One Last Learning Event - Long Table Dinner in Tasmania

We're in the final stages of planning our return to Texas.  After years of planning and working on the property in small burst and slowly through contractors and other via remote control, I will be in Texas from early February for the foreseeable future.  While I'm really happy to be "going home" and essentially going from being involved in the IT industry on a daily basis to working on the homestead and doing projects I've only dreamt of for years, there will be some sadness on leaving Australia.  After all, we've been here ten years this year and that constitutes over half of Julie and my life together.   We have some wonderful friends here and have an exceptional number of memories of fun places, lovely people and business and personal growth and adventures.  We will truly miss Australia but at the same time are incredibly excited about the future and the opportunity to be close to family and friends again in the USA.

As we have evolved our plans and aspirations for the homestead and projects in TX, it has become more and more clear that food is going to be a central theme - learning more about food, growing food, canning and preserving food, and encouraging our friends and family to become more aware of the implications of food and the food chain on our health and well-being.  While here in Australia, one of the people we have come to appreciate (and final meet and know) is Matthew Evans, aka "The Gourmet Farmer" a wonderful program here in Australia on the SBS.  Here's a bit about the Gourmet Farmer and Matthew:

Matthew Evans

Ever wondered what it’d be like to leave a cushy city job and set up a small farm without any experience of rural life? Join Matthew Evans as he adjusts from being a restaurant critic to learning exactly where his food is coming from, on a farmlet in Tasmania’s beautiful Huon Valley.

Matthew Evans was once trained as a chef, before crossing to the dark side of the industry and becoming a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2,000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, Matthew realised that chefs don’t have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he’s raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.

The show has been a fun thing for us to watch over the past few years and we become more and more interested in meeting with Matthew and finding out more about what he's doing, how he made the change and what advice he might offer us in our upcoming adventure.

One of the things Matthew has done is a "long table" dinner in his new home town of Cygnet, Tasmania (population about 800 I think).  When we got the email about the upcoming dinner in August (middle of the winter here), we made our reservations right away.  We also decided to make it a long weekend, travel to TAS on the "Spirit of Tasmania" - an overnight ferry from Melbourne to Devonport on the north coast of TAS (Cygnet is on the opposite side about 4 hours away).   We'd see a few things, stop by Hobart and the Salamanca Market (where Matthew and his partner Nick Haddow have a shop called A Common Ground.  Here's a couple of pictures - Salamanca Market, A Common Ground - the store, and Nick Haddow and I in the store.

It's a really wonderful shop where you can get all manner of fresh meats (from Matthew's pigs and other local sources), cheese from Nick's Bruny Island Cheese Company and many others.

From there, we went on down to Cygnet (an hour or so) to stay at the Old Bank B&B.  Not only was this a very nice place to stay, but the long table dinner to be held in a day or two would be at the Orangery connected to the Old Bank B&B so getting home after the event would be easy.  Here's the B&B and Orangery>

Shortly after we checked in and got settled, Matthew Evans himself came by the B&B to check out various things about the setup and to bring in a fair amount of provisions and items to be used at the dinner the following day.  This gave us a great chance to meet Matthew and talk with him for awhile.  Even better, since pork from his farm was on the menu (along with many other seasonal produce products like swedes, turnips, parsnips, etc - remember August is winter here), he was really happy to get our recently produced apple sauce (the jar he's holding) as an additional item to serve with the pork.

This was a nice treat for us and we got to spend a lot more time with Matthew and his wife Sadie not only the evening of the dinner (Matthew was pretty busy cooking and serving) but for breakfast the following  morning.  The only caveat was that I had to help Matthew carry the tables a few doors down to the community centre the morning after the dinner.  Fortunately everything in Cygnet is pretty close by so we didn't have to carry things very far.  

Here are a couple of pictures of the dinner - there are pictures of Julie.  The first is with our host (left) at the B&B and Sadie - Matthew's wife.  The second is with Winsor Dobbin - a wine critic now also residing in Cygnet.  Winsor gets lots of bottles of wine to sample and clearly can't drink all he gets so was happy to bring some of his nice bottles over as part of the dinner.  The beauty of this dinner was that nothing (save the apple sauce we brought from Victoria) was raised or grown and harvested more than about ten miles from where we were eating.  While eating nothing but products grown or raised within ten miles of your house wasn't a new concept when I was a small boy, it's almost unheard of now.  I can tell you that there's something very special about having a meal like this - both in the food and the conversation.  What a delightful evening.

I'll continue this blog with a few nice pictures of some of the scenery around Cygnet taken on an early morning walk the day of the dinner.

