A TALE ABOUT DAMS

To write in support of Peter Spencer and why he is on a hunger strike I need to tell my readers how country Australian land owners are being robbed of their rights to utilize their land. I will explain how our Australian Government can act, when it so chooses, to over-rule State Governments. Our farming property Das Helwig Haus B&B is free hold title, but increasingly what we are allowed to do on our land is being eroded by State and Federal laws. I do not have the freedom to now clear land, build dams or light fires – freedoms taken for granted by my Australian forebears.

Our fallow farm land

On the Agmates site Rob Wass explained How our Politicians (at all levels) Appropriated our land (property). Read the rest of this entry »

EUCALYPTUS FORESTS = HOT BUSH FIRES.

As always happens when people people join a FORUM to support a person or project they start to discuss other matters. Thus while I’m writing these posts in support of Peter Spencer I can not do much more that let people know why this courageous man has gone on a hunger strike. It must also be noted that every time I write the words Peter Spencer the powerful Google search engines will recognize his name and give it more prominence.

I posted my words yesterday on http://fayhelwig.com supporting the stand of Peter Spencer, who is on a hunger strike to draw attention to the lack of compensation for Australian country people who have had their rights to utilize their land, as they see fit, taken from them by Qld and NSW Government land grabs. I gained inspiration to write another post after reading comments on http://agmates.ning.com/group/peterspencerhungerstrike

Despite the fact that CO2 is a potent plant food, and that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would only result in a rise of 1 degree Celsius, why are we tying up vegetation? Wouldn’t it sequester more CO2 if trees were grown, the timber utilized, and then more trees grown in their place? Instead we have the ridiculous situation where vegetation is grown until senescence, then it falls down, cant be harvested or collected and adds to situation such as the recent ‘Black Friday’ here in Victoria? Comment from Colin J. Ely

Saplings clean much more CO2 out of the air and produce more O2. A plantation of new trees will help, rather than leaving the existing trees. Perhaps a compromise could be reached, a part of the land could be used as a plantation which could be used for logging once it has reached maturity. Just a thought. Comment by Leith Carnie.

Bushfire at Glen Aplin

This was the view from our farm boundary fence in October 2002 of a bush fire, on the other side of our Glen Aplin valley, which took the life of a local woman. The little clearing on the hill in the centre of this photo above is the Felsberg Winery. Read the rest of this entry »

OUR GLEN APLIN HOME

Our 14 hectare (32 acre) farm is situated at 113 Mt. Stirling Road, Glen Aplin, Queensland, Australia. Glen is a Scottish word for a valley and the first Government surveyor who came through this region was a Scottish born man with the surname of Aplin, who named this pretty valley after himself. It became a valley of small land owners growing stone fruits or vegetables and grazing a few head of cattle. Within the past 20-30 years tourist enterprises like wineries, restaurants and guest accommodation have brought changes to the region.

Our home, Das Helwig Haus B&B, is situated in the forested area at the centre of this photograph, which was taken from the Felsberg Winery on the eastern ridge of the valley.

Valley view

To give you a greater appreciation of where we live, below is a view taken with a telescopic lens. Try to place that road, directly above the cluster of trees. The roofs of our buildings are barely visible behind the forest of eucalyptus trees.

Das Helwig Haus B&B

Over beside the road, you can just see the golden wildflowers above our entrance drive way.

Entrance wildflowers

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THE HEN HOUSE

Throughout most of my life I have lived on farms where the previous owners had constructed  poultry pens. These were rough structures with some form of shed cover, like a rusty iron tank split in half to form a roof, and a wire netting run where hens could forage during the day. Due to the prevalence of foxes in country regions poultry must be securely penned at night.

This year I needed to use the existing poultry pens for my growing flock of geese which led me to the decision to create a new enclosure, but where? As my readers know I’m always looking for ways to recycle materials and my projects usually serve more than one purpose.

When we purchased this farm 17 years ago it already had an igloo garden shed frame. I bought a plastic cover to go over this igloo frame, with thoughts of having a hot house in the winter. Although I have a beautiful garden, I’m not good with pot plants. Even my seed raising beds are established directly in soil out in the larger garden. This shed sat idle, within my garden begging to be put to use.

Igloo garden shed

When my infant granddaughters came to live with us, the idea occurred to me that I should convert this igloo into a hen house where the little girls could feed the ‘chooks’ and gather the eggs. Read the rest of this entry »

THE VALUE OF SHADE

Recently, when reading Peter Andrew’s book Back From the Brink, it made me take a good look at my upright willow trees and ask myself if I was utilizing them to full advantage. I planted these trees in 1998 at the end of a drainage system to serve three purposes.

• To soak up excess water
• To create a green view  behind our vegetable garden
• To provide a wind break

I quickly became disenchanted with these trees, as they spread their roots out into the area where I had previously planted pumpkins. It was a space where the pumpkins could spread. But, with the willow trees stealing all the moisture from the ground, my pumpkin crops began to fail. We ripped the ground and pulled up the roots, but within 6 months the roots had again colonized the area. The past couple of years this ground has remained bare. The trees were serving their intended purpose, but they had restricted my use of this portion of my garden.

Pruning willow

The willow trees had grown too tall. In August 2008 while they were deciduous, I hired men to reduce the height of the trees by cutting them back with a chainsaw. I used the solid wood for the fires and the twiggy branches for support structures for climbing beans and sweet-peas. When they grew again they had a bushier shape. I have seen trees like these repeatedly cut back to fence height to create a dense hedge. Read the rest of this entry »

TEA FOR TWO, OR MORE

As a child I was only allowed to drink milk or water until the age of twelve, with a soft drink as a special treat during an occasional visit to town. My parents drank Bushell’s tea with their meals.

