Our Farm
The Native Farm is twenty acres at Eppalock, in central Victoria, about half an hour from Bendigo. It was part of a thirty-five acre family block. The rest of it is still next door.
It is not an easy place to grow anything. The thirty-year record for this patch of ground is 511 mm of rain a year against 1,728 mm of evaporation — the site loses more than three times the water it's handed. Ten months of the year run at a deficit. There are 49 frost nights in an average year, 19 of them hard, with a frost season that runs from May into October. The hottest day on record here reached 46.2°C.
So we planted natives. Partly because plants that evolved for Australian conditions have a better chance of surviving ours. Partly because they're niche: nobody competes with us on price for a crop most people can't name, and on twenty acres — less once you take out everything that isn't rows of trees — the only economics that work are high-value ones. And partly because they ask less of us than conventional fruit does.
Right now about a quarter of the prepared ground is planted. There are finger limes in Zone 3, which are doing the best of anything here. There's boobialla through Zone 4, growing fast. And there are four rows of mountain pepper under a shadecloth roof, which is what's left of a planting that was more than twice the size before last summer. The rest — seventeen kilometres of prepared beds across six zones — is waiting on us working out what belongs in it.
We've recently stopped tidying. The grass and weeds now grow up around the trees instead of being cleared back, on the theory that ground cover is worth more than neatness on soil like ours, and that it's less work besides. There are Dorpers on a section with no trees on it, and the plan is to move them around under temporary fencing and see whether they'll trim the grass without touching the trees. We don't know yet whether any of this works. That's most of what farming here has been so far.
Nothing on this block pays for a while. Finger limes take three to five years to bear. Mountain pepper the same. You don't put a crop like that in the ground unless you expect to be standing in the same paddock in ten years' time — and that's the whole idea of it. This is a family block, being planted by one generation mostly for the next.