The following day we took a nice drive down to Bruny Island and to a number of the other local areas.  In one of the pictures, you'll see a group of sheep being herded on the road from one paddock (field for you in the US) to another.  If you look closely in the upper right of the picture, you'll see a man with his back to you and his somewhat bald head gleaming in the sun.  That fellow is the recently retired Senator Bob Brown from Tasmania and head of the Green Party in Australia.   I guess not that Bob has retired he has a lot more time to spend with agriculture and sheep in Tasmania.

So we fondly and sadly bid farewell to Tasmania, Australia and this huge part of the world called Asia Pacific.  We will miss Australia and our friends while at the same time look forward with anticipation and excitement to the next phase of our lives - friends, family and our homestead in Texas.

October 2012 Progress

We had the chance to be back in Texas for a few days in October.  The primary purpose of our trip was for my college reunion in Kansas, but we certainly wanted to get a few things done at the homestead while we were there.  When we arrived, we found that the recent rains had prompted a huge amount of weeds.

But a good bit of hand work resulted in the front yard area looking like this:

And getting the tractor a new battery and getting things all fired up:

Resulted in our beautiful property being shredded to look like a park again:

Most of the work done was to complete the electrical and enclose the attic upstairs so it'll be cooler, safer and less dusty than it would be just exposed to the rest of the garage.  Here's the before and after shot of the electrical box.  We pulled another 2000' of wire (probably close to 2 miles in the house), installed numerous outlets and boxes, pulled wire for coax and stereo.  These two shots don't show the amount of work, but at least give an indication of the large progress that was made in ten days:

And the framing for the attic went well too:

One of the highlights of our trip was to visit the head office of Ogden Publications - Mother Earth News, Grit and other very useful publications.  We spent time with Bryan Welch, Publisher (sorry Bryan about the antlers):

And got to meet many of the staff of Mother Earth News and talk with them for a good period of time.  As those or you who know me and follow this blog know, the information and advice from the staff at Mother Earth News has been very valuable to me in the pursuit of information while we do our building and will be even more important to me once we're back on the homestead full time:

Hopefully, those still working on the homestead will finish the little bit of plumbing that needs to be done prior to an inspection.  Then, we'll see insulation and dry wall going up which will make the place very suddenly look like a home instead of a bunch of sticks.  Here's a shot of the living room from the kitchen area.  We'll show the similar shot later when we have dry wall.

We look forward to our next trip back and hope that we'll be able to actually live in the house at that point with a completed bedroom and bath.

Spring Flowers and Some Nice Touches

It's been three months since we've been to the barndominium and it'll be about six months until we're there again, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening.  Some work continues on the electrical and we've ordered a couple of nice things for the new place.  The first is a "Christie" medallion for the front gate (yet to be constructed).  There's a manual, locked gate there now but ultimately will be a nice, stone automatic gate and this emblem will be part of the new gate.

And while on a business trip to NYC right after our working visit to Texas, Julie bought a nice chandelier.  In previous blogs, you could see the vaulted ceiling in the main kitchen, dining and living area.  The chandelier will probably go over the area for the main dining table.

And this Spring, given the amount of rain they've had in Texas the past few months (after 2 years of terrible drought), we finally have vegetation and wild flowers on the property again.  You can see the pump house on the right side of the picture as well as my old Ford 8N tractor in the middle.  The propane tank has pretty well disappeared in the vegetation (or could be just slightly to the right of the frame).  Either way, it's really nice to see the wild flowers and vegatation on the property again after two years of virtually nothing growing.  I hope the trees have profited from the rain and I'm sure that much of the rain is making its way down to replenish the aquifer.  Let's hope the rains continue.

Above is a very nice shot across the width of the property showing the vegetation this Spring, the wild flowers and the barndominium in the background.  Wish we were there, but we'll be there soon enough and there's a lot of work we'll hopefully get done between now and then, so when we have some new progress and pictures, we'll post again.

And as a final post for this session of blogging, here's a nice shot of Ivy and Jude running through the wildflowers.  Thanks to Bob Denson for the photo.  We appreciate Bob's willingness to be our "eyes" when we're not there.

Outside Work January 2012

The previous blog shows the progress made during our recent holiday to the US.  The inside is coming along nice, but the outside is really coming along so I thought a few pictures would be fun to see.  First, here's a picture of the completed pump house (see the framing in the prior blog) along with the propane tank.  All the dogs are accompanying Bob when he took these pictures.

The next picture is taken from about the same spot the previous picture was taken.  THe first picture is looking to the northeast and the picture below is looking to the southwest.  You can see the new retaining wall that was just built in the foreground and the large planter near the porch.  In the middle, the "front yard" has been nicely leveled and a new Italian-style fountain placed in the middle of the front yard - our first bit of exterior decoration.

