15 May 2015
I had thought I would be able to write about the return of our bees with pleasure, triumph even. I had thought I could quote from Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, making comparisons between her funereal imagery (she sees the bee box as ‘the coffin of a midget’) and my own happy experience. But no. Plath’s words are wildly prophetic. Once she has described the box, and the din that comes from it, she calls it ‘dangerous’, with the inhabitants ‘angrily clambering’. She is appalled by the noise (‘It is like a Roman mob’) and declares, ‘I have simply ordered a box of maniacs’. And then, like the Delphic oracle herself (to switch classics) she says, ‘I am no source of honey / So why should they turn on me?’

The thing that had actually been concerning me in moving the hive was its weight. We had to lift it from its temporary home of the last few months – where the bees had disgraced themselves by stinging their lovely host Tom not once but five times on the face – onto the back of the ute. Last time we looked, the two boxes of this hive were pretty full. The bottom box filling up with brood, the top box filling up with honey. Honey that we couldn’t extract because it wasn’t capped yet. But, as ever, our mentor Alwyn carried the load. Literally this time. The bees had managed to find a way out of the barrier across their doorway that was meant to keep them in overnight, so Alwyn lifted the hive while we slipped a piece of shadecloth underneath, then lifted it up the sides and tied it on, trapping most of the bees that were leaving to forage – some were inevitably left behind in this manoeuvre. Then he took one end of the hive while the two of us took the other, up to the tailgate of the ute and sliding it along to the back of the cabin. We tied it on, put the canopy down over it and drove it home. It was equally straightforward when we got home, sliding it off the ute, positioning it on its platform, removing the shadecloth and letting the bees go. They were cranky bees. They’d been trapped inside for most of the morning then bumped around to reach this new and unfamiliar place. And some of their group was missing. They bombed us, their little bodies crashing heavily into our helmets. They followed us up the hill to the cars, clambering on our suits, looking for a way in. But they didn’t get their chance. Alwyn drove away in his suit, an alien in a ute. We went inside and watched them from the window, crazy-flying around the entrance to the hive. ‘We’ll leave them alone,’ we said.

I thought I was leaving them alone by finishing a job I’d started earlier today – planting some bean seeds. I had a little patch all dug over – up near the house, a long way from the hive – and I popped the bean seeds in, put a cloche over them to stop any passing wallabies from walking on them / nibbling them, and watered them. I saw a blue-banded bee buzzing around some late tomato flowers. I congratulated myself on my confidence around bees, on how easily we had moved our hive, on how wonderful it was being a beekeeper. The next moment, I realised that the nearby buzzing wasn’t the blue-banded bee any more, but one possibly two bees caught in my hair. I stood still. Ha ha, bees in my hair. No worries. If I don’t panic they’ll just fly off. But they didn’t fly off. I bent down to brush them against a big bunch of parsley. Poor bees, can’t get out my hair. But they didn’t take the hint and kept up their angry buzzing until the burning pain of the sting hit me. Martin to the rescue, brushing the kamikaze bees out of my hair and getting me inside. Then the bees are in Martin’s hair, entangling themselves. Not by accident, but design. Even though we are no source of honey they have turned on us, the devils who disrupted them and stole them away.

Plath’s poem ends, ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. / The box is only temporary.’ I hope, in Plath’s case, they recognised her as their saviour, not their tormentor.

30/4/15
I spent a couple of hours this morning contemplating the front garden, digging up bits of it and pulling things out. The tomatoes have definitely overstayed their welcome – particularly the ones that have tiny little tomatoes no bigger than a pea. Their sprawling branches have started to occupy huge sections of the garden, for little reward. So they came out, and the capsicum / chilli mutant got a severe prune. I’ve decided it was too well staked this year, and the densely packed branches (that, in other years, have snapped off whenever we had high winds) have kept the bush too humid, so that a lot of the fruit has rotted. The constant rain this summer hasn’t helped either. Not that I’m criticising the rain.

