49 Farmer or Botanist

The raspberries had to be pruned, the fruit picked, the jam made and I had a fulltime job as well. Picking was always the best. It was a great time for thinking while being enveloped in the sharp almost clinical scents of slightly crushed raspberries. We had several raspberry varieties that all felt and smelt different.

Maybe Chilcotin is best. It has those bright red acid fruits that brighten up the senses when you pop one in and squirt the juices over your tongue. It is so acid that it takes the zinc coating off trellis wires, and it makes magic jam. We propagated it initially because it is from Alaska and might have a little more cold tolerance than other lines. Our place is cold.

Maybe Willamette is best too, but its flavour is more for the less committed raspberry eater. I like it best even though it’s from Oregon where she met leg problems. I know some Americans are strange but among the label notes on their red wine bottles might be “Willamette and blackcurrant scents in a light tannin background”. Flavour-wise it’s then down scale through Glen Clova to bottom out with boring fruits like those on Camby; pink water held around fine particles of sand.

The best thing about picking is that afterwards the fruit can be morphed into numbers that can then merge and interact with others in a computer database. There they grow into graphs, forecasts for yields and above all into excuses for not getting better yields. Only when the fruits are off the canes and categorised and weighed, computerised, and in tidy boxes freezing in the fridges do they really become real and realise their full glory. Those ephemeral little red blobs become part of a bigger picture probing towards the meaning of life.

By contrast pruning is just boring, competing with weeding and mulching for the most boring prize. Even whitewashing rocks or digging holes is better. But if there’s a lot to think about those activities are manageable. I find that I have my best conversations while pruning. I get into serious and deep discussions, even arguments with dead people, the prime minister, God (same thing I suppose), my family members and un-people that bubble up from old dreams.

Remarkably they occasionally come up with good points I would never have thought of. I suspect that solitary confinement in a darkened cell for a couple of weeks might not be so bad if they all came along. Though after two weeks they might start to run out of things to talk about and I might have to say too much. I hate talking.

She wanted me to take photographs of her wild plant discoveries and talk about her identifications using the glossy botanical books. Her idea was to identify and dry and press the specimens then put them and the photographs into a book with display pages. She drew a map of the bits of the farm where she had found plants and added a grid reference system. This was going to be page 1 in the book.

It was starting to look like a big project to me. Putting G12 or A5 next to a dried plant or photo meant you were going to want to return to that place and check it out over a few years. This didn’t seem like stamp collecting or bird spotting. With stamp collecting all you do is find the stamp, stick it in the book and forget about it, unless you wanted to brag to someone about having that stamp. My dad had a Penny Black but he never told anybody which seemed to make the owning part pointless. The same applies to birds. Once you see a bird and tick it off in your list or spotters book that is the end of the exercise because the bird has flown away. The bragging rights had been cemented in by the tick.

A plant on a map grid was inviting trouble. Your identification could be checked by others. You could never brag because an expert might be listening and say you were wrong. You would look stupid. That didn’t worry her. My photos of things like the common fringed lily Thysanotus tuberosus looked good though and it was starting to seem I at least could have some bragging rights as a very amateur Botanical Photographer one day. The farm was developing a new dimension.

38 Wombat-proof enclosure

To avoid similar problems in the planned new and improved enclosure wombat holes trafficable by other things had to be disallowed. I sought advice from Rural Fire Brigade colleagues.

You can borrow my exterminator said Paul. This was a loaded shot gun mounted vertically over active wombat holes with the trigger attached to a trip wire. You just move it between all the holes around your place and have 100% protection. I have no wombats now he said.

Alan had a different and quite green solution that he had used. The method was to let the wombat make its hole. Wombats aren’t interested in raspberries so you can let them in. You then frame the hole in timber and fit it with a top-mounted but heavy swinging gate. The wombat can come and go freely through this adapted hole while weak things like rabbits and birds can’t move the gate. Good in principle but wombats don’t always go out the hole they enter by. My own solution, the least innovative and least exciting, was to drop the wire-mesh side walls of the enclosure 30 cm into the ground so hampering the wombat digging process. That was the plan I followed.

Digging a slot 30 cm deep around a site 100m x 20m is hard work. I called on Ben. This was to be a father-son bonding exercise like watching Pale Rider together and listening live to touring jazz musicians at local clubs. It didn’t work out that well. I wasn’t sure why until I recalled a similar interaction with my dad. He wasn’t a great gardener, usually restricted in his activities to making borders of bricks around garden beds. These bricks were slanted upwards on their edges for classy effect but also inflicted maximum damage on falling children and tripping old people. Mum was the natural gardener. Dad liked to treat the garden as a route march with compass. You start, you do, you finish, preferably in minimum time. Repeat after a year or two.
His vegie garden hadn’t been dug over for a couple of years. It also hadn’t produced anything in the interval except chickweed, dandelions and grass. The plan was to dig it over to two spades depth thus releasing the deep bound up nutrients and allowing good root penetration. We started but it turned out he had urgent exam papers to mark and lessons to prepare for Monday so could I finish it before going off to rugby. We continued to buy vegies.

