Gallifrey Forest Farm

Rainy Days

2022/07/18 Danielle 0

It is raining right now. Sheets of chilly, clean water, falling from the sky, and it’s hard to watch it and also hold in my brain that this has been a very dry winter, statistically speaking. Obviously, that’s only in WA. The east coast has been inundated, again, and apparently we’re (the Bureau of Meteorology is) predicting another La Niña summer coming up. Our third in a row, which is, I am told, unprecedented in recorded history. La Niña years are wetter than average, for context; the east coast probably has more flooding to look forward to, and WA will […]

Lost Skills

2022/06/12 Danielle 0

A lot of the things I post here are about farming, more or less. Horticulture, agriculture, permaculture.. growing food (and fibre, and animal fodder). Which reflects the fact that the production of our base necessities is really important. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs places basic physiological needs at the bottom for a reason, after all – they underpin everything else. But growing ingredients isn’t the only part of that picture which is important. Over the last year or two, I’ve been looking at various sort of ‘old fashioned’ skills, mostly just because I’m interested and I’m that sort of nerd. I […]

Belatedly

2022/05/19 Danielle 0

Well, it’s been a ..I want to say year, but in fact closer to four years since I updated this. In the meantime, we actually moved out and into town for 2 years because roadworks on the main road up here were making our commute to our on-premises, in-town day jobs miserable. Then there was Covid-19, and a few changes of job situation, and the roadworks finished (finally!), so we moved back in. The farm is still going, in spite of 2 years of not living on the property, and slowly, slowly, our plans are coming together. Not helped by […]

Farm Club

2018/05/06 Danielle 0

The first rule of farm club is.. please do in fact talk about farm club. Tell anyone you know who might be interested. Encourage other people to start their own versions – maybe we can make it into a movement. Farm club is a combination of a (hopefully) practical co-op for food sharing and an attempt at a real-world version of a gifting/barter economy. The idea is that members offer “shares” in whatever they produce, along with what they need back to keep producing the thing, and other members sign up for those shares. So in our case, we produce […]

Fruit Trees from Seed

2018/04/16 Danielle 0

The received wisdom of gardeners and horticulturalists everywhere (I’m generalising, go with it for now) is that it’s pointless to grow fruit trees from seed because they don’t come true to type. (True to type means that the fruit of the daughter plant will be the same, or very nearly the same, as the fruit of the mother plant.) There are exceptions – mangos and mot citrus produce what are called polyembryonic seeds, which means that there are multiple embryos in each seed, and only one is the result of sexual recombination – the others are asexually produced, and will […]