Life on our small farm

Christmas arrives and family with helping hands arrive too. This means extra hands in the market garden, in the packing room, and to put up the Christmas tree which might have been forgotten otherwise. It means two extra sat-on seats at the table, extra company and extra laughs.

Our youngest son who has finished his Uni year comes home with a renewed enthusiasm for what we do. He makes a big impact on weeds, helps us fly through Christmas induced increased volumes of salad bags in the packing room, prunes trees and goes to the Farmers market to help Daryn with the big Christmas crowd chaos. 

My Mum turns up each year before Christmas, to lend a hand. She excels at pulling apart flowers for the salad mix, tying up feisty cucumbers, completing abandoned housework and peering seriously through her glasses when the rest of us joke that she's the HR department keeping us all in line.

When I was little, my grandparents would arrive a couple of days before Christmas to lend a hand in the tomato shed. It was a busy time, with the picking, grading, boxing and selling of tomatoes to locals and people heading off in all directions on their summer holidays. My grandparents, who had been market gardeners themselves, knew what a hectic time it was and turned up spot-on when they were needed. I remember the tomato shed a bustle of people chatting and laughing, Christmas songs playing on the local radio and customers cars pulling in off the road all day. 

This Christmas, keeping our flat-tack busy stockists stocked up is a priority, and we'll rush to keep up in the Christmas madness. But once we've done each days work, we'll relax and celebrate with our loved ones.

We wish you all a happy Christmas. May you too have extra hands if you need them over the busy season. Good luck to other growers out there, that are working hard these holidays to earn an important chunk of their year's revenue. Thank you to all our wonderful customers, fellow market stallholders, our stockists, friends ... and our families for your support and fellowship this year.

When we first arrived at the farm, there was much discussion of ideas for a farm name. But when it came down to it, the most obvious choice was a nod to the little Whanaki River (it's more a salty, muddy mangrove creek) that our farm sat next to.

You could say our river is a tidal finger pointing inland off the Kaipara Harbour. The Kaipara has 5 main arms that weave out into the land. When we look at a map of the district we can easily find our farm. It's a little corner between 2 tidal fingers. (tiny red circle on right of map).

The river not only inspires a farm name, it also provides some character.

The white headed grey heron live here, next to the river. We see them silhouetted against the sky up high on the branches of 'old man pines'. They perch facing the river, and we think they're watching for crabs or small fish. They glide down from the pines, across our paddocks, making prehistoric-sounding croaking calls. They swoop down to join our goat herd. They and the goats happily go about their daily tasks together ... we guess the herons enjoy the insects and worms that get disturbed by the goats.

The river changes from hour to hour, giving us tidal intel. It just takes a quick glance down the river to know if the tide is in or out. The tidal status doesn't impact our daily tasks but it's kind of grounding to know what it is. It reminds me of childhood car trips to Grandma's house at the beach. We would drive up and over her hill - and as we came down we had a birds-eye view over the tidal inlet. It was a race to be the first to shout out if it was: in - or out. 

Straddling our river is an old one-lane bridge. Over the years there are been some interesting goings-on down at the bridge. Our market gardens are in our front paddock and any noises at the bridge tend to be quite clear. As I mentioned, the bridge is old (I think built around 1917) and it looks a bit dodgy because the upper structure is wooden. But there are concrete footings underneath. At the bridge entrance, there is a sign of vehicle weight restrictions but I guess drivers don't always know the weight of their vehicles.

One day I was picking tomatoes and heard a truck approach the bridge. It screeched to a stop just before the bridge and then a loud, animated conversation began between the driver and passenger. I heard: "I'm not bloody driving this truck on that", the sound of the men jump down off the truck and then their footsteps on the bridge. There was a fair amount of murmuring. They went back into the truck. After a few minutes I heard a bigger truck coming from the opposite direction. It was a big heavy sand truck, one that goes over the bridge almost daily. Once the unsure truck drivers saw the bigger sand truck cross the bridge, they went across.

One year there was a team who came to maintain the bridge. They did some repairs, cleaned and painted it. They were busy working for a couple of days. Suddenly the bridge looked cared for. I called out 'thanks for looking after the bridge' to one of the guys as I drove over it while they were working. On their last day, there was a lot of banging and crashing as they loaded their gear into their truck. The driver started up the engine and I heard a guy yell "nearly finished, one minute" and then the driver called out "looks fricking awesome, lets go". The next day when I drove over I saw the guy had painted new white lines leading up to the bridge. They were free-styled, a bit wonky. That made me laugh.