Cutting back the capsicum / chilli revealed some kale, planted at the beginning of spring. It has been so deeply shaded that it is now barely bigger than when it went into the ground. Seeing its perseverance inspired me to expose it a little more to the light, so out came the Egyptian spinach (which was going to seed anyway), more tomato plants, and, inadvertently, a large rocket plant that had escaped my notice. I continued my swathe of terror against tomatoes and Egyptian spinach, and added warrigal greens to the pile of ‘once were food, now are weeds’. I might point out, all of these things were self-sown. They came out of nowhere and have been good to us, but it’s no good getting sentimental about them.

When I stopped for lunch, I looked out over my morning’s work – and saw very little. A small area of bare ground near the compost bin, with a large (self-sown) parsley that I couldn’t bear to take out. Another small area in front of that, separated by the radishes. Closer to the house, some room to the side of the asparagus, with some more of the rocket – it looks like it might keep going – and another patch near the stepping stone, where I’ve staked one tomato with a lot of larger green fruit – they’ll ripen. Four small patches of ground with room for more plants. ‘Maybe,’ I said to Martin, ‘we’ve invented a new type of gardening. Patch gardening. A type of gardening that spurns the over-technological application of straight rows, where plants are constrained in the straightjacket of lines, the monotony of one species. Where the seasons are narrowly regulated, and vegetables are on a timetable. Our plants are given free expression, in patches of ground where they can mingle as they will with other plants, without applying seasonal apartheid.’ ‘The Warre hive of gardening,’ said Martin.

21/4/15

I borrowed a book about chook sheds from one of our friends a few months back. I thought it was going to tell you about the essentials in a chook shed, maybe suggest optimal sizes for a chook run, but instead it was a series of pictures with little captions that said how this person had built their shed out of an old silo (complete with curving windows), or that person had converted their children’s cubby house. All of the photos made the sheds look adorable. I gave the book back saying, This is more like chook-shed-porn – something to look at, to salivate over, to desire.

But now that we have our own new chook shed, I have to admit that there’s nothing wrong with chook-shed-porn. Ours is made from recycled pallets and pre-rusted corrugated iron. It has a tiny door with a spindly ladder for the chooks, and a bigger door with a big bolt for us to reach the eggs and clean out the chook-poo straw. The chooks are contained by a wire fence that folds under, to deter digging predators, and it has a gate that springs shut via an ocky strap. Part Heath Robinson, part inspired improvisation, it works brilliantly.

Our old chook shed – a mere, uncharming, unhip kit – sits unloved, its door hanging off since the dog-next-door pushed too heavily to make her way to the eggs, its tiny run filling with a feral pumpkin. We’ve taken down the electric fence that we had used to give the chooks a bigger run. We’ve also stopped giving them unfettered access to the whole garden, and everyone seems happier. Our plants aren’t dug up the minute they’re planted. The chooks seem calmer in being contained, not bothered that they only have one tree (albeit their favourite – the chermoya) to scratch under. Maybe they’re just happy to sleep in such an adorable shed, to form such gorgeous tableaux as they climb their stairs, to be laying eggs in cut-out water containers, and to have a sustainable, ethical abode that could feature in a magazine on organic gardening.

1 April 2015

As we drive along Bucketts Way to the farm the haze starts to rise lightly from the fields. A whiteness shifting over green. I imagine putting my hand down on one of those white-covered fields and feeling the cold and damp of the blades of hard prickly grass under my palm. But I am in the car rushing down the road. The sky deepens in the east to indigo. In the west it’s washed out, a streak of grey cloud drawing a jagged line under its vast colourless expanse.

