Wed 7 Jan 2009 | 
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Unlocking the Family Secrets
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Enlarge textI am not ashamed to admit that I have befriended Italians in an underhanded attempt to learn the secrets of their family salami. I have given them bottles of homemade wine, telling them “I love making wine, and sausages, and salamis and things. I must be half Italian, you know.”
The young Italians have all told me they are sure their uncles and dads would let me help on sausage-making day.
“It is great fun,” they say. “We have heaps of people. The more the merrier.”
topThe Little Drinks of France
I knew I would love the wine. That was a given. Wine was half the reason we were going there. I knew I would love the food. That was the other half of the reason for our travel. But I never thought I would fall in love with les petits boissons de France.
The little drinks of France. That is not what the French call them, mind you. It is what I called the many glasses of splendid liquids that you are encouraged to drink before and after the main course of wine that accompanies every meal.
After the old ewes lost three out of four lambs in our first attempt to breed them, we decided to buy the best sheep we could get our hands on. Pure bred Wiltshire Horns. Young and in perfect condition. Our ram was a beauty. A one and a half year old, pure bred stud ram. We called him Benny.
One morning last autumn, I was making toast for the kids, my wife was drinking a cup of tea and looking out the window. There are dogs in our paddock, she remarked. I dropped the toast and flew out the door. She told me later she was so angry with me for rushing off without breakfast. She didn’t know that dogs could kill sheep. She didn’t know such things happened.
My eldest son used to call them boo-ies. He adores them. He used to eat a whole punnet. So when we moved to the bush, it didn’t take us long to plant some strawberries.
We left it too late in the season, so the heirloom varieties we wanted were unavailable. Instead, we bought two each of about five different varieties from a huge hardware store. We built a border using rocks from off the farm and, enlisting the help of our eager boys, we stuck the strawberries into a few inches of pure compost.
Last week, I wrote about a grapevine that grew in the backyard of our University share house in Carlton, Melbourne. This grapevine provided the grapes for my first vintage.
The fact that wine was made from crushed and fermented grapes was the only thing my mate Reg and I knew about wine making. So when the grapes in our yard were sweet enough to eat, we picked them and crushed them in an esky. We used our hands mostly. I don’t recall feet being involved, but my memories are hazy as there was some cask wine involved in the course of the afternoon.
In the past week, we have been back in the vineyard again.
As the long dry continues in Victoria, we are tidying up the vines by reducing the number of new shoots and fruit bunches. We have no water for our vines, so we do what we can to help them through the summer.
Of Mothers and Babies
We wake most days to the plaintiff and mournful moo of our little steer calves. We are weaning again. In past years, I have failed miserably at the task of weaning our animals. Our first weaners were a bunch of Angus steers. Of course, we didn’t know they were weaners. We didn’t know what “weaner” meant.
We thought they were cute little cuddly black cows. Surely they were too small to be hard to handle. Within a month, these babies, who had been sold at the market straight off their mothers, had caused us untold dramas.
We didn’t plant the olives. They were there when we bought the place. Mind you, we had to look hard to find them. Just sticks, about thirty centimetres long with a couple of leaves hanging from the tip, they were buried amongst long, spring grass. Kangaroos, and God knows what else, had been eating them.
As I had planted the vineyard close to these olive trees, I had an interest in them growing. I hoped they would one day provide protection from the strong southerly winds. So Christina and I got down on bended knees and weeded them and put tree protectors around them. We heaped some cow manure around their bases. We stupidly disposed of any identification tags that remained. Then we sat back and expected it all to happen.
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About this Blog
Quality farm produce from a city slicker family? Follow this entertaining journey of sustainability and struggle at the end of a country lane.
David Shennan David continues to work in the city after moving his family to a small country property. His wife calls him "a weekender" who swaps gabardine for gumboots. It's the struggle he must endure to strive for the perfect ham from the perfect pig.
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