Nowadays there are multiple drink choices available for adults and children alike. One has only to walk into a supermarket to see rows of bottles and cans stacked high containing cordials, fruit juices and carbonated drinks. At the dairy counter there will be different sized containers of milk, in plastic or cardboard, offering a variety of flavours.

Move to the racks of tea and coffee and you will have a choice of roast coffee beans from all over the world. You can buy beans or ground coffee, some of it decaf. Usually in the same aisle it is possible to select dried teas in surgical dressings, as one of my friends once described the sachets commonly called tea bags. You will be confronted with brands and varieties from many countries.

It was on a trip to the USA in 1981 that I first encountered the powdered concoctions mixed with water which the local people called iced tea. Later, when I visited my German in-laws in 1990 I was offered a choice of herbal teas with the evening meal. These were always served as a hot tea.

In 1992 we moved to the Granite Belt to establish Das Helwig Haus B&B. Amongst our first visitors were Meg and Peter Stevenson with their children Darren and Belinda. During an excursion they discovered a herb farm and returned with several pots for my garden. One of these little plants grew into a Lemon Verbena bush.

Lemon verbena

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MULCHING MATTERS

During the past weekend when we opened our garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B for the Australian Open Garden Scheme, I was frequently asked about my mulching methods. I use several methods of mulching but they are all intended to serve these purposes.

• To stifle weed growth
• To prevent evaporation of moisture
• To keep the ground cool
• To prevent erosion

Most green ground covers serve the same purpose, provided they have sufficient water to encourage their continual growth.

Ivy as a ground cover

I planted this ivy in 1993 to grow over an old tree stump situated in the garden at the rear of the house. This is the western side and after soil and rocks had been moved to build the guest wing of our house this spot looked like a dessert with white dusty soil and raw boulders. I hired Frank and his bobcat to create a rocky upper terrace above this portion of the garden. My priority was then to green my summer view by planting deciduous fruit trees and to cover a couple of old tree stumps with vines. Read the rest of this entry »

KEEPING THE FAITH

The story is told in my book Wildflowers, Wilderness and Wine as to why we established the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies on our land at Glen Aplin in 1996.  I would have preferred to establish a memorial drive linking the Granite Belt hamlets of Amiens, Messines, Bapaume, Passchendaele, Bullecourt, Pozieres and Fleurbaix which had once been railway sidings for a soldier settlement where former servicemen who had survived the battles in France settled on rural blocks to grow apples. When farmers feared the poppies could spread and become a weed nuisance, we decided to plant a field with wheat and poppies to show the poppies were not a threat to the rural community.

We first opened our garden and field in November 1996. We charged a $2.00 entrance fee and raised $1,000.00 which we then donated to Brisbane Legacy.

The Australian Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League (the forerunner to the RSL) first sold poppies for Armistice Day 1921. For this drive, the League imported one million silk poppies, made in French orphanages. Each poppy was sold for a shilling: five pence was donated to a charity for French children, six pence went to the League’s own welfare work and one penny went to the League’s national coffers.

Eberhard and I decided that, as a matter of integrity, we must visit the battlefield region in northern France and made arrangements to travel to Europe in January 1997. We were met at Villers-Bretonneux by Jean-Pierre Thierry, O.A.M., President of the Association France-Australie who became our guide for a day in the Somme .

My words will not describe the desolation of the wet, windswept fields we saw that day.

Wheat field near Pozieres

As a farmer I could look at this soil, over seventy years later, and see in the structure of the clods of earth the clay that had been brought to the surface by the trench digging and shelling. It is the clay that shows as white in the field. Read the rest of this entry »

THE REMEMBRANCE FIELD

Most visitors to my garden understand the significance of the red Flanders poppies growing in the Remembrance Field and the edging hedge of the herb rosemary. Rosemary is the token worn on ANZAC Day and the red poppy is worn on 11th November the date the Armistice Treaty was signed at Versailles to end World War One.

“But, what is the significance of the blue cornflowers?” they ask.

Cornflowers and poppies

My answer is of particular interest to the residents of Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, because the planting of blue cornflowers represents our remembrance of the crew, doctors and nurses of the Centaur an Australian Hospital ship sunk off our coast by a Japanese submarine. Read the rest of this entry »

ORGANIC SUSTAINABILITY

It takes faith to persevere with the establishment of an organic garden environment. The first year that you establish your plants is bliss as they are going into fresh soil. The next year every pest imaginable seems to have discovered your garden and be gratefully chomping their way through your vegetables. By the third year the predators, like the lady beetles who eat the aphids, will arrive. By the fourth your garden should be coming into balance. You will still see some pests, but if your plants are not stressed they will thrive. To keep a garden thriving not only does it require good soil, it needs thick mulch to keep that soil moist and to allow the earthworms to prosper.  My compost bins have been worked over by generations of compost worms since I introduced them to this garden in 1992. As they convert each bin of waste to compost it is spread out on my gardens. The ground is covered with hay and they continue their work under this layer, aiming to break the hay down and incorporate it into the soil. Thus the hay must be replaced over my gardens each year. One of my flower garden beds is permanently planted with deciduous shrubs. Every year self-sown Californian poppies emerge from the hay mulch to bloom amongst the shrubs. Peter Andrews would like these poppies, which I have seen flowering wild over the hills of California, as they are tap-rooted plants. They will be bringing up nutrients from deep within the soil to finally rot down again as mulch and they will be preventing a build up of salt in the soil.

Californian poppies

These mulched shrubs and Californian poppies are part of the hill forest segment of the farm adding nutrients to the soil. Read the rest of this entry »