How The Farmer and the Cook came to Fruition

Shearing Shed Ramp that I helped to concrete

Have you ever had one of those moments where you feel like you are stuck in “groundhog day”, and every day seems “same same, just different”? Well I did early in 2017 and it wasn’t until we were concreting the lead up ramp into the shearing shed that I realised something needed to change.

I’m going to call it, and admit that I was stuck in a funk. And a big one at that. It was hot, we were working and I was over it. Not the work, just “it”. You know when you are over “it” and you get the blues? That was me last year and I had an epiphone! When you are asked to do something that you haven’t really done before, like concreting a ramp, you make it into something fun and pretend you are icing a cake…..just on a much larger scale! Well I did anyway. Hubby poured the concrete whilst my dad and I raked, scraped and smoothed out the concrete to replace the worn out wooden boards that lead into the shearing shed. Here is a photo of the process:

I got really into it and thought “this is so much like icing a cake I really should do a blog about my farm life and cooking life”. Seriously that is what I thought! As I “iced” the ramp and concreted another section in the yards my mind was going into overdrive. I loved cooking and I loved farming. How could I possibly intertwine the two and get people interested in both aspects? How could I teach people about sheep farming and educate them on the way we do things here on the farm? I think to a certain extent that farmers have a “stereotype” attached to them and I wanted to prove that we aren’t all like that. I am sure that SOME are like the hay-chewing yokels that farmers are portrayed as, actually I don’t know anyone like that, but I certainly am not. I have a Bachelor in Agricultural Science from the University of Melbourne and completed half of a Master’s degree before falling pregnant with Charlie and subsequently not finishing it.

I love my animals, all 4,500 sheep, 8 chooks and 6 dogs and care very deeply about the environment and what we will be passing on to our children. My other passion is cooking. I have a trillion cookbooks and magazines that I love to sit down and read like a book. I love eating! And drinking wine. This was my going to be outlet.

It was while I was cooking a dessert in readiness for my sister’s arrival (I am a twin and have an older sister also) that I realised what my ultimate goals would be. My first aim was that I was going to be on Jon Faine’s conversation hour in a couple of years time to talk about agricultural production and ways that we can be sustainable while caring for the land and each other. My other major aim is to get invited to restaurant and bar openings (not just in Melbourne but also nationally) so it gets me off farm talking to other foodies! It can get pretty boring talking about sheep or to sheep all the time so again, I was getting more and more excited about my new blog and the possibilities that could be coming my way! It’s perfectly normal to dream about these things right?!!

Hubby drew a logo, I brainstormed a website design and waited for it to be built. In the meantime a friend of mine encouraged me to launch on Instagram and off I went. It was scary but fun all at the same time. I had no idea how to use Instagram and needed some serious lessons on navigating my way around. I built a Facebook page and invited all of my friends to like it and share it. The ball was well and truly rolling now! How exciting. The funk was beginning to leave me.

We do a lot of work in our sheepyards and shearing shed so we had to improve the dangerous entry into the shearing shed by concreting the ramp. I am so glad that we did this as it has allowed me to get out of my funk and enter not just a virtual world of Instagram and Facebook but it has also allowed me to meet new people and make connections in ways I never thought possible! I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be meeting up with randoms that I met on the internet. That just isn’t my style. But hey, anything is possible in this digital world that we live in. And I am loving it!

I hope that you are enjoying the photos and stories that I post on Insta and Facey. I am having a lot of fun doing this Farmer and the Cook gig (I am both the farmer and the cook by the way!) and I hope you continue to follow me on my journey. I am open to suggestions, so if you would like to know or see more of something, either farming or cooking, then I would love you to please let me know! Drop me an email or PM using Insta or Facey. I promise I will respond.

I have included some photos here of the yards so you can see where I spend most of my time playing with sheep.