Chin Chin Farm

By Sonia Whiteman, Chintin, Vic.

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 quick- 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 we are replacing it with mulch that we source from the council.

Raising the pH and improving the biology of the soil has been effective and the capeweed has been out-competed. We trialled a planting of legumes in between the rows last year and that has worked well. The legumes provide nitrogen to the soil and their roots bring up nutrients and moisture from lower down in the profile. In addition, the lavender field looks absolutely beautiful.

In autumn and winter we let the sheep in to graze. Sometimes the whole flock is in for a limited time or if there is little feed, we allow just a few to chew down the weeds, but out they go before they start on the plants. You have to be watchful or they will prune the plants too much.

H arvest

We harvest in December or January, depending on the weather, and in two different ways – hand and machine. Hand harvesting is done with a scythe and each bunch is held together with an elastic band, then taken to the drying room (a 6m container) where it is hung upside down in the dark until dry. The buds are stripped and cleaned using a number of sieves. Lavender buds can be used to perfume a room and ours are food grade so suitable for cooking. They hold their colour, stay purple and look magnificent.

The mechanical system uses a modified tea harvester. It is mounted on a little trolley and pushed along the row cutting the flowers off. They are then taken immediately to the still for oil production.

The plants are fertilised in autumn and while some farmers prune them then as well, we wait until spring. In autumn, we want our plants to prepare for winter, casting their roots deeper into the soil. When they are pruned, they start thinking they need to grow again instead of going dormant. Sometimes retaining the stubble can also help them survive a heavy frost and even once a fall of snow.

Pruning starts in August and has been done by hand, but we are planning to use the harvester to prune. Between pruning and harvest, not much work is required apart from some fertiliser also in spring. We don’t have irrigation so if plants get too dry we flood irrigate them using the ute and fire-fighting trailer. The same system is used on the native plants when they are young and establishing.

We’re planting more lavender out the front, which will become our visitor patch, where visitors can easily learn about the farm and pick their own lavender. A different variety will be used, one much bigger and showier so people can take gorgeous photos.

Lavender Products

We have won awards for our lavender essential oil and also developed a product called Relax and Retain for our son when he was doing year 12 which includes rosemary essential oil. Rosemary is for memory retention and the lavender and rosemary blend is good for anxiety and tension. We do a salve with our beeswax and lavender, as well as a hand cream, sleep balm, room spray and yoga mat spray. The lavender also goes into one of our honeys, two tea blends, a hand soap and a meat rub with our bushfoods.

Interestingly, we made the tea blend initially with strawberry gum and lemon myrtle, which worked, but seemed to be missing something and when we added the lavender it gained a floral note rounding out the flavour profile.

sH ee P

We now run a flock of 150 Aussie White breed sheep which started with 12 first-cross Aussie Whites. The breed is modern and ideal for Australian conditions. The sheep shed the fibre they grow and so no shearing is required. We have had them for about seven years and the flock has just grown as we have kept the ewe lambs from each year.

I think the meat is superb and we constantly get brilliant feedback from our customers at market. At first, our butcher was a bit perplexed because he said, ‘Oh, I prefer my chops with a big layer of fat on them and these look a bit too lean.’ They have fantastic intramuscular fat so he just needed to get used to it. The flock is easy to look after and does not require much effort. We manage the sheep organically so at times we give them supplements of seaweed meal, dolomite, copper and even garlic.

Aussie Whites will lamb three times in two years, and we leave the ram in with the flock and never wean the lambs, so they get a good feed from mum and less stress. We love looking after our lambs, love having them here, and will always have that flock, but I don’t think we’re going to become huge lamb farmers.

Bus H Foods

Most of our woodland is messmate eucalypt which does not flower every year, so when we harvested the lavender we thought ‘Oh my goodness, what are our bees going to do?’ We started to search for what else we could grow whose leaves, rather than the flowers, could be used in the still in the off season. We turned to bushfoods because we love to cook, they’re better adapted to the Australian environment, and the leaves could be used and the flowers left for the bees.

Now we have strawberry gum, lemon myrtle, anise myrtle, Australian native thyme, Australian native oregano and river mint. This year we are planting sea parsley, sea celery and native basil. Recently I added some lilly pilly and also raspberry wattle, whose resin and flowers taste like raspberry, so that’s really exciting.

We have saltbush and wattle but not for the sheep! The saltbush is used as a bushfood, and both are fire retardant, so they line the property to help minimise damage to other crops in the event of a bushfire.

In planting, we’ve had hits and misses, finding the pH adjustment and Soilcharge products help enormously with poor development.

I have also found an effective Australian native fertiliser tablet and we now know to dig the planting holes much deeper and add gypsum to soften the clay barrier.

We prepare the bushfoods using a dehydrator, then pulverise or flake them.

Bees

My husband Stuart and our eldest son Tom both love honey and are fascinated by bees, and when we had all the lavender we thought, why not start an apiary? Tom has been our chief apiarist, and when we started we found we couldn’t get into some markets with our honey because there were already honey producers there and the markets didn’t want too many people selling the same product. So we started flavouring the honey to make it into a different product.

The boys attended a beekeeping course, and we obtained our first nucleus hive six years ago. Now we have nine hives spread throughout the property. We don’t migrate the hives as we prefer to plant more abundantly for them and reduce the kilometres our honey travels.

We have our own honey extraction equipment and the honey is bottled in its natural state without heating. The bees seem to do well on our farm plants, the bush nearby and the clover, capeweed and dandelion from time to time.

Our saltbush honey tastes like salted caramel which is popular. We also get apple wood from DV Cider nearby which we use to make smoked honey and they use it drizzled over cheese on their platters at their restaurant.

Overall I guess you could say that our approach is food and flavour from the ground up – if you look after the land the rest will come. Our experience here has shown that when we look after our soil first and the plants second, everything else is healthy. We also love to learn and living this way we learn something new every day.

We managed to have a mini break about a week ago, going away when the land was dry as a chip and on our return it was so green, which was so rewarding and shows the value of organics.

Chin Chin Farm, 673 Chintin Rd, Chintin, Macedon Ranges, Vic. Ph: 0411-401-969. Website: www.chinchin farm.com.au. T