The moon brightens as the sky darkens. It’s a bit lopsided, still not full, missing a slice out of the bottom. The moon, the haze, the cooling air. Driving out of Sydney to miss the holiday traffic, through choked up roads that finally open onto highways. It all reminds me of Easters past, of my children running in a pack of children on long wide beaches, where the sea splashes fresh against yellow-grey sand as the sun fades. Wrapping children in towels and hurrying them back to holiday rental houses with lino floors and no heaters, cooking sausages on ancient rusty barbecues in dark backyards. Counting children to make sure that none have slipped away. Finding beds and sheets and looking for more blankets in dusty cupboards. Hearing voices rise and fall across the night. Traces of foil easter egg wrappings wherever you go.

Or my own childhood Easters at Lake Macquarie. My parents had a friend who lived there and we would visit every year. She lived right on the shore and the boy next door would take us out in the dinghy. Which was scary, out on the deep wide water. The jetty, where you could lie and peer through the cracks between the slats of wood, watching fish dart among the seaweed fronds, was better. That, and foraging through my showbag, eating licorice, are my main memories. We went every year to the Easter Show, in Moore Park, to see the fruit and vegetable displays and the cows and the sheep and the pigs and then – our annual binge of crass commercialism – to the showbag pavilion. I would buy a licorice showbag with little packets of licorice – licorice strips, allsorts, twists, chunks, bullets. At the bottom of the bag ­– and it was so exciting that I think it can only have happened once or twice ­– were two or three wide straps of red licorice, wrapped in tissue paper, precious. Too precious to eat. I would take my licorice bag with me to Lake Macquarie and ration out the pieces every day, hoping it would last forever. I would lie on the sharp broad grass by the side of the lake, listening to the water lapping, and hoping that would last forever too.

13 March 2015
Autumn hits with wild abandon, growing weeds and spinning storms through our valley. Everything seeds and stretches, fruiting, colonising madly, in its final throes of growth before death. Everything looks displaced, frenzied. Pumpkins scatter across the hillside, tomatoes lurch out of the garden beds, zucchinis melt raggedly back into the ground. Heavy rain, and unrelenting humidity on the non-rain days, leave the garden damp and panting.
Approaching the farm, I see that a patch of snowy cloud fills our valley.
Slow. A black cockatoo’s wings beat the air as it sails towards the forest. One cry as it reaches the trees.
Sometimes, some very few times, when times are very hard, when the community becomes a nettle patch, painful to walk through, with a lasting sting – but not as bad as a stinging tree – I think what it would be like to not live here, to not have to deal with nettles. It would mean I wouldn’t have a forest to stare at, to walk in, to learn the tiny corners of. I wouldn’t have a creek, to hear its happy rush after rain. I wouldn’t have birds to delight in, that catch my eye or ear as I’m gardening, their gentle hop, their cacophony. I wouldn’t have sudden moments of joy, breathtaking surprise, feeling honoured by a koala, an echidna. A frog. I wouldn’t have a garden to feed me my vegetables, my greens and tomatoes. That offers up a single magnificent strawberry, a cluster of special, delicious midyin berries, just in passing. I wouldn’t have chooks that pick grasshoppers delicately out of my fingers. I wouldn’t have stars drifting, or a moon bursting through night clouds. I wouldn’t have a place that makes me want to use words like ‘blessed’ and ‘soul’. So much I wouldn’t have.

26 February 2015

On Monday night we went to the Tim Minchin concert. The steps of the Opera House filled with happy people. The sun went down and the lights of the city filled the buildings with Klee-like patches of yellow. Ferries beetled in and out of Circular Quay, jolly with their patch of splashing water. Tim Minchin talked and belted around the stage, singing songs where the wordplay mixes sharp needles with custard. Nice custard that warms the heart; clever, acupuncture needles that hit the right spot and make you smile maniacally along with him.

