Starting back in 2023, where we left off…. Harvest for 2023 was delayed by heavy rains, leaving farmer Steve with an opportunistic schedule for the heritage grains plot, especially as they had so many other paddocks to harvest first. Harvest of the heritage plot was finally completed on the 19th December, 2023 around the wet …
For the last four years our farmer friends, Steve and Tan, have been growing up some trial grains originally sourced from the Horsham Genebank, with the intention of one day having something new to share and sell. See previous posts for the detail and full story of their journey to date. During the process it …
Bread trials – Purple Straw and Yecora Red Wheat Read More »
On January 12th 2023 we were invited to witness the last day of harvest of the heritage trial plot. Nick and Dain went to see farmer Steve and Noel harvesting the purple straw mix with the Hege 125 plot harvester that they borrowed from fellow Biodynamic farmer Darren. Being a much smaller field of wheat …
This year the Yecora Red wheats and purple straw wheat amounts were large enough that Steve could use his own equipment and was able to plant out in different densities similar to how he plants his other grain crops, which would hopefully help to smother more weeds. We ended up with half an acre of …
A pot of soup and familiar faces – Planting 2022 Read More »
Stretch then came back to harvest the grain in December 2021. We went to watch with now four week old baby baker in tow on another rather hot day. Along with Stretch came his little Kingaroy trial plot harvester, which was also a lot easier and faster than harvesting by hand with scissors like we …
With slightly bigger batches of seed for the individual varieties and almost 6kg of some of the blends, Steve and Tania enlisted the help of Stretch and his super adorable trial plot air seeder to plant the next plot. It was June 2021. By this time, we had already made some decisions on a few …
An adorable air seeder and a new accomplice – planting 2021 Read More »
When harvest came around in December we donned scissors alongside Tania, miller Liesl and baker Lise. We carefully snipped the heads off each stalk in each row which were then bagged and tagged, and later weighed. I thought I was going much slower than the others but turned out I was just harvesting the better …
Steve and Tania planted out all of the remaining seeds, by hand, on a blustery Winter day in 2020. It was a humble plot of grains, soon dwarfed by fields of rye but marked out ever so carefully with posts and a map for later identification. The plot was then hand weeded by Steve, Tania …
Hand sowing, hand weeding and the rise of Horatio – planting out 2020 Read More »
Sometime after moving to Pomonal post bakery-tour-holiday and starting up a micro-bakery, I thought “I’d like to try growing some wheat and rye”. An email to the Horsham Genebank, a bit of back and forth to clarify grain types, local region & climate, a signature and soon 49 tiny seed packets arrived in the mail! …
Well fed birds and a chat around the fire – Receiving seeds 2019 & planning 2020 Read More »
In December 2018 we started off on our three month holiday-bakery-tour-extravaganza-thingy, the first stop, of course, was the iconic Red Beard bakery in Trentham where we were put up for the night by John and got to hang out for a bake. From there we headed west for a quick visit to my parents’ house …
Learning about the past to understand the future – Australian Grains Genebank 2018 Read More »
