Milk & Gumboots: a rain story
It’s been a very wet few months. Like much of this part of the country, The Clarence Valley has had a cyclone for main, and then 12 weeks of almost incessant rain for dessert.
I do not recall what it it feels like to walk around the yard and not have the soundtrack of whoopie cushions underfoot. Had to hang up my crocs a while back now, the mud started coming through the little holes up the top.
Investing in gumboots, naturally, has felt like one of the best decisions I’ve made all year. In them I’m reliving my days milking cows. Montages of a time in my life where I was young and reckless and romantic AF fill my thoughts as I tend to the animals each morning, before getting started on the kids lunch boxes.
Until having children, and trying to juggle adulting during the most unethically expensive period of time — moving to Woop Woop to milk cows for a living was the most outrageous and hard thing I’d ever done. I was a gal from a capital city with no farming background in my immediate family. I was in my party girl era, fake tan to the nines, high heels and a new outfit each week. The pull for this was something I just can’t explain.
I now wear a pink ring around my legs once more. It’s weird finding the ring where the gumboots rub in the mirror again, recalling how back then it took years for leg hair to regrow. And the rubbery clunk they make with every step makes me almost want to shout “come uuuup girls come up” (every tender to dairy cattle has their own call). The gumboots have taken me right back. Ain’t it wild how smells and sounds, even footwear, can act as such a vivid time transporter.
“Until having children, moving to Woop Woop to milk cows was the most outrageous and hard thing I’ve ever done. The gumboots have taken me right back. Ain’t it wild how smells and sounds, even footwear, can act as such a vivid time transporter.”
It’s a good thing that the gumboots have me disassociating. Cos things on my own little farm have been tough lately. This should be the last period of bumper harvesting of our chillies to get us through to late spring, before their big winter haircut. Instead it’s been spent just trying to keep our crops alive.
Chillies just like me, don’t like muddy feet. are on dense clay soil here, and though the top soil has been built up thick and beautifully over the last 3 years thanks to the manure from our animals, compost, and lots of hard work — the earth under our crops after this much rain really has acted like a tarp. Our chillies being waterlogged in the ground for this length of time means their roots can’t get enough oxygen.
Thankfully, I increased our chilli crop this summer, and took over the bed that sits a little higher on the terrain, which I usually like to grow our home veg in. Maggy when I was building this bed used to play in it with his trucks and dump sand from the sandpit in it. So by accident, that has kinda created this epic drainage situation. The chillies in this bed, even with having so much of their nutrients being washed away, are more or less pumping which I am so incredibly grateful for.
The poor babies in our lower beds have copped a beating and I have had to give them their short back and sides winter hair cuts early — basically, to put them into induced comas. This means they aren’t fighting as hard to stay alive, and pruning them right back has also allowed max sunshine when it strikes to penetrate the soil and dry these beds out. Will they come back in spring? Here’s hoping.
A neighbour gifted me fertiliser he made with the fish carcus’ from Maggy and Zeph’s catches. Been quite something to utilise the full animal in this way - protein to feed us, and the rest for ‘Glen’s fertiliser.’ He’s come down to fetch the fish frames when the boys have had a good fishing day. Boy does it stink, but it’s liquid gold. Rapidly absorbed by plants and bursting with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
Fish emulsion fertiliser uses readily available and natural resources — fish bones and skin fermented with molasses and milk. I’ve been using this as medicine on our sleeping hot babies to give them the best chance of coming back. Little green shoots on their branches greeted us this week.
Who would have thought eh, life would come full circle back to milk and gumboots.
My heart big time goes out to all farmers doing it tough at the moment x