On Tuesday I went to the state funeral for Faith Bandler. I suppose all funerals are moving, but this one, with its collection of people, many of whom are publicly important, gathered together to honour someone who has affected our world in so many valuable ways, without having had huge recognition in the wider community – this was particularly moving. Speaker after speaker talked of her grace, of her perseverance. She spent ten years speaking to community groups before the 1967 referendum – a referendum to change the constitution regarding Aboriginal people (including them in the census – as Linda Burney said, “before that we were nothing” ­– and removing the prohibition on the federal parliament having the power to make special laws about Aboriginal people) that was agreed to by 90.77% of the Australian people – the highest number ever. Faith Bandler was a formidable activist, feminist, strategist, mentor, humanitarian, internationalist – an inspiration. And she was, as Professor Paul Torzillo said so forcefully – and to the great appreciation of the until-then sober and respectfully quiet crowd – “she was a leftie, and we’re claiming her as ours.” Maybe Barry O’Farrell didn’t applaud that one.

On Wednesday I woke to the news that there was a crash on the Harbour Bridge. Southbound traffic was banked up to The Spit. Traffic on Wattle Street was at a standstill. Extensive delays through the peak hour. Buses delayed by an hour. It sounded like the whole centre of Sydney had turned into one massive traffic jam that I didn’t want to join. I dawdled in the flat, waiting for it to clear. By the time I did leave the streets were normal, with a feeling of relief about them. I drove across the bridge and up the highway, turned onto the motorway. I drove through heavy rain and sunshine, on wet roads and dry. I arrived at the farm in the late afternoon. The creeks greeted me with a bit more splash than they’ve had for months.

This morning, Thursday, I woke to this year’s family of blue wrens belting around the garden. Their tiny bodies are barely heavy enough to weigh down the parsley or basil they land on. The grass is wet from last night’s rain. Since last Sunday a lot of the zucchinis have melted, their big strong scratchy leaves gone, their hollow stalks reduced to a puddle on a yellowing stem. Wallabies have found the sweet potato and its leaves have gone too, only the stems left to stand, empty, on their vines. Two of our first plantings – the live fast die young tamarillos – have died and we cut one of them out last week. I pile its bare branches onto the mattress springs that the sweet potato grows through as one more hurdle for the wallabies. It’s good to give the tamarillos another purpose before they become kindling. They deserve a lengthy send-off. These pioneering trees formed the basis of the food forest in the top garden. We planted coffee bushes under their shade and shelter, ringed them with lemon grass and comfrey, grew out from them with greens, then carrots and tomatoes, then arrowroot, further out with marjoram and feijoa, joined their bed up with plum and peach trees. This summer we extended again, with turmeric and yacon, melon and cucumber. But the tamarillos were the first: they established the centre. Our first crop, they taught me to love the tart, red-blood ooze of their fruit.

This is my life. City and country. Light and dark. Frontloader and twin-tub. Chicken and egg. Joy and pain. Life and death.

February 21 2015

Jokes about regicide apart, it wasn’t easy killing the queen. Not that we did it. Our mentor, Alwyn, took us out to where he had sited our ailing hive and his (new swarm) hive, in someone’s lovely vegetable garden on the outskirts of town. We opened up both hives to find that our hive was still – after three months – just managing to replace itself, still only occupying the five original frames it came in. Our queen was there, and a new queen cell near her. ‘They know she’s no good,’ Alwyn said. A sixth frame had a massive hole in the middle of the wax. ‘Wax moth. Sign of an ailing hive,’ said Alwyn. Judgement day was upon us.

