Our First Farm Update
Welcome friends! Liz here, coming to you from Hillside Food Forest. I wanted to introduce myself and share an update on our journey of building a regenerative agriculture farm. It’s been about 18 months since we took the big leap and moved to Putty, to work towards our dream of living from the land and building the life we dream of.
It certainly hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows here at Hillside. From flooding and losing power for days on end, to rodent plagues, we’ve had our fair share of challenges along the way. But with those challenges have come so many beautiful and rewarding experiences, like the birth of our very first calf and building hundreds of metres of permanent electric fencing. Looking back we’ve learnt a lot about how to take care of livestock, the processes involved in producing pasture-raised chickens and now pigs and my favourite - nurturing our raised gardens to produce food for our family. Everything is still a work in progress, but like anything in life it’s important to see the positives and reflect on how far you’ve come.
To give you an update on where we are at with the farm, we have recently connected all our irrigation to start rotationally grazing our cattle again. They had a period over winter free-ranging the property, whilst the grass was mainly dormant. We’re in the process of building a few chicken tractors before we get our next batch of chicks for our pasture-raised poultry. You can expect we’ll have chickens for sale by early next year, so get in whilst stocks last. We’ve also just had our first pigs processed, which has been a difficult experience for me, but I’m eagerly awaiting picking them up from the butcher’s to sample our hard work. I plan to share a few recipes I develop using our pork, so keep an eye out for those in the coming weeks.
The renovations, unfortunately, are at a stand still at the moment, however, there may be a bit of a development on this before the end of the year. So, we shall see. Fingers and toes crossed! Well, that’s all from me for now - I look forward to reporting back on the pork and poultry soon :)