We'd been here a couple of years, when there was a knock at our door. It was the public relations person for a movie that was going to be made in our area. They wanted to tell us that our bridge was going to have a part in the movie, there would be disruptions to our road while they were shooting and could they use our driveway for a day to film from? YES! We gave the boys the day off school the day they filmed the bridge scene from our driveway. The film was 'Mahana', and our bridge was the star of a car chase scene right at the beginning. As the cars race towards our one-lane bridge, one gets ahead and cuts the other car off. Our oldest son was about 13 at the time, and was invited to join the director and crew where they were filming in the tent on our driveway. Our younger son and I stood out of shot in our loading ramp. It was so much fun to watch the old cars racing up our road and the actors dressed up in their 1960s clothes. It made me imagine life in another era on our road. And when we watched the movie at the pictures for the first time we were so excited to see our road, glimpses of our farm and the bridge. 

We found some photos up at the local Albertlander's museum of when the bridge was built. There were less mangroves then, the river looks wider and there were even some sandy banks in areas. Now the river is muddy and there is quite a drop down into the channel. But we have seen schools of mullet swim up the river and under the bridge, and the mangroves do have a beauty of their own especially on sunny days when the water sparkles up and around their trucks. 

A neighbour told me a story about local mullet fishers of the past. They meet up at the bridge with the loads of mullet to be transported off. Sometimes they had to wait for hours for the load to be picked up, so a dunny had been built on the river side. But the dunny ended up being converted into a smoke-house, and the guys would smoke a feed of mullet while they were waiting.  

The river gives us these stories - and our farm character - and we want to give back to it. We want to help look after it, and the important harbour it flows in and out of. The people here before us did a great job in fencing off drains, dams and the riverside. Now's our turn to do our best for the river and make this farm even better for future people to come. We're earning our living market gardening off less than a hectare. We have between 10-20 cattle grazing the paddocks, a few goats on weed patrol and a few sheep on race-clean-up but there are extra paddocks we would like to retire. The lower areas of these paddocks - close to the river, are reverting back to wetlands. You can just tell they're crying out to be planted out into wetland loving plants and trees. 

We've begun planning with The Forest Bridge Trust, who are helping us create a sediment reduction plan for these paddocks and the riverside. By retiring paddocks to farm animals and planting them out, it will help prevent subsidence of land and sediment in the river. It will help create more forest, wetland, and habitat for birds, frogs, eels. But more than that, our little river runs down to an even bigger and important place that needs protection - the Kaipara Harbour. We're excited to do our small part, it's going to cost a lot of money for us but it sounds like we'll get some funding to help us out. And we'll do it in stages over the next few years.

Over the years our little farm and it's corner on the river have become our home. As time goes on we learn more about it's past, make our own stories and realise we've become part of it's history too. When you work where you live it's hard to see the beauty - often all you can see is the work still to do. But when we stand on a hill and look down to the river, we can see that the river connects us to something much bigger - the Kaipara. Who would have thought we'd feel such kinship to a salty muddy creek?

A few seasons into market gardening, we faced the ultimate test: can we grow tomatoes? Why am I calling it the ultimate test? Because people tend to have quite strong opinions about growing tomatoes. Either they grow a plant at home every summer, or their father does. We'd read lots of posts and articles about commercial tomato growers watering each plant 20 litres of water a week in irrigated tunnel houses with fans. Pruning and feeding the plants sounded complicated and only fit for an expert to attempt. 

We don't have tunnel houses, we'd love one ... but just haven't had the money to buy one. We don't have a town water supply to rely on, or a spring or river. We collect all our water from the sky and store it in tanks. Would we have enough water to sustain the tomatoes? Would the tomatoes be ok in our no-dig beds out in our front paddock in the wind and rain?

When I was a kid, my parents and grandparents were market gardeners. They grew a lot of different crops, mainly through the summer, but they were mostly known for their tomatoes. Penny's tomato shed was quite well known in the district. They grew most of the tomatoes in glasshouses but also grew some tomatoes out in the paddock. There were die hard outdoor tomato customers that would wait for the outdoor tomatoes. They'd come in week after week asking when the outdoor tomatoes will be ready. It was flavour they were after, the paddock tomatoes have a different flavour, maybe it's because they're out in the direct sun, sometimes not quite getting enough water, open to the wind and rain.

