Tasmania Archives - Another Day

There’s a local lore in Southern Tasmania, that if you want to successfully grow tomatoes in your food garden, you must plant them on the one and only ‘Tomato Planting’ day of the year – otherwise known as ‘Show Day‘. This is the day when the entire greater Hobart region grinds to an absolute halt and nothing other than tomato planting or show going, happens. This whole shenanigans of ‘show day’ was quite the calamity for us ‘just arrived in Tassie’ mainlanders 5 years ago! We were baffled at why we had to live in limbo for a whole day when we first arrived, biding our time at the Hobart airport hotel, waiting until normality resumed on the following day to collect our key from the Real Estate Agent! Yes, show day is a huge thing in Hobart – whether you’re show going or not, because it also dictates the one and only day of the year that you should, if you want any chance of a good tomato harvest, plant your little seedlings into the Earth. A day earlier and you risk Jack Frost pummelling them to the ground, a day later and your harvest will not ripen in time through our short windowed ‘growing season’.

Therefore, like all good ‘lore’ abiding Southerners, yesterday we visited our local seedling growing friend, Lindy of Island Herbs for a good mix of local climate loving tomatoes and also courted some self seeded cherry tomato seedlings from Nanny and Poppy’s greenhouse soils where their boomer cherry tomato plants kept producing right into late Winter, having only just recently given themselves over to returning back into Mother Earth’s cradle.

:: Placing plants around the space in their pots before beginning to plant so as to plan out the area first ::

Marlin and Papa spent a recent weekend converting our simple garden shed into a space with deep filled garden beds made of fallen fence palings on our property. I cannot tell you the number of applications these old abandoned fence palings have been put to good use in. From compost bin bays, to garden borders, orchard net supports, park benches and even a clothing rack to hang and fold clothes on in our bedroom. He’s quite the ingenious man our Papa and we’ve been greatly inspired through the years by some of the creative ideas and notions in Alys Fowler’s book ‘The Thrifty Gardener‘. Alys is one of my favourite food garden authors and my other two favourites of hers are; The Thrifty Forager and Abundance.

We have planted a mix of predominantly heirloom variety fruits with a sprinkling of various chillies and capsicums throughout. A handful of tiny bite size fruits and then the majority being larger ‘beefsteak’ style tomatoes with a few plum/roma shaped tomatoes as well. Our mix includes; cherry tomatoes (I’m unsure of the exact variety of these as they are self seeded), yellow pear, tommy toes, marianna’s peace, amish paste, st. pierre, money maker, apollo, debarao plum, black krim, black russian, hungarian heart and tigeralla. Hopefully the tomatillos will come up again from seed in the garden – I’m sure they’re already doing so underneath the jungle canopy – otherwise we’ll plant a few of those seedlings as well.

Last season we missed out on making one of our favourite condiments for the Winter – green tomato chutney. We normally mix tomatillos and the last of our season’s green tomatoes, but unfortunately last year our tomato crop was less than impressive – bordering on near non existent. I’m guessing we most likely ignored the local lore and thought if we planted a few days either side of Show Day, what could possibly go wrong!

:: I remember reading years ago in a Waldorf article, how the 6 year old child needs heavy duty, meaningful work; raking leaves, wheelbarrowing and carrying fire wood as a few examples. I know that this Grade 3 farming year will deepen this work a little further and I think it will be wonderfully therapeutic for Chilli! ::

Heading into the Grade 3 farming year with Chilli, it’s wonderful to see not only her interest, but also her ability in the farming and cooking tasks around the home, increasing. She’s become quite the little cook, whipping up cakes, muffins, breads and other treats, all on her very capable own. I’m looking forward to journeying into this growing season with her in this more focussed way. Including preserving tasks in her school program, means we should get to a lot more of the recipes we like to include in our Autumn repertoire, but occasionally don’t get to through day to day busyness.

The base of our Grade 3 farming studies next year will be the Seedlings course from Spiral Garden, alongside the Herbal Roots Zine program and also bring in elements from Earthschooling and Christopherus homeschooling programs. Everyday food growing, seasonal preserving, making compost, keeping chickens for eggs and watching springtime sheep shearing are all part and parcel of our daily life. We are deepening our own farming practises over the coming year and also therefore the opportunities Chilli will have for learning more about these activities in her Grade 3 studies. My parents keep sheep and goats for us that we will be raising for meat, we are looking at the possibility of a milk cow homed at a friend’s property, we have begun expanding our chicken keeping to be able to process our own meat chickens and I am hoping we will have the opportunity to attend a farming and cooking workshop throughout 2017 at Fat Pig Farm’s new school and restaurant facility. We’re planning for the year ahead to include building bee hives as well as a wood fired pizza oven. I know that Chilli will also love the Earthschooling Fibre Arts block contained in the handwork program for Grade 3. I’m hoping we will be able to visit a local spinner who also dyes her own wool, as well as a local weaver. I’m envisaging a little bit of a ‘Pelle’s New Suit‘ project for her! The spinner lives behind our first property here in Tasmania and keeps her own alpacas whose wool she spins and dyes. These alpacas were such a beautiful part of Chilli’s early childhood and first experiences here in rural Tasmania, that it will be lovely if we can include these in our fibre block for Grade 3 handwork.

