Gallifrey Forest Farm

livestock shows

2013/07/22 Danielle 0

I haven’t been to many rural shows. My first, really, was the Perth Royal Show last year – although I’ve been to the Royal Show before, it’s been for the carnival and the rides rather than the animals. Last year I figured, we’re starting a farm, I’ll look at the livestock. Actually, I only intended to look at the chickens and pigeons, and the cats. I ended up also checking out the alpacas, goats, and cattle. I went to my second show on Saturday, and my third on Sunday. Saturday was the 2013 Colourbration alpaca show, which I wanted to […]

plant profile: amaranth

2013/06/18 Danielle 0

Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.), also known as love-lies-bleeding or pigweed, is reasonably common in flower beds and nurseries around Perth. It’s an impressive looking plant, with tall spires of long lasting pink, purple, or orange flowers and often attractively variegated red and green leaves. Amaranth species prefer a tropical climate, but many species are frost tolerant, and they’re so hardy that they’re considered a weed in many places. I saw a few growing wild in the middle of the city this morning. Almost every part of the plant is edible. The seeds were a staple food of the native people of […]

species diversity and food

2013/06/06 Danielle 0

This morning as I was cutting up a persimmon, one of my workmates came over and, apologising for asking a stupid sounding question, asked what it was that I was cutting up. I don’t think it’s a stupid question at all – if you don’t know what something is, trying to find out is admirable. But it made me think about why someone wouldn’t recognise a persimmon (not just not know what it was called or where it came from, but have literally never seen one before). I know about persimmons because I spent a year in South Korea teaching […]

miscellany – end of May 2013

2013/06/04 Danielle 0

It’s the end of May already – and past the end, by now. This year is going so fast. So, some updates: The house planning & building is going, although ever so slowly. We’ve almost finished sorting out a small mortgage extension to cover getting the first water tank in, the second big shed up, and the full engineering plans drawn up. It may sound like an odd selection of things to prioritise, but those are the things we can get money for from the bank without having a builder, and getting a builder is still proving tricky. The water […]

lucky tomatoes

2013/05/21 Danielle 0

There are a multitude of tomato varieties, ranging from black and purple through every shade of red, pink, orange and yellow to the ones which are green when ripe. Most of them taste better than the standard supermarket tomato varieties available in Australia. Diggers Seeds holds annual taste tests of a selection of varieties, and the supermarket variety they scored for comparison got only 42.46% approval, while the heritage varieties ranged from 60% to 77%. Not all good tomato varieties are heirloom or heritage varieties, though. There are still plant breeders out there working on annual vegetables like the tomato, […]