creek life

I (or rather, WE - see below!) live on my family's beef farm at Sams Creek, on the far south coast of NSW, Australia.
 
The property is 360 acres, bounded by the Kooraban National Park on one side, and my partner's 800 acre beef DAIRY property on another side (oh b.t.w - I'm a vegetarian). The farm at Sams Creek is a pretty special place - as well as being a working farm, it contains a remnant section of temperate rainforest, and large tracts of uncleared native vegetation - in fact the farm provides a valuable wildlife corridor between the Kooraban, Gulaga and other local National Parks including the Batemans Marine Park....... as I said - a mighty special place.

,

view from the creek into the patch of temperate rainforest -
its a rare & special thing to have a patch of temp rainforest on private land...

I can't count how many generations farmer I am... but for more than 5 generations my family has remained within a tiny 10km radius around the small township of Cobargo and let me tell you that's a LONG time in a small community...

FP (that's how I refer to my long-suffering partner) and I have two deee-lish-ously country (read 'wild' or 'feral') young kidlins - Sass and EJ.....

Sass - believes vehicle doors are for whimps...
(during the 'worst drought in recorded history' FP  hand fed his beef herd.... )

EJ loves to go 'exploring' around the farm to bring home 'treasures'
phworrr look at those drought ravaged paddocks!

 

































































We share our space with 4 dogs (Brimmer, Brody, Sarah & Honey-hound), 2 cats (Boots & Dante), an ever-changing slew of chooks, cows, sheep, horses.... and of course an incredible array of native animals (from tiny scrub wrens to wandering wombats to large bounding grey kangaroos and even the odd dingo!)

swamp wallabies are a common sight down by the creek

We have a BIG, eclectic (weedy) garden where we grow a nice proportion of our fresh food (fruit,vege, eggs, meat) in our organic home garden and orchard or paddocks - the last few years have been especially challenging as we've endured the worst drought in recorded history (that's a pic of our boyo helping to feed the cattle just before the drought broke in early 2010). I'm a passionate permaculture advocate and my goal in the next wee while is to increase our self-sufficiency by nine-times or more (I desperately want to learn to bake bread....) and power-down our consumption of EVERYTHING (think 'zero' waste)

I loooooooove garden fresh raspberries-
is there anything yummier?

I'm a demon preserving queen (I-jam-therefore-I-am) and right now I'm neck deep in my Visual Arts practice-based MFA with Monash University all completed via distance education (wheee). In 2012 we renovated my daggy little studio, splashed a coat of vicious orange paint on the doors and opened it to the public as sams creek bookworks

oh and you could say I have a wicked sense of humour..... 

but hey doesn't every aussie country girl?

.....