"Balmoral Park" farm garden

 We have a pretty big garden here, I always say its two acres but I'm just guessing really! Nevertheless it is pretty big. Many times we have said we  wouldn't plant anything else but that doesn't happen at all. We have five large rose beds and many less formal areas as well as a big vegetable patch and a lot of fruit trees. It has been a labor of love and guided by  whim and opportunism rather than knowledge or science a lot of the time. Often it feels like a monster and in over the fifteen years we have been gardening here we have had two major droughts and  many life events that have impacted on its development and care. Last year when I finished work, our daughters gave me a consultation with a landscape gardener, this was extremely useful and gave us a path forward for the future. However our year was significantly impacted by covid as we had two of our grandchildren here for most of the winter and I was homeschooling as well as running a household with two youn...

When my youngest daughter was about six she told me one day that she didn't think she needed to go to school any more. I asked her how would she learn? Her reply, "I will just stay at home and do experiments." Recently when I finished working in a demanding full time role she emailed me to say, "Now you can stay at home and do experiments" and I have to say this is pretty much what I am doing. Experiments in the garden and experiments in the kitchen. This little baking business is an opportunity to experiment, develop skills, achieve perfection and enjoy the feeling of staying at home and playing while still feeling like I am learning and being useful. The kitchen is certainly my focus at the moment and I just love to be in my kitchen. From a pretty unprepossessing space when we bought this old house, it is now a beautiful sunny, light filled space. I have the stove of my dreams and lots of cooking toys to play with. There are beautiful views from every window, ...

Balmoral Park Farm Kitchen has really come into being because of the bread and my desire to achieve perfection in baking sourdough bread. I have filed in my memory bank a quote from someone I admired, I cant remember who it was!! who said they were going to devote their retirement to baking the perfect loaf of bread. I thought this was a pretty worthy goal and that I would emulate it! It quite quickly became apparent that in the pursuit of sourdough perfection we were going to end up with a lot of bread! Far too much bread for two people to eat. Added to that I found some beautiful local, stoneground  flour https://www.facebook.com/artisangrainsau/ and while it is a very reasonable price it adds considerably to the cost of my experimentation.  So I thought I would explore the possibility of selling some of the bread. Now I live in a fairly isolated, small, rural community, you can count the number of cars that go down our road each day on your fingers! Having just left a ...

Well it has been a very long while but I have decided to stay with this old Blog instead of creating a new one. The past few years have held many challenges for us, another drought, the summer from hell that all of Australia endured, a very busy working life, however here we are mid 2020! We have both left full time employment and are  now full time here on our little farm, which presents us with many new opportunities. The drought has broken for now, which brings renewed hope for our garden and farm. Our house is pretty much fully renovated, as much as an old place like this can ever be finished! Since finishing work at the end of February I have had the time and energy to create a little business out of my enduring passions for baking and baking sourdough bread. I thought I would see how it went selling via orders on Social Media and having people drive out here to collect their orders! Five weeks in and its going well.   I have been a passionate cook for as long as I c...

I am feeling inspired about social media connections and the possibilities of supportive online communities about all things farming. I often feel that my ideas about sustainable and organic farming are not well supported in the environment in which we live so go online to find ideas and resources and there are many. I have been playing around with Instagram and following lots of interesting blogs and podcasts about farming, organics, food, cooking and creativity in general so I thought I would give my blog a bit of an overhaul and try to get back in the habit of posting. What is uppermost in my farming mind at present is the state of our paddocks and soil. We had a really harsh autumn, the stock were not moved enough and as a result our paddocks became quite degraded and run down. We really should have started supplementary feeding months before we did. Now we have had a wet winter and an amazing start to spring, things are starting to recover but we have also decided to introduce ...

It seems like once you have a Border Collie for a pet any other dog breed just seems unacceptable. Our first Border Collie "Steffi", adopted us, we didn't have her very long but fell in love with her energy and intelligence. Then we got Patch, he was a great dog, family pet, weather forecaster, he was frightened of thunderstorms so if we were all away from home he would turn up at the neighbours hours before a storm! They came to know that a visit from patch meant a thunderstorm was headed their way. We had patch for 9 years and were bereft when he was hit by a car and died. We said at that point that having dogs was too sad and that we wouldn't get another one. Within the year we had Angus, such a beautiful boy. Angus is the dog in the banner above. He helped raise Zoe and was broken hearted when the girls left home and again when we moved to the farm here, He stuck with us until the end though, a good friend and  companion. I decided to get Elle as Angus ...