Ben and I dug half the length of the slot and because we were trapped in the bush nobody could go anywhere else to do pressing business. It was a good interaction for me. The following week I worked out a much quicker way to dig the remaining slot with less muscle, but by that time I was alone. Ben had learnt nothing except it’s cold at the farm.

The design was brilliant. The 120 cm high fence with 30 cm in the ground was chosen with a mesh that small birds could fly through easily. They were birds like superb blue wrens, bush wrens, diamond firetails, red-browed finch and European Goldfinch and pollinators like eastern spinebill, white-cheeked and white-naped honeyeaters and the chattering New Holland honeyeaters. These were mainly local residents that were joined in summer by yellow-cheeked honeyeaters. It was good to see them foraging at various times. The mesh excluded the larger crop-damaging birds like the sulphur crested cockatoos and crimson rosellas.

Above this strong fence material was hung a 2m wide metal bird mesh which was fragile but very cheap at the time and the roof would be a woven nylon bird net that wasn’t cheap. We had a local timber mill that supplied the 3.5 m treated pine poles that would support the whole structure. Total cost was around $2000 which we could cover in jam sales in a month or two.

I had previously foolishly bought 100m of nylon bird net at a very low price, primarily because I can’t go past a bargain. It was single strand nylon rather than the woven finish. I put some of it up to see if it worked. After three days it had caught and hung three rosellas. They tried to force their bodies through the mesh which stretched but not far enough to free them and in their twisting around they had become hopelessly entangled in other nylon cells. It worked well in the fashion of the shotgun on the wombats. I took it down and put it in a locked cupboard.

16 Torsten's list

During the hour or so that Torsten and I had spent together prior to our purchase of Wombalano he had told me many things, like how to start and run the fire pump that lifted water from the river to the 8000 gallon concrete tank sitting on a small hill 200 metres away. Like where the 2 inch water pipe ran and how he had dug it in and his plans for linking in to Gordon’s similar line as a fire emergency measure. Like about the kit 4000 gallon tank that had been delivered but never unwrapped and where I would find the thousands of nuts and bolts needed to fasten it together. He told me where the rolls of spare irrigation pipe were, the wire and netting for fencing and explained the tools I was inheriting. They had many expansion plans and had bought in sufficient materials to do them. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel he said.

Over the following months and years I got to know Torsten intimately despite never communicating ever again. He was methodical, so once you learned the method, you knew he would always use it. He spaced things equally, kept his old nuts and bolts separate from his screws and nails and had categorised them in sizes. He overbought everything so there were spares. He made lists. The lists were in neat folders and arranged alphabetically. He obviously went to a different school from me, or perhaps he listened instead of looking at girls.

While browsing through one folder I found an envelope containing the labels from all the plants they had tried to grow. The labels were numbered and there was a diagram of where the numbers were placed on the farm. Very many things had died or soon would. Grapes, many fruit trees that would thrive in Sydney, nut trees like almonds and hazels and a couple of walnuts. They had spent a fortune. Included were 5 varieties of raspberry, 5 plants of each.

We grew a few raspberries in the cold of Canberra so I thought they might be alive somewhere. I followed Torsten’s diagram to the Middle Paddock where there was just long grass. No signs of the bushes. They should have towered above the grass. I started up the enormous trimmer that was part of the walk-in-walk-out deal using the nylon cutter rather than the blade that was big enough to fell a small tree. Sadly, Torsten hadn’t bought the plough attachment. I started cutting the grass and within a few minutes had located a very small raspberry plant. The others were equidistant and due east and west of the first. All 25 had survived the 6 years since they had been planted, but hadn’t grown or spread. They weren’t on a dripper line like the dead and miserable fruit trees and the seriously bored-out blackcurrant bushes. They had got this far so they might as well be rescued and treated nicely with at least a dripper line and a bit of a weed and fertilise.

She said it would be nice to grow raspberries. Then we can make raspberry jam like your mother makes. She didn’t mean my mother who never made jam though she was great on other stuff, but rather her mother. Her family had a strange tradition of referring to their parents by “Yer mother/father”. They were all pretty keen on their parents so it wasn’t an attempt to distance themselves from that relationship. They still do it which is pretty weird. Maybe an Adelaide thing to do with expurgating any convict links which of course they didn’t have.