:: Before planting our tomatoes, we headed into the bush areas of our property and collected sticks to fix in the soil and plant in front of. These of course, as our tomato plants thrive through the coming months, will become our stakes for tall growing, strongly supported food plants of beauty and greatness! ::

:: Chilli enjoyed being able to use a handsaw for the first time on her own, in a real world application ::

:: Papa spoke with Chilli about how the water sits on top of the soil and takes a while to filter down to the roots of the plant. They discussed when we water plants, why it’s important to do so with a sweeping motion, giving a light water and returning a few times. Chilli was amazed to dig a little into the soil and realise for all the water she and Marlin had put onto the soil, just below the surface was very dry! ::

:: Our rustic, scrap craft gardening, tomato hot house ::

In the stillness of our sleeping, Winter home – I quietly climbed out of bed after feeding and resettling Marlin in the wee hours of the morning. I noticed it was 5am and thought to myself “I wonder if it did indeed snow through the night?” Peeking out the kitchen window into the darkness of the early morning, I delighted to see that the ground was not only white, but a flurry of beautiful white flakes was falling gently from the sky. I had to remind myself I wasn’t dreaming, I was in fact awake, standing in our kitchen – looking out to our front lawn!

I crept in and tapped Chilli on her shoulder “Chilli, it’s snowing” I whispered… Nothing… It took me three attempts before she stirred and heard me, at which point she was immediately out of bed, running for her snow suit – if only she was that quick to wake up and spring into action every morning! Papa groaned and slowly plodded out of bed. We all watched for a few minutes from the kitchen window before I thought that I better wake Marlin – Chilli was already half way into her snowsuit! Marlin also groaned, rolled over, buried himself into the pillow and said “Boo-a”. When I tried to pick him up and tell him it was snowing he again buried himself into the pillow and growled at me!

5 minutes later we were all snow wear clad, standing on our front lawn in utter disbelief with powdery white flakes falling on our nose and eyelashes! I may just have even heard Julie Andrews singing softly somewhere off in the distance – it really was that magical!

When we heard the forecast reports of possible low level snow in Hobart and the cashier at Salamanca Fresh told me the other day that 80% of Tasmania would be covered in snow on Monday, I really didn’t think it would happen at our 70 metre elevation home. It is though a Blue Moon after all, so what better time for it to snow for the first time in 30 years at sea level upon our little island home!

We awoke to snowflakes dancing out of the sky and quite a nice covering all around – on the ground, down the stairs, hanging heavy in the trees, covering the food gardens and all over the clothes line. After a few hours or so in the before dawn snow, we came in for some breakfast and sat at the window – eating bacon and eggs, drinking hot chocolate, while watching more snowflakes dance down from the sky. The snowfall during breakfast thickened up the blanket covering Mother Earth even more and the morning was filled with many a snowy adventure; exploring, marvelling at, eating (the snow!), playing amongst and collecting a tin full to keep in the freezer for taffy making! We caught snowflakes on a dark woollen sock and marvelled at the shapes we could see with even just our regular magnifying glass. This perfectly complimented our recent science studies looking at the individual design of each snowflake. At around 10am Father Sun had climbed far enough up his daily winter ladder to start causing the snow to drip from the treetops. The golden glow he cast over the white, snowy world as he rose out of bed and started his daily climb across the sky only further served to add another magical dimension to our surreal, dreamy morning. By noon there was nothing more than the odd patch left lying around our property, leaving us to remember back and question “had it all just been a very vivid dream?” The children spent the late afternoon playing by the window, sitting in a little fort bed they made and watching out to the weather chanting “come on snow – come down low!” They had Papa checking the BoM, hoping and praying that he’d say there was a possibility of the snow coming again through the night. But alas, the snow clouds were gone and our winter wonderland was not going to revisit through the night. We went to bed that night – early, with full hearts and memories that surely will last a lifetime – snow at sea level in our little island home – pure magic! Needless to say, it was a school free day yesterday, “just like Martin and Sylvia” Chilli told me “A Snow Day!”

If you haven’t been overloaded with 2015 #snowbart phenomenon photos as yet, then I invite you now to come on a little journey through the gardens of our cottage home and all our #snow fun here in #southerntasmania on that beautiful, magical morning we’ll all, always remember so fondly. (NB: The first few images from 5am were taken on an iPhone, which doesn’t do the best job of handling low light, so please excuse the grainy, black and white early morning pictures which are the first handful of images in the slider below.)

(Please click the first thumbnail below to enable the slider with image captions, telling the story of our Snowy Day)

Food Garden :: Tomato Planting

Tasmania :: Snowbart