September - The Season Begins
Dear Friends,
September always feels like a turning point here.
Winter is still hanging on in the mornings, with crisp air and the occasional dusting of snow on the mountains, but the days are longer and there is a definite change in the paddocks, the garden and the air around us. Things that have been quiet for months are beginning to move.
The lambs are growing and it is time for marking. The tractors are back in the paddocks, ground is being worked and crops are going in. The vegetable garden is being prepared for another season, and after months of waiting, the first flowers are ready to harvest and sell again.
It feels as though everything is beginning at once.
September has been a busy month, but amongst the work there have been birthday celebrations, school assemblies, Pony Club, basketball, a school camp to Maria Island, lunches with family and dinners with friends. The kind of things that fill the calendar but also make a month feel full in a different way.
Perhaps that is what I love about spring. There is movement everywhere.
After months of preparation, things finally begin to show themselves.
In Bloom
The ranunculus and Iceland poppies are flowering, and with them comes one of my favourite moments of the flower-growing year, being able to cut flowers from the paddock and actually sell them.
After winter, those first buckets of flowers feel particularly special.
The poppies have been beautiful, flowering in all their wonderful colours, and the ranunculus are producing those long, elegant stems that I have been waiting for. There is something very satisfying about cutting a flower that began as a seed or corm months ago and seeing it ready to be enjoyed by someone else.
September was also the month my dahlia sale went live.
So much of the work with dahlias happens long before anyone sees them. Lifting, dividing, storing and checking the tubers through winter, then preparing them for sale. Opening the sale felt like another little marker that the new growing season had properly begun.
It is lovely to think of these tubers leaving the farm and going into other gardens, where they will spend the coming summer growing into flowers of their own.
There has been plenty happening behind the scenes too.
My friend Margit, from Chatsworth, and I have been working on a floral arranging workshop for November with florist Carolyn Atkins from Found In Earth and Curate Botanica. We will be using locally grown seasonal flowers from the Posy Paddock and other local growers, which makes the whole idea feel very connected to what we are trying to create here, celebrating the flowers that grow in our own corner of Tasmania and the people who grow and work with them.
At the same time, I have been quietly working away behind the scenes on a curated collection of gardenware for The Posy Paddock & Co. I am looking for things that are beautiful but useful. Pieces that feel considered and timeless, and that become part of the everyday rituals of gardening, the things you reach for season after season. It is still very much a work in progress, but I am enjoying the process of bringing it together.
On the Farm
Spring on the farm is never quiet.
Lamb marking has kept us busy, and there has been plenty of tractor work as we prepare the paddocks for the season ahead. Paddocks have been sprayed off for potatoes, more poppies and fodder crops. We have been ploughing, working the ground and rock picking, slowly getting everything ready for sowing.
Fodder rape and white clover have gone in to provide feed to help finish the lambs, and the last poppy paddock has been sown. Once the poppies are in the ground, the watching begins.
We have been checking the paddocks for slugs and irrigating where needed to help the poppies emerge. So much of farming is putting something in the ground and then spending the following weeks watching, waiting and hoping for the right conditions.
September has given us some beautiful weather for it, sunny days and crisp nights, with a dusting of snow in the middle of the month to remind us that winter hasn’t quite given up yet.
Then came 17mm of beautiful rain.
It was exactly what everything needed. You could almost see the difference afterwards. The paddocks freshened, the garden lifted and everything seemed to have a little more life in it.
From the Kitchen Table
The vegetable garden has been getting more of my attention too.
After winter, I always feel an urge to get everything ready at once. There are beds to prepare, soil to work, weeds to clear and plans to make for what we will grow through the warmer months.
I have been working my way around the garden, getting the beds ready for planting and thinking about the season ahead.
There is something very grounding about the vegetable garden at this time of year. It is still mostly potential. There isn’t much to harvest yet, but there is plenty to do, preparing the soil, deciding what will go where and making sure everything is ready for when the time comes to plant.
The garlic is growing away, and the garden is slowly beginning to look less like a winter garden and more like the place it will become over summer.
I like this part.
The preparation.
