Out in it

On hot days like today most of us get to hide away in front of our air cons or fans, but if you’re an animal, a vegetable or a farmer, no matter what the temperature is you’re going to be outside.

Up on Emmaline Farm in Buxton, Taungurung Country, Noleen Glavish has been preparing for the heatwave all week.

The irrigation in her orchard runs through the night, while sprinklers cool her veggie and melon patches during the day. It’s working but she’s dreading her power bill.

So far Noleen hasn’t lost any fruit, however, the growth on her apple trees that she’d usually prune this time of year is playing havoc with her netting. 

For now though she’ll put up with it, grateful for the leaves that are stopping her apples from getting sunburnt.

And anyway she’ll be too busy to prune until Wednesday moving hoses and turning on and off taps. Her pump, she says, will be running 24 hours a day.

Over at Mountain View Free Range on Woiworung country in Gippsland, when the chickens get hot they pant like a dog. 

If you’re a hot chicken, unlike humans, horses, hippos, monkeys and apes, you can’t sweat – so you pant to increase evaporation from your respiratory tract, which cools your blood and your body.

You’ll also hunt for shade, trying to catch any breeze you can by holding your wings out wide and perhaps think about stopping laying eggs for a while.

As a hot chook you just cannot bring yourself to drink warm water.

Mountain View farmers, James and Julie know this and will be putting up shade and rotating large frozen bottles of ice into the drinking troughs to keep it cool enough for you to drink. 

Anything to get you through this.

Meanwhile down at CERES Organic Farm ask one of the propagation crew if they’ll lose plants in this heat – the answer comes back without hesitation – Absolutely we will.

In the heatwave the team work overtime trying to nurse hundreds of trays of seedlings through the furnace of the next few days.

Those tiny plastic cells that contain the shallow roots of lettuce and basil plants just don’t have the mass of soil to hold moisture.

Even with the extra watering shifts there will be losses – one or two burnt seedlings will consign a punnet to the cast-off table.

The fact that it’s too hot for people to garden means there’s also going be a backlog of unsold seedlings.  The delay in getting new stock onto the seedling table up at CERES Nursery will see many of these trays grow too big and leggy to be sold. 

Absolutely there will be losses.

For the people who grow our food through these hot days, the work begins extra early and ends late.

On Tuesday night when the cool Southerly blows and this heatwave ends spare a thought for them, for their trees, their hot chooks and their veggie seedlings. 

Ken Hercott (that’s him with the loaf) grew up in the 80’s on a wheat farm in Pyramid Hill.

Instead of driving a header and harvesting grain like his dad, Ken had a fascination for baking with it. 

Ken Hercott is a seeker – in 80’s Australia there were no sourdough bakeries so Ken went to the baker’s mecca of San Francisco learning from bread-masters Richard Bourdon and Chad Robertson.

When he came home Ken found himself smack-bang in the middle of Australia’s sourdough ground zero. 

He baked with bread legend John Downes at Newrybar and Natural Tucker which launched a generation of bakers, woodfired ovens and the sourdough culture we enjoy across Melbourne today.

These days Ken bakes his signature loaves up in Castlemaine and occasionally travels down to CERES to teach a sourdough class. 

There’s not much Ken doesn’t know about his craft and if you’d like to learn to shape and bake and hear a slice of Melbourne’s sourdough history then join him at CERES on February 15th.

And if it helps get you there, please use this discount code SOURDOUGHFEB$10OFF. 

Have a great week

Chris