I remember riding my bike along the smooth dirt track alongside the tomato beds in the paddock. The tomato plants were dying, it was the end of the season. I saw one last deep red little tomato on a plant and ate it. It was the sweetest, strongest flavoured tomato I've ever tasted.  

So, anyway back to now - we knew growing outside was possible, but I didn't remember all the hard work to pick the tomatoes when they're down on the ground. I wish now I'd taken more notice when I was a kid instead of riding my bike around.

Like most things we do for our business, we jumped in boots and all with great enthusiasm. We seeded 150 tomato plants, all cherry tomato varieties. We decided that's what our customers would like the most because we loved eating them. It didn't occur to us until the plants were big enough to transplant out into the paddock how time consuming it was going to be to plant, stake, train, prune them all. We got them all the in ground, staked and tied up and did a round or two of pruning. Then it all got out of control.

I told my grandma, 'we're growing outdoor tomatoes. 100 metres of them. We haven't kept up with pruning and tying and now they're great big tangled bushes. But there are loads of tomatoes'. Her face dropped and she rolled her eyes. She said 'that's fine, they'll just be really time-consuming to pick'.

Something quite interesting to me is that my Mum told me that back in the earlier days, when my Grandparents were in charge, they didn't used to sell the little tomatoes. The little tomatoes wouldn't be picked and would be left on the plants or thrown away. My Grandparents once went away on holiday and left my Dad, a teenager at the time, and his sister in charge of the market garden and roadside shop. I think a customer saw the little tomatoes still on the plants and asked if they could buy some. So my Dad and his sister had a brainwave to box the little tomatoes and sell them for more than the larger tomatoes. It was a success.  

Anyway, just to reassure you, our baby tomatoes were a success too. We ended up with a huge crop, the flavour was outstanding, our customers loved them and we sold them all for a good price that made the time-consuming crop worthwhile.

This is our third summer growing tomatoes and we haven't learned our lesson. We still grow 150 plants, and this year we got behind in pruning and tying up. It takes us 1 hour per bed to pick the baby tomatoes and there are a couple of plants that you pretty much have to lie on your tummy to get the massive handfuls of little tomatoes hiding underneath. We thought we had it cracked this time, too, with a whole lot of bamboo tepees supporting the plants. But they weren't strong enough for the heavy weight of the fruit laden plants.

Note to ourselves: next summer ... buy big steel Warratahs to extra support the tepees.

We tried a new variety this year - a variety called Andiamo, a 'San Marzano' style, lower acid, plum tomato. San Marzano tomatoes are famous in Italy for their flavour and as a canning tomato. I'm sure you'll agree the description sounded quite romantic so we grew it, and it's all true, Andiamo is our new favourite. We'll be growing that each year along-side (or along-ground) the baby toms.

I think back to my childhood again and I remember my dad coming in from the tomatoes, his hands all black from the tomato plants and smelling of tomatoes. I remember him scrubbing and scrubbing his hands and never getting it all off. Now our hand towels have tell-tale yellow marks from the tomato season, and one of our sons once said there's nothing better than the smell of a tomato plant.

Does this mean we can now call ourselves tomato growers?

It's been wet and muddy and honest-to-goodness we're over trudging through it to get to our gardens and taking on and off our wet-weather gear to work outside. 

The wet and mud affects all of our daily work on the farm and most tasks take longer than usual. All crops grow slow and take an age until harvest. Less customers brave the farmer's market and our stockists sell less. All in all, our work is a little less rewarding in the winter.

The gravel road we live on becomes quieter - with drivers avoiding its potholes and muddy puddles. When we drive to our local town we feel a muddy-vehicle kinship to the other muddy-vehicle owners we drive past and park next to.

If the wind is strong, we prepare in case the power goes out. Fuel for the hydroponics generator, buckets of water, candles, playing cards and firewood. It's too far to pop up the road for takeaways so we make a slow cooker of something that can be re-heated on our wood fire for dinner if the worst happens. The wind whistles around our old house, which is a bit draughty but solid against the stormy weather - the settlers who built it chose a good spot.

On very wet days we check for road closures in case our route to school or our delivery to stockists is blocked by slips or flooding. One stormy afternoon all three routes to and from town were blocked with slips and flooded roads. We couldn't pick up our son after school so he stayed the night at a friend's house. That night the friend's dad couldn't get home from work and he ended up staying with us. We joked that we had traded family members. The roading guys worked hard overnight to clear the roads and the next day our households returned to normal. 