Perhaps because it is much the same as the flower farm. You do the work first and then you wait. You cannot make the seed germinate or the plant grow any faster. You simply give it what it needs and let the season take over.
And then there are the things that always seem to happen around the kitchen table.
Birthdays, family lunches, cups of tea and conversations that stretch a little longer than planned.
My mother-in-law’s no-fail sponge cake has also made another appearance. It is one of those recipes that has become part of family life, the kind of recipe you know you can rely on and will no doubt be made many more times.
There is something lovely about these familiar recipes being passed through a family. Food that becomes tied to people and occasions, rather than simply being something you make.
Ma-Ma's No Fail Sponge Cake
Ingredients:
- 4 eggs, separated
- small pinch of salt
- 3/4 cup (165g) Caster Sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup (90g) cornflour
- 1 large tbsp custard powder
- 1 tsp cream of tartar
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
Method:
- Preheat oven to 175°C.
- Beat egg whites and salt until soft peaks form, then gradually beat in caster sugar. Beat well until very thick, stiff peaks form. Gently fold in egg yolks and vanilla.
- Add twice-sifted dry ingredients, then gently fold them through the egg mixture until combined.
- Turn evenly into two well-greased sandwich tins, 21 cm x 6 cm deep.
- Bake in the middle of the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until the sides of the cake have shrunk a little from the side of the tins.
- Turn out to cool, then slice through and fill with cream and jam, to make two individual layered cakes, or one big cake with four layers.
Gathered at Home
September has been full of the little moments that happen around the bigger ones.
I had a lovely visit from a friend who came to see the garden and flower farm. We wandered around together before heading to the raspberry farm for lunch. I always enjoy showing someone around who hasn’t seen it before. You see your own garden slightly differently when you are looking at it through someone else’s eyes.
There was Pony Club on Father’s Day with Olive and George, Oscar playing in his basketball semi-finals. We also had a school assembly where we watched George receive a class award, and Olive perform with the junior choir.
These moments feel so ordinary when they are happening, but I find myself wanting to remember them. Watching your children grow is such a strange thing. One minute they are little and the next they are standing on a stage accepting an award or singing in front of a room full of people. You spend so much time raising them that sometimes you don’t notice how much they are changing until one of these moments makes you stop.
I also spent a few days away with Oscar on his Grade 7 camp to Maria Island. I went along as one of the parent volunteers and it was lovely getting to know some of the other parents who came along too. Maria Island was beautiful, as it always is, and there was something very special about experiencing it alongside the children.
I loved the time away, but I also loved coming home.
There is something about sleeping in your own bed and having your own shower after a few days away that makes home feel particularly good.
September also brought my 43rd birthday and being thoroughly spoilt by my family, dinner with friends, a catch-up at the local winery with girlfriends and a day with my sister and her family when they came over for lunch.
And then there was Harry.
I spent some time helping him with his agriculture assignment, out in the paddock with a shovel and the equipment he needed to collect his information. There is something quite special about watching your children begin to take an interest in the things that have always been part of your everyday life.
So much of farming is learned simply by being around it. Watching, helping, asking questions, getting your hands dirty and slowly beginning to understand the land for yourself.
It made me think about how much the children absorb simply by growing up here.
The farm is not just where we live. It is part of their education, their childhood and, in small ways, their understanding of the world.
Field Notes
September has reminded me that beginnings rarely arrive all at once.
They come gradually.
The first poppy.
The first ranunculus.
A field of newly emerging crops.
The first signs of the vegetable garden waking up.
Lambs growing stronger.
The return of longer days.
A little more warmth in the afternoon.
A beautiful fall of rain.
A child standing on a stage.
Another beginning to understand the work of the farm.
So much of what we do here is about preparation.
We plant long before we harvest. We prepare the soil before we plant. We make plans months before we see the result.
And perhaps life is much the same.
There is a tendency to look ahead to the finished garden, the finished project, the flowers in full bloom, the paddocks established and the children grown.
But September has reminded me to notice what is happening now.
The tiny beginnings.
The things that are just starting to emerge.
The moments that will only be here for a short time before the season moves on.
After all, growth takes time.
And perhaps we don’t need to rush it.
Until next month,
From the Paddock.