The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 41
Ode to a Ripe Fig. A Brushcutter's Lament. 01.03.2024
Dear Readers.
It’s Hugo here. As Pip mentioned last week I am momentarily in control of the ship in order to publish my first Journal entry. Hopefully you find my perspective enlightening, or at least mildly amusing. Pip has asked me to have a bigger voice in the telling of our story here on substack and in various other mediums so you will be seeing and hearing a little more from me from now on.
In case some of you are not aware, Pip had a fairly serious tussle with a mandolin while making a cucumber pickle this week. Sparing you all the details of the ordeal suffice to say she came off a little worse for wear. So as she would say this is the Universe’s way of telling us that I need to play a bigger part in this storytelling too. While a little drastic, I understand the intent so Im sure my duties in and around Moorfield will increase exponentially and more than likely include “Scribe for all written content” in the immediate future. Some of the formats might change. Some of the information will likely condense but we will continue to share the insights and perspectives from our Gardening journeys to yours.
Now onwards to my first Journal entry.
Hugo.
They say, well Frances Bacon did anyway, that “gardening is the purest of human pleasures” and “the greatest refreshment of the spirit”. In my general observation the same can’t be said for the brushcutting in springtime.
I came to gardening late in life and rather reluctantly I might add, having never really grown up with cultivated spaces. There were always a couple of house plants which somehow clung to life and seemingly thrived on the neglect they were dealt and there was always a Jade by the door in a pot which we trudged from house to house in the hope that the riches foretold in its fables would somehow find us eventually. We moved around quite a bit, all through the Western Suburbs of Sydney. New immigrants held to the sword by the whim of landlords or simply looking to better our lot in life. We lived in everything from my uncle’s two bedroom townhouse when we first landed, to big brick houses with scaled down roman arches like you often see in those kinds of places where immigrants come to settle and create for themselves a little bit of home. Big yards with more concrete than lawn and if you’re lucky a massive lemon tree in one corner, always laden with fruit and a fig in the other, seemingly built for climbing that holds the most delicious jammy fruit you could ever want to eat, if you could ever beat the fruit bats to them that is.
Perhaps it's easy to point to this state of impermanence I suppose, as the thing that made it hard to ever put down roots of our own, even if we had been inclined to. But really we just weren’t garden people. Mum killed most things that went in the ground and Dad was more of a mulch and lawn guy although he often bemoaned having to do that too. We always managed to keep some chilies alive, seeds that someone had managed to bring in from Chile, a variety that despite my best efforts I haven’t come across anywhere at all to buy in Australia. Never really game to ask the origins or the biosecurity credentials, I suspect the seeds had been around for some time gifted and traded amongst the Chilean diaspora for generations and will likely continue to do so for generations to come.
So growing up it was those chillies, a fig and a lemon tree, and those plants held our awe and delight. They held our memories of home and family far away and, most importantly, they made the meals that graced our tables every night with new friends and family and the community we built for ourselves in this new place. And I suppose for me, and I suspect many others, plants and gardens more generally still hold that place for us today.
Just as an aside, many years later Pip and I traveled to Tuscany and stayed at a Villa and olive grove whose hillside was dotted with ancient figs scattered amongst the olive trees. The Brown and Purple baubles hanging heavy off the branches warmed to absolute delight by the Summer Sun put me right back there, climbing that fig in the backyard. The fruit ready to pick and eat one day and ready to rot on the floor the next, and in Italy, left for the Cinghiale to turn through with delightful consequences of sweet ragu ladled over pasta in the evenings. But that’s how fine the line is for me with Figs. They are at their absolute best the day before they fall and rot and you never really know the joy of them until you pick them from the tree in the early evening once the day’s sunshine has done its work and the sugars are macerated almost a little too much. To this day when people tell me that they don’t like figs, I get a pang of sadness that they grew up without a fig tree in their yard and its beautiful ripe fruit to gorge themselves on.
But I digress and I think my diatribe on the horrors of under ripe fruit is best left for another journal entry.