The following picture is taken from the far west corner of the porch - in the opening to the front yard you can see in the middle right of the picture above.  You can clearly see the new retaining wall, the leveled yard and the new fountain (along with the pump house, propane tank and electrical service.  You can see that we've aggregated all of our "utilities" in one area to make maintenance and other activities easier.

To get the gas and water lines from the propane tank and the pump house down to the barndominium, we had to dig some pretty serious trenches.  Heavy equipment will be running across this area from time to time as it's all along the easy side of the house where we plan to put the rain and grey water collection systems.  Thus, we wanted to bury the pipes 3-4' down.  Fortunately the land is pretty sandy so digging deep isn't much of a problem except for the large number of tree roots in the way.  Here's a picture of me and Dave installing the water pipes.

Finally, since we've been gone, we had someone come in and put more road base (a heavy clay base - required in this area since the soil in the area is so sandy that you need to put down a heavy road base material so vehicles don't sink in the sand) on the road, on the approach to the garages and the parking areas.  We had noticed this last trip that the previous road base had become a bit worn (quite a few heavy contstruction trucks caused that) and had sunk a bit into the sand so another god coating was in order.  Ultimately (once we're done with construction), we'll put other road base materials on the top of this base coat.  But until we're closer to being done, this material will be our road - kind of a orange-red color quite similar to the color you'll see in the red center of Australia.

This first picture is the approach area to the garages (west of the barndominium looking east).  This area had too much slope for my liking (especially to back the trailer in and out) so we had it built up and as you can see, it is much flatter now.

And here's a hot back toward the main road showing the additional material on the road.  This part of the road had gotten pretty "wavy" from the larger trucks bringing materials to the job site.

And one more good look back at the road and approach to the garages.  At gentle slope around the turn but it should be fine now assuming it all settles nicely in the rains of late winter and spring.

Christmas 2011 and January 2012

There was a lot of activity at the Texas homestead during the Christmas holidays.  We came to the US in mid-December, spending a few days in California before coming to Texas.  We also had company - Julie's mother Barbara came out to spend about ten days with us and to see the property and activity.  It was a very hectic time.  We made a couple of trips to Austin to see Jodi and the kids as well as seeing the kids with family next door.  Nonetheless, we did get a lot done as you'll see in this and the next blog.

First, here's the progress on the interior:  the framing is virtually complete (there will be a couple of things to finish up once the electrical is completely done).  The plumbing is in (rough version) and the electrical is well along.  Also, the air conditioning system has been installed and the ducting run.

Most of the work has been conducted by (or at least supervised by) our contractor Ray Rau and his team and subcontractors.  Here's a picture of me and Ray on the front porch during one of the work days:

Here's some pictures of the framing:

As you can see, the front part of the house will have a very nice vaulted ceiling.  All the ceilings are 10' ceilings but the entire front half of the house (kitchen, dining and living areas) will have a 14' vault.  In the next picture, you'll see that even the pump house got framed and finished.

One of the features of the barndominium is easy access to the deck area above the living area.  Not only is this a place to gain easy access to the wiring and plumbing, it's also a great area to store things and to put the air conditioning, hot water heater, etc.  The following picture shows the large set of steps that has been built to take things up and down, and the entire area will be enclosed for safety and cleanliness.  We'll have the air conditioning provide some cooling to the area so things we store up there won't be "cooked" in the heat of the summer.  Also, the "plenum" will provide a somewhat cooled blanket of air over the top of the house so that the cooling requirement in the house will be reduced.  We'll put lots of insulation between the house and the outside walls (R38 in most places) and will put at least that much insulation between the attic area and the outside walls..

Starting the Interior Build

It's been awhile since I've updated the blog and mostly that's because nothing has really been going on with the Barndominium except some planning.  In June and July, the exterior was built and we framed out the exterior of the "house" portion.  Since then, we've been back in Oz and busy with things there, but now it's time to get busy with the Barndominium as we're going to be back in Texas through the Christmas holidays.

During this phase of the construction, the interior walls are going to be framed, the rough plumbing will be done, a septic system will be installed and we'll get the HVAC installed.  We should be virtually ready to get the second inspection done on the house.

Since we're only going to be there a few weeks and since there's so many specialized jobs to be done, we've retained a contractor to do the framing and finish work as well as coordinating the activities of the plumber, electrician, HVAC and septic contractors to make sure it's all done right and on time.

The pictures in this blog will be the start of the framing - the first day or two of the activity after the house wall dimensions were transferred to the slab.  We'll take a lot more pictures when we arrive and those will show various other parts of the work, including the plumbing, electrical and HVAC.  We're really looking forward to this stage of the work as our Barndominium should really start looking like a house when this stage is done.

At the same time lights have been installed in the garage along with other wiring and the well pump and pressure tank have been installed and working.  Now, we have to build a "well shed" to go around the pump and protect it from the elements.