The new swarm hive, the control against which ours was being measured, was booming. Bees occupied every frame, the eggs were being laid in a regular pattern, we saw larvae and pollen and honey. The queen was wandering around with an entourage, a bubble of worker bees around her. Alwyn picked her up to put a blob of blue marker pen on her – it makes them easier to spot, and the colour coding for each year lets you know how old she is – but she scrambled out of his hand and flew off. We tiptoed around, not wanting to be the person who squashed the good queen, until Alwyn spotted her on the ground, picked her up and marked her and threw her through the front door of her hive. Then he turned to our hive. Our queen’s red-dotted back came into view, close to the new queen cell again. That red dot had once been the source of excitement, alerting us to our queen’s activity, showing us that all was well with our queen on her throne. Today, the red dot is sad. It marks her out for her fate. Alwyn reaches down – not with those careful fingers that held the other queen so lightly that she flew away, but with hard pincers that squash the queen and … she’s already gone. A smear. ‘What about the queen cell that they’re building?’ I ask. ‘That needs to go too,’ he says and it’s gone, broken in half. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing to a viscous substance in the cup-like half of the cell, ‘there’s the royal jelly they were feeding to the young queen.’

The rest of the procedure was quick. Alwyn placed a piece of newspaper over the top of our box, then some thin pieces of wood on three sides and another box on top. He punched holes in the paper with a nail. We moved the five frames from the good hive into the box along with three empty frames. The thin pieces of wood keep the boxes apart and give the bees in the top box an access door in one direction while the bees in the bottom box have their access in the other direction. This means the bees can go in and out of their own hives separately until they’ve eaten through the paper and the hives have combined.

We put the lid on top of the top box, and bricks on top of that. I wonder if I’m too soft to be a farmer.

February 12 2015
The joy of homecoming, recognition, is immediate, but it takes a while for the buzz of the drive and the city to leave me. I check the chooks. They look to see if I’m carrying the white bucket with their scraps, or even a caterpillar on a kale leaf, but I’m empty-handed and they ignore me. I walk around the garden. Finally, the zucchini have a decent crop and not just flowers and enormous leaves. I find an escapee at the back – it was probably tiny when we left last Saturday but it’s nearly 30 cm long now. The new zucchini – the Christmas present seeds – are already producing ball-shaped fruit, one way past tennis ball size. Should I pick it? The self-sown capsicum – the only sort we seem to be able to grow – has got half a dozen green capsicums. One down the bottom is turning red so I pick that. Tomatoes have started coming up where the beetroot came out, vying with the pepinos for space on the bank, apparently trying to outdo each other for the prize for the plant that spreads the most and produces the least at the moment.

Further along, the Jap pumpkins continue their rush down the hill, but they’re doing the right thing, with a satisfying number of flowers turning into little bulbs of green-striped pumpkins. The strawberries are breaking free of their cage – the one tiny area of order in this chaotic garden, where the strawberry plants are in a row, surrounded by mulch and looking something like a gardening photo – but their runners can’t be contained or rerouted any more and the cage will have to be expanded. The mandarin tree which has struggled for three years, and which we noticed only last week has finally started to thrive, is looking less happy. Some small branches are almost bare of leaves, and other leaves have large chunks taken out of them. Nasty looking caterpillars, orange, brown and white, have invaded. My secateurs are the nearest implement so I chop the ones I can see in half and hope I’ve got them all.

And now, my dinner of zucchini and pasta eaten, the night’s cool air around me, moths the size of small birds battering against the flyscreen, the slow chirrup of frogs and crickets an undecipherable background blur, I’m here.

3 February 2015
The morning sky is that lighter blue that says, enticingly, daringly, ‘autumn’. At the farm on the weekend the days had lost their burning heat and the nights were cold enough to push us indoors for dinner. We woke up on Sunday morning to a light mist over the hills, creeping down behind each tree to silhouette it briefly before devouring it.