Once I had cast off the suburbs of the Greater West for the share houses of the Inner West, my good friend and one time room mate Francis managed, in the heady haze of our 20’s, to build and maintain a very productive little patch in an otherwise underwhelming yard. I personally did very little else in his garden but water if he ever went away and of course, picked from whenever I could. We composted, weeded, planted and picked, and while it was never a vocation I took to dutifully or with any real consistency, I would help out when the urge to spend some time in the sun on a Saturday or Sunday morning spoke louder than the hangover telling me to stay in bed, which to be frank was not very often.
But as always my favourite part of the growing, was the eating and gardening for me was an extension of my pantry and a way of improving my dining experience more than anything else. The compulsion to do it simply didn’t exist for me outside this lens. Francis is now a superb market gardener and is often frequenting the farmers markets on the South Coast of NSW so hit him up if you are ever in the area.
When I first met Pip my days of shady share house living were numbered. She was a real grown up human, years ahead of me by that scale and most others, who had created a beautiful space in a one bedroom apartment. For the first time in my life, I saw that beauty had a very real place beside pragmatism and this was never more prevalent than on her tiny first floor balcony which heaved under the weight of pots and window boxes and hanging baskets full to the brim of flowers and food.
The first thing I did when I promptly moved in was to put a kettle BBQ out there and overlooking Glebe Point Road, we carved out our little sanctuary well above the mayhem happening just a couple of meters below us on the street. It signaled the start of a longing we both held for space and we found ourselves reaching for it as often as we could. Sunday drives turned into weekends away which in turn became long weekends or make that the whole week or maybe even 2. It got to the point where the solution was obvious, We should just move to the country and so together we did.
It's hard to recollect the details of those early days in Tasmania. I remember the move, I remember the sheer unadulterated excitement as we set off on this next grand adventure. The joy that every little thing brought us in those early days. Buying apples from road side stalls, picking blackberries from the brambles growing wild. And I remember the discipline and fervor with which we met those first few months at Little Oak, working to all hours, under floodlights in the rain, the joy of having a patch of dirt to turn and tend to was palpable and we took it all on with an unmatched urgency.
We racked our brains, or I did anyway, with ways I could quit my day job and farm full time. It didn’t really matter what I was farming. We bought animals, more than we probably should have and we planted anything and everything. It was less a learning curve and more a sheer and unforgiving cliff and I'm not sure if in this metaphor I am at the top and staring into the bottomless chasm or if I am at the bottom staring up at an impenetrable wall that juts clean out of the earth and disappears into the clouds above never really revealing its full scale.
But there's really no knowing without trying. The passion with which we hit the ground in Tassie was reckless and unbridled and as with all hard things taken too lightly, we were promptly handed our arses. Possums, Pigs, Quolls, Too Much Water, Not Enough Water, and of course the brushcutting in springtime. We just weren’t prepared for what we were undertaking and our old adage that we had often leaned on, “when you bite off more than you can chew, chew harder” was barely keeping our heads afloat. So it took a few years but we made some sensible choices out of equal parts necessity and enlightenment.
We got rid of the pigs (though that was hard), we added some water tanks, we thought about the garden holistically. We came up with a bit of a plan, ripped the old stuff out (mostly) and then executed it. It sounds so simple in hindsight but we were so full of bluff and bravado when we first got in there and I really wouldn’t deny anyone that part of the process because you kind of have to be if you want to take the plunge and shift your whole life on its head. But I sure was glad when we had moved past it.
So off the back of those learnings from Little Oak I have a new adage I lean on these days. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon”. This one suits me far better I think. One thing that became clear to me once the dust settled on those first few years at Little Oak, is that “Doing” is not my strength. I like “Pottering” or maybe even some days “Tinkering”. Now an undertaking like Moorfield doesn’t leave much time for either and as reluctantly as I have become a gardener I have also become a doer when it is doing that is needed.
I take great heart from what Pip and I accomplished at Little Oak. Despite the struggles we came across in those early years we found a rythm in the building of that place that played to our strengths and to a greater unified purpose. Pip’s creative vision and my ability to tinker my way through to most outcomes that saw a lot of those goals realised. For a few years there towards the end, we were able to step back and look at a table full of good food, and great drinks, surrounded by our kind and generous community, the kids laughing and running through the garden bursting with life and colour and the smiles that brought to everyone who was there on those occassions and hopefully on the odd occassion they might recall our time there together.
