THE GARDEN

What we bought was 22 acres of bracken, dust, rabbits & failing fences!….& we’ve never regretted it for a moment…except, maybe in 2003, during the fires, when we were surrounded by 100s of acres of burning forest, & the CFA trucks had gone & the smell of burning bitumen was overwhelming! But after a little while we downed a beer, threw some kangaroo on the barbie…(purchased at the IGA) & figured a  new start was exactly what we needed. Unfortunately we were under the delusion that the fire would deal with the weeds & we could start afresh. Sadly the rest of the summer was the wettest in living memory & within months, …apart from the erosion… the Patterson Curse was 6 feet tall, especially around the Alpaca “toilets”…Tragically , of course, we had to have the Alpacas put down because of burns to their feet.

So we were alone apart from the starving wallabies, kangaroos & destroyed fences &  dead & dying Koalas.

People ask us did we have a plan when we bought the place. Well, yes we did…or particularly Tina did. I had some dream of Delphiniums & the scent of Honeysuckle in the evenings. But it seems the plan was mainly to have a flock of coloured sheep…When I first met Tina she had a spinning wheel; an embroidered chair with an antimacassar; a double bed with a velvet bedspread; & lace-edged floral curtains in the back of her Combi Van & would retreat there at lunchtimes to spin up a storm. She was a receptionist/secretary at the Melbourne University.

Gingel -the mother of the herd

As it turned out, she also needed chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, donkeys, dairy goats, cashmere goats,  angora goats, culminating in Alpacas. We also agisted a couple of dairy cows (Jerseys). They belonged to a one hundred year old Beechworth lady who had run out of grass. They were murder on the fences! Cows are so pretty, but, like children, they are best admired in someone else’s paddock.

The astute reader may heave noticed that these are all creatures of the garden-eating variety. Except, perhaps, for the ducks…but in their case the drakes are so obsessed with rape it's a wonder they have time to eat anything!

Mysha - cute but evil

We used to collect snails in the garden at night & feed them to the chooks & ducks…But you have to stop once they become bubbly & cross-eyed…It’s hard to keep a good mollusc down!

So as an erstwhile anti-vivisectionist, vegetarian citysook  my contribution to “the place” for the first few years, (apart from the hard-earned!), was stringing fences & castrating lambs who already had names.

It is character forming for a person who is dyslexic, kack-handed & has a tool phobia to learn to use a wire-strainer on barb-wire, let me assure you.

Tina gave up work as a legal secretary in Wangaratta to have kids! Yes, dairy goats. So began era of our own milk, cheese-making & goat’s breath on a frosty morning…you can’t believe how delicious…better than a baby’s head.