It was during one of these wet and muddy months that our oldest son Sam, who is in his final year studying film production, asked if he could use one of our paddocks to shoot some scenes for a short film he was making. It was a story he had written about a Viking and he was excited to begin filming.

Here was something to distract us from a difficult time in the garden and luckily it had stopped raining for a couple of days to dry the farm (slightly) for filming.

Time was short before filming started and Sam asked if we could help with set building. We - reluctantly at first - chipped in constructing a hut. Our boys had built many huts in our bush over the years, but we hadn't done work like this since childhood and it was fun. Sam said the hut needed to be big so it took a while to finish. The hut was visible from the road and passer-by's were slowing to get a look and neighbours were stopping to ask what the hut was for. 

The film crew arrived and we watched them filming in and around the hut, crowding the doorway with their cameras, booms and screens. Suddenly we understood why the hut was big - there was lots of gear, lots of crew and the tall actor playing the Viking needed to fit inside.

It was entertaining to have young creative minds around for a few days talking about stabbing scenes, golden hour shooting and, most excitedly ... a planned camera drop. Our kitchen was the birth place of many massive trays of stir-fry rice, our side-by-side bike was roaring up and down the road and driveway at all hours ferrying people and gear back and forth. The local cop even stopped at 3am at the close of a night shoot to check what was going on!

The filming wrapped up, the crew went back to the city and now the farm is quiet once again. It's still wet and muddy but it's getting lighter earlier and going dark later, which is an encouraging sign that winter will end soon. The farm had been used for something new and the filming took our minds away from mud for a while. We can't wait to see the film finished. 

Sam and his friend Jordy are the creative directors of Red Ape Media, and the short film they shot here on the farm is called 'The Walker'. Take a look on Instagram @thewalker.production to see more on the filming of The Walker, and follow future projects at @redape.media.

The recent extreme weather has made us think about our lives as growers, how we've gotten to where we are and who we are now.

We had been living on Waiheke Island for 17 years when Daryn said “Lets shift off the island. I’m tired of commuting and not seeing you guys and we’ve dreamed of having our own business for a long time”. I’ll be honest, my heart sank. I hate change. I don’t like being out of my comfort zone. Our little boys and I had a nice life, playing on the beach, being near my family. But we did miss Daryn - he was away long days due to the extra hours it took commuting. He travelled overseas frequently for his job and was away weeks at a time. Ok, I thought, one step at a time, we can just start researching and it might not happen for a while.

We didn’t think seriously about how we would earn a living in our new life, but liked the idea of producing some kind of food product. Auckland had a lot of people who could be our customers and Daryn needed to keep his current job until we got the new venture started. So we decided to stay roughly an hour of Auckland.

We headed over to Auckland one Saturday morning to look at rural properties, all on the Kaipara side of North Auckland. I was still feeling apprehensive about the prospect of moving. As we stepped off the ferry I bumped into an elderly man and said “oh, I’m sorry”. He smiled kindly and said “don’t be sorry, just be happy”. Lucky I had my sunglasses on because I cried all the way to our town car parked on the nearby wharf. The man’s words felt like some fatherly advice, telling me to bravely look forward to new our adventure.

We settled on a 48 acre farm near Wellsford. The original part of the house had been there since early settlers had built it, big old trees planted through the years gave the small farm character and it was next to a tidal inlet from the Kaipara Harbour. Our youngest son started at the tiny local school and our oldest son the college a half hour drive away. Both boys loved their new schools and soon made friends.

We had decided to buy cattle to graze the paddocks. We had been at the farm for about a week when Daryn came back from the saleyards with 40 sheep. “Just to tidy the paddocks up a bit”, he said. The next day he went overseas on a work trip. I dropped the boys off to school and came back to find a dead sheep. It took me all day to dig that hole, wrap the sheep in an old sheet and tow it to the hole with our car. I still think it was a clever plan - towing the sheep into the hole, the car wheels straddled the hole and the wrapped up sheep dropped neatly into the hole. I had never touched something dead before, so it was a big deal for me, I feel embarrassed now, remembering that the next day at school I was telling a proper sheep farmer about it. He said “you know you can always call and we’ll come to help if anything like that happens”. I said I needed to start out like I was going to carry on - I couldn’t ring them every time something happened when Daryn was away. We sold the sheep and got cattle. Cattle are great.