That is what I cling to and that is why I was overjoyed, and I’m not even being sarcastic, to do it all again when we found Moorfield. To create a space for us as a family, to share that space with friends and community and on a scale we’ve never attempted before, to capture that feeling we sought for so long at Little Oak. That feeling I got in the fork of that fig in a backyard in Fairfield or BBQing on the apartment balcony in Glebe amongst the pots and hanging baskets, or making pizzas at Little Oak amongst our friends in the most breathtaking of cottage gardens, that we built three times to get it right. Our sanctuary shared with those who know to appreciate those moments like we do.
So that’s me so far. My gardening journey may not be your typical one but I take on my position as Hole Digger In Chief (Pip digs her fair share of holes too just to be clear) at the Garden at Moorfield with an immense sense of pride for everything we achieved at Little Oak and everything we will accomplish here, at Moorfield. And with a promise of a good feed from the garden at the end of the day for my family and friends, why wouldn’t I?
HUGO’S PLANT PICK
Rosa ‘Sally Holmes’, Modern Shrub Rose.
In a garden full of blooms like Little Oak it was hard to pick a favourite but from the first time I spied Sally from across the froth, she had my heart. Understated, unpretentious, graceful and dignified. Who needs all those petals anyway?! Im looking at you cabbage roses. She is perfect in her simplicity.
We are yet to plant one at Moorfield as she doesn’t like getting her feet wet for extended periods (we have some pretty boggy beds in the Rose Garden) but Pip assures me she has found a spot she thinks will be perfect for Sally.
GROWING DETAILS:
WELL CULTIVATED AND FREE DRAINING SOIL 💩 💦 NEEDS FULL SUN 🌞 FLOWERS LATE SPRING TO AUTUMN 🌹 WILL NEED HIGH SUMMER IRRIGATION 🥵 FAIRLY DISEASE RESISTANT 🦠 BENEFICIAL INSECT ATTRACTING 🐝 HEIGHT 200CM 📏 HALL OF FAMER 🏆
COMING IN MARCH…
Hopefully the start of the glasshouse footings for building the base at the end of the month, early April.
Prepping the new veg beds and beginning to build them up in the hope of having them ready for spring crops.
Planting out our autumn annual blooms that I sowed a few weeks back in the Cut Flower Garden as February just turned out to be way too hot.
The first ever tomato harvest at Moorfield!!! And out best tried and trusted recipes for preserving them.
The creation of the new composting zone next to the veg garden and the introduction of the first worm farm.
The planting of some very young but exciting new ornamental and food trees.
The great Rose Garden clean up to get another autumnal flourish.
Here on substack you can expect, The (Moor)Field Guide: 9, the first installment of our The Design Guide: Little Oak vs Moorfield. An Overview. Apologies we couldn’t get it live in Feb, as hoped. And the next, Cheat Sheet: Soil. We are also hoping I can get another Garden Gadabout Interview, or Gallery at least, up by the end of the month too.
As Pip always says, thankyou so much for being here and supporting us in the sharing of our story. Pip has always maintained that her writing on Substack was an honest account, equal parts inspiring and informative. Equally elightening as it is engaging. She takes this silent promise to you with immense dedication and hopes it is evident in everything she sends out into the world. For you to follow along, interact or engage means the world to us both and we are truly grateful. I hope my first foray into the Journal did your time justice.
It’s been great chatting with you.
Hugo.
First of all, sending all the very best of get-well messages to Pip. Flipping mandolins - they really are lethal. Second of all - I loved this, as I love all Moorfield's updates. It's lovely to hear your point of view, Hugo.
You've even got me thinking about Sally Holmes as a rose - I've always ignored her, but your post inspired me to go and do a bit of reading (like I need any encouragement to read about roses but still!), and she looks just so healthy - and it seems that the flowers keep coming through the season.... what's not to like?
On my list!
And by the way, those cauliflowers are majestic......
Thanks Hugo for contributing this great perspective of your and Pip’s journey and all that you have achieved. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the journey at Moorfield