Chin Chin Farm By Sonia Whiteman, Chintin, Vic.
This couple has found the right balance of activities and products along with the satisfaction of improving their soil and natural environment. My husband, Stuart, and I own a 160 acre property about one hour’s drive from Melbourne. On it we produce lavender, lamb, honey and bushfoods and also run workshops. We sell our lavender mainly as essential oil and dried buds, but we also make teas, hand creams, room sprays and soaps. Our lamb is sold at Woodend Market and Tallarook Farmers’ Market once a month through our lamb boxes, plus some is made into smallgoods. We flavour our honey as a way of differentiating it, so we have smoked honey, coffee honey, saltbush honey, lemon myrtle honey and, of course, a lavender honey. Our bushfoods are used in our meat rubs and teas. We have recently started to run workshops here, bringing people onto the farm and running activities with local artists, teaching people new skills. While we have lunch we tell them about what we do and why we do it, and spread the word about the motivation for regenerative farming, looking after the land and the techniques involved. This year we will open the lavender field for ‘U pick’ and we are planting a range of wildflowers for the same purpose. History
We bought our property about 10 years ago. Stuart and I both grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Templestowe at a time when you’d get home, grab your BMX and disappear until dinner time and your parents didn’t know where you were. You were busy making ramps for your BMX bike or building bridges across dams and the like. We have two boys, Max and Tom,
and in the city we were nervous about letting them outside the front gate by themselves! We started thinking about farms and ended up with one that has 24 hectares of native woodland that the boys could explore. Overall, however, the land was in very poor condition. What we saw as green was just really 100% capeweed and onion grass, but being the rookies that we were we thought that was great. It was beautiful and green and lush compared to living in the city. After the purchase, we brought the boys up and drove around the perimeter so we all knew where the boundaries were. After telling the boys to go out and explore, we found them still standing at the car. We said to them, ‘What are you doing?’ And they said, ‘Oh, are we actually allowed to do stuff?’ And we said, ‘Yes, of course, you can’t get lost so you’ll be fine.’ From that moment onwards we knew we’d made the right decision. That first summer, Stu and I were cleaning out the old shed and the boys came back from a walk and they were wet from top to toe, sloshing around with gumboots full of water. We said, ‘Where have you been?’ And you know, kids have that look on their face of ‘Holy crap, here it comes. We’re about to get into trouble,’ and they nervously said, ‘Well, we wanted to know how deep the dam was so we walked through it.’ Stu and I were like, ‘Awesome, this is why we bought this place!’ From then on we started farming with a dozen sheep and didn’t do too much with it other than try to remediate the land itself. We quickG R A S S
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ly realised the whole place was rundown so we spread some lime and a little chicken manure. About four years ago we realised how much we love it here and decided to look around for an appropriate enterprise. We soon worked out that 160 acres is not enough for a real sheep business so we investigated alternative crops. We researched options that would grow in bad soil and that don’t need much water, and I said to Stu, ‘Bingo, let’s try lavender.’ Stu has always loved lavender more than me, so we decided to plant a test plot and we also found an organically minded agronomist to assist us. We had to deal with the infestation of capeweed, and the soil was high in acidity, so we used a calcium-magnesium-phosphorus blend to modify the acidity and more chook manure to provide fertility. Lavender
Don’t let anyone tell you that lavender is easy to grow! It might be if you only have a few plants in the garden, but lavender farming is much more complex. We learnt that even though lavender can grow in poor conditions, it does much better (as most plants do) in good conditions. We started by applying the minerals and manure along with worm castings to the soil and rotary hoeing it. After a few weeks for incorporation, we planted the lavender with a product from a company called Soilcharge which stimulates root growth and soil bioactivity. Last was the application of weed mat. We found the lavender grew well, but the weed mat was not enough to control weed growth so
