six months, and an even rarer method involving olive oil instead of vinegar. But those are tales for another day. In the meantime, home-grown olives are appearing for the last time in among the gardener’s meals…

Chainsaw pruning and possum damage

It’s tough times for the oldest fruit trees on the property, exacerbated by neighbours’ demands, old age and possum damage.

The two trees at the centre of these separate dramas have probably clocked up several hundred years between them; they date back to the pioneering years of early settlement on the Adelaide Plains, when what is now the suburb of Magill was first established with vineyards and orchards to feed the white settlers. These remnant trees – an almond and a Satsuma plum – have somehow managed to survive urbanisation and the decimation of the old gardens in the district as the developers moved in and razed everything on these large historical blocks to build townhouses and units.

That these two trees survived, where their sisters did not, owes everything to the fact that this land was largely vacant until this house was built on the remnants of the Penfold orchards in the early 1950’s, then passed from the original old couple who built it to myself – another gardener.

The plum tree has rotted out with age, but hasn’t been helped by the invasion by brush-tailed possums that have systematically eaten off each year’s shoots during winter, distorting the tree’s growth. These possums have reached pest proportions in Adelaide gardens of recent times, aided and abetted by the installation of cable television and power lines that provide an aerial network of pathways that allows them to move easily above ground level (away from dogs) and to nest in safety in our roofs and dense trees. Modern fence lines also provide easy passage to fruit trees and vegetables in backyard gardens. Being Australian native animals, they are protected by conservation laws; it is illegal to trap them and move them, let alone kill them as the aboriginal population once did to provide winter furs.

My only solution has been to block their passage onto this property by placing spiked sections of slit PVC tubes onto power cables to keep them off our roof, offering some relief from their early morning snarling and hissing and giving the fruit trees a chance to come into full leaf during Springtime.

The almond tree was causing a different problem entirely, although it also suffered extensive possum damage and kept our neighbours awake with their nocturnal territorial squabbles. This almond tree is entirely on my property, but the neighbours – like many others in Adelaide – wished to install solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs to offset rising power costs, helped by Government rebates. So this tree needed to be lopped to allow them solar access.

In both cases however, I’ve been able to extend the lifetime of these historic trees by encouraging sucker growth (in the almond) and grafting winter budding material from higher up the old (plum) tree to the trunk lower down. These younger shoots will build new trees upon the root systems of the old, and I’ll be able to keep those early varieties alive for another generation.

All this effort is easily accomplished using an electric chainsaw – a far more reliable tool in an urban garden than my old petrol-powered chainsaw, which required endless effort to keep it serviced and running. Seven dollars is all that is required before each major job; this buys me a new chainsaw file with which to sharpen the teeth.

Winter weeds and winter pruning

Once again, the long haul down from Germany to southern Australia, and from high summer to deepest winter…

In the vegetable garden, chaos.

The down-side of rich soils and the coming of the winter rains is the coming of the prolific growth of nettle seed, swamping all other crops. All my carefully planted onions have been submerged in my five week absence, and their rescue requires painful and careful weeding. Only just in time too – seedlings are severely weakened by this sort of shading.

The most frustrating aspect of these long plane flights is the jetlag; it has taken all of two weeks before I can function well enough to tackle the more difficult task of pruning almond trees and grapevines.

These young grapevines are essentially only a year old, having born their first ‘Isabella’ table grapes last summer before running riot. That chaos is apparent now that the leaves have fallen off; its time to train these youngsters onto the two-tier cordon wires and to strip away all those extra canes.

Reading books on how to prune things makes my head spin; the neat and tidy shapes found therein belies the utter confusion facing the gardener when confronted with real plants. So I’ve been pretty brutal this winter, and have chopped these young vines back hard to a double-T; from each trunk, one set left and right onto the lower cordon, and one set on the upper. Some of the long canes I retain but wrap them in another direction or at a different height. All the rest is cut off.

Once upon a time I would have put all these cut canes aside and fed them through the shredder at a later date. Today I just cut them into short lengths and drop them on the ground where I’m working.

Fortunately, the winter days are short and I get off early to sit reading by the fireside. Now exactly what have I done with all those pruning books?