Despite the Instagram highlight reel, it’s a risky, hard and unconventional life many of us small scale producers have chosen. It can feel lonely sometimes when the mice have eaten all your pumpkin seedlings for the 500th time, your creek crossing has flooded you in for a few days because it won’t stop raining (or your dam has dried up because it won’t start raining), your children won’t keep their shoes on in public or let you brush their dreadlocks out, and you wonder why you decided to put your entire pay cheque (ie -flock of chickens, crop of radishes, ridiculously fragile but necessary piece of infrastructure) out in the deluge, gale force winds, golf ball sized hail or frying heat and let it fend for itself rather than just putting it in the bank like a sane person.
It’s a mad life, and we’re mad for choosing it, but we cling to it because it lights us up and we believe in what we are doing.
One of my favourite things about being a producer member of SHA is the opportunity to make friends with other people who also choose the mad life. Folks you don’t have to explain your dodgy internet connection, completely wild offspring, water restrictions, hectic driveway or complicated kitchen scrap system to.
Our nearest SHA neighbour is Tobellie Hill. We (Brightside Produce) are located in between the Tinderry mountains and Tallaganda National Park, in high, cold, grazing country on the edge of the Monaro. Tobellie Hill are up and over the range to our East, nestled into the lush, towering Tallaganda forest. We can drive to their place via fire trails that pass through ancient untouched pockets of forest, areas of scrubby regrowth, creek crossings, mountain saddles with wallabies and lyrebirds and up peaks that disappear into dense, cool cloud.
Like us, Tobellie Hill are another young family making their living market gardening. Over the years we have helped each other out in lots of little and big ways. A bobcat rescue mission for a semi-trailer load of compost accidentally spilled all over a driveway, meals for new babies, help with home-schooling applications, extra strawberry runners, lessons in looking at soil biology.
Farming and having a young family is hectic, so we don’t see each other often enough, but texts fly back and forth through the season-‘I hope that storm missed you guys!’, ‘Is that fire near your place?’, and it is a comfort to know that they are living their parallel life on the other side of the mountain.
This week we made that journey via fire trails to visit Dan, Erin, Toby, Ellie, Mollie and Riley at Tobellie Hill for a pre-season catch up. We talked about the never ending quest for a slam-dunk season, and the work of tweaking the infinite variables of weather, inputs, labour, timing and markets. We looked at soil samples under the microscope and discussed different techniques we’ve all been trialing to better steward our land. The kids happily clambered over giant hay bales, foraged for mushrooms and demolished the strawberry patch.
We’ve made many amazing friends through SHA, folks who live brave lives and chase big dreams and it is joyous work indeed to be flipping the script on the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ in favour of the shockingly subversive idea of resilience and strength through collaboration and community.