This was all a dream and yet for someone who does a lot of dreaming – like the whole aspirational martian thing, thank you Matt Damon – this did seem like a pipe dream.
40 acres of arable land was the blank canvass to paint our perfect new lifestyle. All I needed was some learning, and, it has to be said, for my wife to continue making the cash to complete my dreamscape.
Sure the vineyard was the main focus but I had other intrepid plans for the rest of the block.
I grew up as an impressionable teenager watching the BBC’s ‘The good life” and also spent every spare daylight hour hunting lizards, fish, turtles, anything that moved, at our local creek. Our house was a menagerie of sad looking amphibious life forms. So self-sustainability and collecting wildlife was in my DNA.
Now, with 15 years under our belts, we’ve learned a lot about the rural life of grape growing and trying to grow your own food. Maybe if you have that glint in your eye, this might help you decide if the good life is for you.
The first thing you learn is that self-sustainability is going to take a lot of your spare time. That special time you have now to sit around dreaming of, say, having your own trufferie or exotic chickens, is gone. You’ll be outside fixing fences that your rampant pig is trampling down. It’s a constant demand as every direction you look is another overdue job and your partner, who will be still financing the arrangement, is getting a little sick of your excuses.
I’ve tried, with varying success, to raise many farm animals. The first were chooks, which only encouraged me thinking how easy was that? The first lesson that I worked out was that you leave the pullets in the box rather than let them sit on the backseat of the car. It’s a safety thing. They did get used to the corners but not before a coming a-cropper or two.
Heady with success, we agreed to take on a goat. Straight up my advice is don’t ever take on a goat or believe the ‘friends’ who offer it to you. A goat will fuck with your life. You wake to a view of the goat, Boomerang, standing on your increasingly impatient wife’s carefully selected country-themed hardwood outdoor furniture, eating your favourite t-shirt, staring you down, testicles gently swaying in the morning breeze. Being of indeterminate age and likely to be as tough as a belt-sander, you need to find someone else gullible and new to the land.
The geese were only slightly more pleasant an experience. They hang around the yard, crapping on anything of any value and then, in spring, turn into these vicious alpha-males, evil things that won’t let you move freely around your farm. Then you find out that they have this distressing mating ritual where the males basically try to drown the female, in coitus, as it were. I tried to revive one such goose from a particularly rigorous session on the dam. As I was the first aid officer at work, and the first responder, I was confident that I could employ my resuscitation skills to bring her back from the brink but physiology and the absence of a defibrillator made the effort unsuccessful.
Perhaps the moment when I shone most brightly, was when we, or should say I, decided to raise pigs to make my own salume. My wife didn’t remember that meeting and when I turned up with a cage of two baby black pigs, it took quite a while for her enthusiasm to catch up with mine. Pigs grow fast and will eat anything, including the chickens that they shared their first night with. I reasoned to my distressed kids, that ‘Babe’ didn’t eat the chooks in that movie. What sealed their fate, and my career as a pig farmer, was having the 200kg female running through the house after a dip in the dam. Some five years later we can finally laugh about that experience.
So it’s a never ending quest to find the right sort of animals to raise and not put your marriage in jeopardy. I’m leaning toward miniature cows at the moment, thinking a herd of 4-foot high, pure-blood galloways would be a pretty cool addition to my life stage.
Footnote: We did manage to make the best, hand-reared, cold-smoked bacon you can imagine. If I wanted to go commercial I realise that I would firstly need a lot more wives and then sell it at $1000 a kilo to return the investment.
Here’s a neat way to use good bacon:
Okonomiyaki (Osaka-style pancake with bacon tare)
3 whole eggs
180g plain flour
2 tbsp bacon tare (recipe follows)
200g Pontiac potato, grated
100g kohlrabi, grated
300g cabbage, shredded
1 punnet shiitake mushrooms, sliced
4 spring onions, finely shredded
12 slices cold-smoked bacon
1 tube Kewpie mayonnaise
sansho (Japanese pepper)
In a large bowl, beat the eggs and add everything down to the bacon. Mix well and chill for an hour.
Heat a large, thick based frypan. Cook the bacon on one side just to release some bacon grease and reserve.
Scoop out a cup of the egg mixture and pour onto the now hot and bacony surface. Use a spatula to keep the mixture in an orderly, flat disc about 15mm thick. Cook for 5 – 8 minutes over a moderate heat.
Place three slices of bacon, cooked side down, on top of each and flip over. Cook for another 5 – 8 minutes on this side until cooked through.
Turn out the okonomiyaki onto a serving plate, bacon up and drizzle with tare and mayo in a crisscross fashion. Season with pepper and serve with a light salad.
Bacon tare
2 thick slices of fatty bacon, chopped
6 chicken wings, chopped up
2 spring onions, chopped
½ cup sake
¼ cup mirin
¼ cup light soy
extra vegetable oil
In a heavy based frypan, sauté the bacon to release some grease, remove, reserve, and add the chicken, fry until its looking crispy, use a little more oil if needed. Add the bacon and spring onions and fry until everything is nice a crispy. Add the sauces plus ½ cup of water and cook low and slow until you end up with a quite thick yet pourable sauce, you’ll need about ½ cup. Strain and chill. Heat up a little to use if needed.