Hello, hello sweetest of the peas!

I hope the days have been kind to you since we were last here.

My blogging time is extremely limited today because I have to take Pepper to the hairdresser soon, and from there we’re heading into Melbourne to visit Bren’s parents and drop Pepper with Indi. I had hoped to get this started earlier, but things happened, and I didn’t. So it might have to be short and sweet. Like Pepper’s impending haircut.

Which just reminded me of a time back when Pepper was about eight and I cut her hair for the very first time. She went from having waist long hair, to hair a few inches shorter. It was so much more manageable for me, but also a bit emotional. Anyway I wrote about it on my blog and got a furious email from a reader berating me for taking Pepper’s power and changing her entire look. It shocked me to think that someone who had never met Pepper before could be so invested in her appearance. We ended up emailing back and forth and eventually she apologised, but I think from memory that exchange really shook me up and changed the way I posted for a while.

After the wettest start to winter that I can remember, this week we’ve finally had some of those crisp, brilliantly sunshiney days I’ve been dreaming of. It’s amazing what a few days of clear skies can do for the soul and for the to-do list.

During the week I walked in on Bren watching a Youtube about a farm in Philadelphia in America, Love’n Fresh Flowers, who treat their dahlias as perennials, leaving them in the ground rather than disturbing the soil by digging them up and replanting them each season. They call them no dig dahlias. Although their main issue is snow/cold, while ours is wet, I was so excited when I watched them explaining their methods and I couldn’t wait to try it out here. In the past when we’ve left the tubers in the ground many of them have rotted, so we’re trialling this new method on some varieties we’re not too fussed about.

First we cut the stalks off at the base, then we chopped the stalks up into little bits and left them on top of the row. Then we covered the beds with autumn leaves and tarped them. Hopefully they’ll survive the winter and come late spring will blossom earlier than all of the others. It’ll be amazing if it works. It’ll be so much better for the soil not to be disturbed and it’ll save us hours and hours of work. Fingers crossed. I’ll report back.

You can watch the whole video here.

As well as ticking dahlias off our list, we’ve also almost finished flipping all of the annual veggie and flowers beds. First we covered them with cardboard, then straw, then compost and then we seeded them with a cover crop. I seriously can’t wait to plant into those delicious nutritious beds come November.

(Do you ever look at the photos on my blog and on my instagram and wonder if Bren does all of the work around here?)

We’ve been picking and eating brussel sprouts with garlic and butter, which despite their terrible reputation, our kids love.

Over the past week my insomnia has kicked up a notch which has been dreadful, but made bearable by the books on my bedside.

I finished Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen and despite the negative feedback from so many of you guys and the reviewers on goodreads, I actually quite enjoyed it. It might have been because of my low expectations, but I really did get swept up in the storylines and in all of the points of view. And although I always find it difficult to read a book where I don’t connect with or like any of the characters, somehow these storylines pulled me through. I definitely thought it was so much longer than it needed to be though, which is ironic considering the fact that I read that it’s only the first in a trilogy. Overall I think I’d give it a three out of five, and I probably will be tempted to read the next instalment.

I also read my Mum’s library copy of The Last Summer Of The Water Strider by Tim Lott, which I loved and finished in two nights. TLSOTWS is such a beautifully told coming of age story set in the 1970’s. There’s so much in it to think about and I’m sure the characters will stick around with me for a while.

I cast off the bottom of the body of my Bracken sweater and am halfway down one sleeve. It’s such fun to try it on at this stage and dream of wearing it with different outfits.

Thank you so much for all of your tv show recommendations. I had intended to make a list and pop it on my blog so we could all enjoy it, but I’ve run out of time. We’re watching season 2 of Ozark at the moment.

Thank you also for your stories of how you first came across my blog and how long you’ve been reading, I absolutely adored reading through them and I was seriously surprised by how many of you said that at some stage you trawled all the way back to the start and read through the entire thing. I think I’d be too scared to.

And guess what else?! Today marks the 21st anniversary of us moving to our farm. 21 years ago today we packed up our little house in East Malvern, loaded all of our possessions into a truck, and Bren and I and our eight month old baby Indigo set off on a massive brand new adventure. We didn’t know a soul in the area, and apart from Bren’s limited experience on a cattle farm in his 20’s, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. But we were young and idealistic and had dreams of growing our own food and living a rich and meaningful life in the forest. We were definitely ridiculously naive and wildly optimistic.

Thinking of those three now I am filled with wonder and pride; gosh they were brave, open hearted and thirsty for experience and knowledge. And to be honest there’s also a little bit of envy in there too; these days our dreams and plans feel heavier and full of tricky details. I wonder if that’s an age thing, or a having more people in the family to consider thing, or just a thing that happens when you’ve been in the same place for so long and accumulated so much stuff thing.

Over the past 21 years our family grew, our business grew, and then shrank, we made a whole new community, we grew fruit and nuts and berries and vegetables, at different times we kept chickens and goats and rabbits and ducks and sheep and dogs, we planted thousands of trees, we renovated our house, we pulled fences down and put up new ones. We tried our best to be good custodians of our little oasis in the middle of The Wombat State Forest and to try and leave it in a better state than we found it.

We’ve lived all the highs and lows that farm life can throw at you. It’s been at times exhilarating, and intense, and incredible, and disasterous and tedious and mundane. But most of the time I think it was one of the best things we ever did. I can’t even imagine what our life would have looked like, or who we would have been if we’d stayed in the suburbs. I can’t imagine a life that’s not filled with mud.

What about you, where were you 21 years ago? And where would you like to be 21 years from now?

I think I’d like to live in a cottage, with a small garden full of flowers and veggies, on the outskirts of a town, possibly by the sea. That sounds pretty idyllic to me.

I wrote the start of this blog post this morning at home, the middle bit was at the hairdresser, and now I’m typing the final words at Bren’s parents’ house. I’m going to press publish now and join them for dinner.

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

See you next week.

Love, Kate x’