Even Sydney has sky and weather. Sydney where a mother raised on Sesame Street sings to her daughter as they ride their matching scooters down the street. Where women give the man with a baby strapped to his chest admiring looks when he walks into the coffee shop. Where the two middle-aged men at the table next to me earnestly discuss whether single-breasted or double-breasted suits are currently in fashion. I switch off from their conversation to concentrate on my coffee-shop reading matter, a paper on BMAD (Bell miner associated dieback). BMAD is the source of some discussion at the farm, and puts a sour note into the beautiful call of the bellbirds (otherwise known as bell miners). Bellbirds have come a long way since they were Henry Kendall’s ‘silver-voiced birds, the darlings of daytime!’. They are now being blamed for facilitating infestations of psyllids (tiny sap-sucking insects) that feed on certain eucalypts and cause dieback, where the leaves are stripped from the canopy and the tree often dies. A further connection has been made with lantana around the base of the tree, as a nesting site for the bellbirds. The simplistic response has been that getting rid of the lantana will remove the bellbirds and therefore save the trees. But, as with anything in nature, it seems the solution is not that simple, because the cause is not that simple. The paper’s summary concludes that ‘there is a complexity of connections and interactions, many of which have yet to be deciphered.’

I leave the coffee shop and wander into Ming On Trading across the road. We’ve only ever bought chicken cages (round domes that we use to protect our vegetables from the wallabies) from Ming On, but today I go upstairs to a world of ribbon and trims, boxes overflowing with strings of sewn strawberries and fake fur. Two women speak rapid Chinese to each other, interspersing their conversation with the occasional English words – ‘sample invoice’, ‘ring downstairs’. It’s like a song I can’t quite get, their voices rising and falling and flowing, then stopped by harsh English syllables. Back outside a woman wearing a black hijab stops on the footpath to embrace her little girl who jumps and points into the sky, calling out excitedly, ‘An aeroplane!’. We exchange a smile at the joy of discovery. What a complexity of connections and interactions yet to be deciphered!

23 January 2015

When we opened our beehive last Friday it was a sorry sight. The bees were sluggish, and there weren’t many of them. There was a small amount of larvae but we couldn’t see any eggs, and we couldn’t see the queen. She’s quite distinctive – not only is she much bigger, but she has a blob of red paint on her abdomen, added by the people we bought her from. A hive can make a new queen, but it needs to be done from the egg stage. No eggs equals no new queen.

We were bad hive parents. Something had gone wrong, and as new hive owners it was bound to be our fault. We went to the monthly beekeepers meeting on Sunday, crestfallen. But the beekeepers are an immensely generous bunch, and nothing pleases them more than helping their fellow beekeepers, no matter how stupid they’ve been. They’re a bit like bees in that respect – it’s all about the group. So we came away from the meeting with many offers of assistance, plus an offer of a new nucleus – a queen with a few frames of her worker bees. We discussed how to manage our existing hive alongside the new nucleus, and the general consensus was that we should combine them using the newspaper method. In this method you put one box (the stronger colony) on the base, then a sheet of newspaper, then the box of the weaker colony on top. We were instructed on it, we were shown it, we looked at it on YouTube and we tried to absorb the many intricacies of this seemingly simple procedure. Wouldn’t all the bees escape during the moving of the boxes? No, they go back to the hive with their own pheromones. Wouldn’t they all fight and die? No, because they have to chew through the newspaper to combine, and by the time they’ve done that they’ve become accustomed to each other’s pheromones and they won’t fight. What if bees from the old hive fly in at the bottom where they are used to flying in? They’ll probably be ok as they’re bringing in food, not trying to rob it. And so on and so on.

Last night we picked up the new nucleus, along with the warmth and expertise of our new mentor. We drove home in the thick sultry night, surrounded by heavy air and stars, the bees strapped in to the back seat of the ute. And this morning we started the procedure. We talked about the steps we were going to follow, we got the smoker going, we put on our bee jackets, we took all the equipment down to the beehives. We opened our original hive for one last check. There were bees everywhere. Bees buzzing in and out of the front door, climbing all over the frames, busily depositing pollen and nectar, feeding larvae, tending to the queen … her tell-tale red blob of paint was slightly diminished, but there she was, her bum in a cell, probably laying an egg. On another frame a large bulbous cell stuck out – a cell that grows a queen. From seeming to have no queen we now had one alive and one in production. We closed up the hive and went to ring our mentor.