That first summer it was exciting when we got the first hay cut from our flat paddocks across the road. The boys and dog had a great time jumping up and over the bales, the paddocks looked nice and tidy when cut - and it was good to sell the bales and make some money. In the beginning it was also a way to meet locals who came to buy the hay, one of those first locals we met still calls in to buy veges and have a yarn about goats and life.

Earning a living from the farm has been a development over 9 years, but finally the farm supports us completely. We are now full-time market gardeners, growing, harvesting, packing, marketing and selling our veges. It’s been years of learning, exhausting at times, but very rewarding. I’ll tell you something, it’s been good for our brains to be learning so many new things. We hadn’t market gardened before, so it’s been a steep learning curve. If a crop fails, it’s many hours of work and plant-growing time that’s gone. We had part-time jobs to supplement the farm income the first 6 years, but we found that the farm didn’t work as a business until we got brave and threw all our energy into it. I have immense admiration for Daryn, who, knowing nothing about hydroponic growing, researched, built and led us to grow the most wonderful lettuces and herbs using the system. Although we have in-ground garden beds also, it is the hydroponic garden that keeps our income consistent year round. It’s been a wonderful lesson for our boys to see us start a small business from scratch, face and over-come challenges. They’ve seen that when the going gets tough, if you work hard enough, you can make it.

We had dreamed of changing our life, but hadn’t thought about how it would change us and how much we would learn.

Daryn and I learning to work as a team hasn’t been easy ... but I have to say we’re become pretty good at it. We think differently and tackle jobs differently. But at some stage I think we realised that being different was actually a good thing and makes our business stronger. We’ve both compromised a bit which has helped. We would never have spent so much time together in our old life, and I’m certain we wouldn’t know each other as well as we do now. We feel good that we are in control of our own destiny - we aren’t reliant on anyone else for our income like we were in our past.

People often say rural communities are tight knit. We’ve found our locals friendly, helpful and generous with their time, but don’t socialise in the same ways we were used to in our old life, like going out to restaurants for dinner or meeting up for a walk. Catch ups are often outside the local 4 square or rural supplies stores. We also found another new community in our customers, people who buy our veges at the market, or pickup their orders from the farm and stay for a yarn about the weather, livestock pricing, trading eggs for lettuces or an extra big hug because your dog died. We even had local customers turn up in a big storm because they were worried about the coriander and lettuces (their favourites!). Yet another community is our fellow small producers at the farmers markets. We are all small business people, proudly producing, working hard, sometimes struggling but loving what we do. Once we sell out at the Saturday market, there is time to catchup with stallholders, sharing news of what’s happening on their farms or how business is.

There are practical things we didn’t have to think about in suburbia. One night we woke to a big thump under our bed. it turned out to be a possum that came down an unused chimney! And other things like thousands of mitres of farm fencing, a very large lawn to mow, pests to trap, livestock to look after, big trees that fall down, farm troughs and dams to check, farm races and a long driveway to maintain. All of these things take time and money to keep up with, but the reward is living in a beautiful and healthy place, having loads of privacy, being proud of helping to keep pest numbers down, entertainment provided by livestock, free firewood ...

How has life changed for our boys? Being stuck out in the country makes it hard to hang out with friends on a whim. They missed out on Saturday sport ... they were helping us at the farmers markets. That was back when we worked six and a half days a week, doing two farmers markets every weekend. The boys have been a really great help to us. We actually couldn’t have done it without them. Sometimes it’s been paid work ... but sometimes it hasn’t, when we were really struggling to make ends meet. We know them better and they know us better from working side by side with us, in the garden, in the packing room and at the market. They wouldn’t have been able to come with us to our previous life’s work. They’ve watched and supported us do things we had never done before.

Nature is a huge part of our new lives. We are totally immersed (most of the time literally) in the weather. It dictates how much our crops grow, what we grow and when, what our schedule is, whether we can sleep easy or not, even how much money we make. We have learned so much about mother nature here on the farm. In reward we are fitter and stronger for working in the garden, get lots of fresh air and vitamin D, eat lots of fresh really good veges, and earn our living. We like the idea that we might never really retire, staying fit and strong working in our (down sized by then) garden. We heard someone say their farming life was a lifestyle, not a job. And that you don't retire from a lifestyle.

We miss parts of our old life - living closer to friends and family, swims at the beach, eating out more, living in a comfortable new house (our farm house is very old), having more disposable income, and - a big one - having holidays ... but that’s about it.

What if we’d never come here to this new life? We wouldn’t be who we are now. We wouldn’t know how capable we are, and that we could be good at growing and selling veges. It’s been a humbling experience to live so modestly. It’s made us braver - we love what we’re doing for now, but we wouldn’t be scared to try something else in the future. Living here has made us question what really is important. Maybe money and flash things aren’t as important as we once thought.

I'm writing this early on a Saturday. Early means it's still dark outside. We get up super-early on a Saturday, like, usually ... 4.00am! It's market day, our biggest selling day of the week, and Daryn and Joe need to get to the market and set up before their first customers arrive (often as soon as it's light!). We pick lettuces and herbs and wrap their roots in paper. Other produce we have picked and packed on Thursday and Friday and just needs to be loaded into the van.

I check the boys have their water bottles, remind them to eat and wave goodbye. As soon as it's light, I head outside to do the hydroponic jobs. I check the hoses are all clear and running. I throw out any plants that aren't thriving. Then I put out all the seedlings in the gaps where we've havested during the week. Next up, it's seeding to replace the seedlings I've just put out. We're seeding 600 hydroponic seedpots currently each week. As we build more we'll be able to grow more.

The boys get back from the market early afternoon. It's always exciting to see how they've done. We aim to sell-out every week, and it's unusual for them not to. We unpack the van, sit down and have a yarn about market-goings-on ... and then ... to be honest, we often nod off. It's been a big day!

Salty River Farm is small, and there are just two of us to get the work done ... with a bit of help from our boys. We are often suprised when people think we're bigger than what we are. We don't have alot of land, and we don't have a team of people who work for us.

We are keen to earn a living off growing good vegetables and show people that anyone can do it, you don't need alot of money ... or alot of land ... and as long as you're happy to work hard, it's possible to learn as you go along.

When we talk to people with a dream to market garden, they often think it's impossible unless they have lots of money or inherit a farm. It's not true, you can do if off a smaller piece of land, you could lease a couple of paddocks or buy a smaller block than what you think. And it doesn't need to be traditionally good growing land either.

The trick is to think differently.

So ... how do we do it?
The methods that we use to grow are intensive - both hydroponics and no-dig beds mean that you can fit more produce into a smaller area. And there is very little weeding - usually a time-consuming part of market gardening!

Hydroponics is a way to grow that is up off the ground and provides a perfectly balanced growing environment without being in the ground.

No-dig beds are made on top of the ground, and each season we top up the beds with new beautiful perfectly balanced soil.

The no-dig beds also mean that the crops are up higher than the initial ground - so don't get waterlogged in our sometimes wet northland conditions

We have learned that crop selection is important. We only grow crops that grow quickly and strongly for us. This means we can turn over crops quickly and they are abundant - therefore profitable. And we have accepted that we can't grow everything.

We have adapted and been flexible. During covid when our farmers markets were closed, we set up an online shop and started deliveries. Now it's an important part of our business. Being a small guy, it's important to be able to change and have an open mind.

We supplement our produce with other growers produce. Our long-term goal is to sell just our own produce, but for now, having a wider range of produce for our online customers makes us a viable business. When we can afford to build more infastructure so we can grow more volume, our goal will be possible.

When we bought our farm, we thought we needed as much land as we could afford to earn a living. Our small farm is about 17.5 hectares. Since we've been market gardening, we've realised we didn't need that much land at all. We only garden off 1-2 hectare!

We have a small amount cattle and goats, to keep the other parts of the farm grazed. Most years we sell our 'standing grass' to be made into hay. The income we have earned from raising and selling cattle and hay has been handy over the years. But we could have been on a smaller property and not had animals.

We really enjoy working for ourselves, living in a beautiful place, growing lovely vegetables and receiving compliments from our customers. For these reasons it is a very rewarding life and although we work hard, we are very happy being here.

Most years we get our flat riverside paddocks cut and baled into hay. It makes us feel good. The hay goes to farmers who need it, we get nice tidy cut paddocks and some tractor work done for us in return. We love the sweet smell of the hay, our boys love fooling around on the bales and the dog loves running on the once-a-year short grass. Everyone loves hay time!

The first summer we were on the farm we were so excited to have the hay cut. We had the whole of our flat paddocks cut - and ended up with nearly 1000 bales! It took us ages to sell the bales, but it was a great way to meet the locals. One local that we met that first hay season still pops in to buy veges and have a yarn about goats and life.