A Story of Seven Summers

by Hilary Burden

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Barn.

  ‘I’m happy, as long as it goes up hills.’

  Barn dipped into his cash reserves until the business could pay him back, and that was how we came to own our first fresh-produce delivery van.

  By the end of the year we had forty box subscribers. We began a blog because it seemed the easiest way to tell the story of the produce we bought and where it came from. Together we had accidentally become hunters and gatherers of fresh local produce packed in a box. I yearned to celebrate what was grown in our region and to share our passion with others. And I loved that others seemed to want to do the same, because our business was growing fast through word of mouth.

  Barney used his corporate background as an oil company pricing analyst to build a spreadsheet, recording all the data the business needed, from customer information and future payments to egg orders and suppliers’ contacts—a complete financial system for hilbarn. I preferred to write things down, freehand, in the black book. I also loved to find new growers and saw it as a journalistic task. Between us we seemed to be able to cover most things. Each week we asked each other if we had ten more customers could we still do it? We both agreed to continue as long as we were having fun. Instead of a produce hall or magazine, I felt pride in having found a new market for growers, and that it had blossomed accidentally out of our own imaginations as a way of spending time together.

  We converted the Nuns’ House tool shed into a packing shed and bought a second-hand coolroom to help keep the produce fresh. Our neighbour Rhonda came to help us pack. We’d sourced our own boxes by then and the three of us worked through the seasons filling them up on Sundays for Barn and me to deliver on the following morning. We chatted about how a lettuce should be packed, in plastic or newspaper, whether tomatoes should be loose or in brown paper bags, if apples should have their stickers on, and how different herbs might be bunched. All the things we did we learned along the way. Barn would say, ‘It’s about how it feels.’ And I’d think back to the Cosmo days in London and the mad hours, sometimes days, spent around a table with Marcelle, Vanessa, Tania, Kath and Bev, conjuring snappy lines that would fit on the cover. ‘Is it grabby enough?’ ‘We need Flakes!’ ‘. . . and gingernuts!’ ‘Send the workie!’ In those days, Marcelle would light up an Alpine to have with her strong tea and the coverlines were eventually born, typeset and tweaked again before finally being committed to press. That’s how great magazines were made then, nothing to do with marketing science or focus groups, everything to do with feel.

  The skill in making up a fresh produce box was about the love expressed in putting it together so that nothing was automatic. It started with a few apples, then a bag of potatoes, freshly dug, tipped into a brown paper bag with the corners twisted into ears, then a large swede or a handful of carrots with their bottoms all poking up, and a bunch of ruby-coloured rhubarb lying diagonally across the top . . .T here was a point (no one was ever quite sure when that was) when one of us stopped what we were doing, stood back and said, ‘Wow, great box this week!’

  Every Thursday, Des from the Lilydale School Farm came to work with Barn to make up our hilbarn boxes. His job was to stamp and tape the custom-made cardboard boxes, line them with fresh newspaper, and stack them ready for labelling. These were important but repetitive tasks and he did them well, although sometimes at a slow pace, without complaint. Des had very few words and too often the weight of the world seemed heavy on his teenage shoulders, while his trousers dragged on the ground. Other days his stories were joined up and full of life, about his relatives on Flinders Island, the budgie show he was saving up to go to in Hobart, or his fishing days with his uncle. One day I watched mesmerised while big Des chopped firewood in my driveway with the strength and grace of a ballet dancer and I told him that.

  Vivienne’s puttanesca sauce

  extra virgin olive oil

  1 onion, finely chopped

  2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

  4 anchovy fillets, chopped

  1 small red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

  2 tsp capers, rinsed and drained

  small tin pitted black olives, quartered

  1 tin diced tomatoes

  ½ tsp sea salt

  ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper

  pasta of your choice

  1 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley

  Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and

  cook the onion for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  Add the garlic and anchovies and cook until the

  anchovies meld in. Add the chilli, capers, olives,

  tomatoes, salt and pepper, and simmer, uncovered,

  for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  While the sauce is simmering, cook the pasta. Drain

  the cooked pasta into a colander and put the sauce

  in the bottom of the serving dish. Top with the hot

  pasta and toss together gently to combine.

  Decorate with chopped parsley.

  Serves 4.

  CHAPTER 16

  Spring, Tasmania

  It was spring again and the apple blossom was budding pink in the Nuns’ House garden and in orchards from Hillwood to Spreyton as we trekked across the countryside in search of the first broad beans of the season.

  ‘Give it a couple of weeks,’ we were told in Spreyton. ‘It’s still a little early.’

  We’d been sourcing produce and packing boxes every week for two years. Every week except Easter and Christmas. We thought we might have to limit the number when we reached a hundred boxes a week, but when that happened and we were still getting new inquiries for our boxes, it didn’t feel right to turn around and say no. We expanded to take up the whole of the Nuns’ House three-bay shed (the hay bales were moved out), and bought a second, postbox-red delivery van we called Versace (he was a bit flash in a 1985 kind of way). We moved into our second coolroom having outgrown our first, and ordered a third pallet of one thousand cartons. Paul and Jeff were helping us with van deliveries, and Bron, a raspberry grower from nearby Underwood, joined us to help pack on Sunday nights. We’d been written up in national newspapers and magazines and we owed all of this, having never paid for advertising, to word of mouth.

  Weighing and bagging 120 one-kilo bags of potatoes is a repetitive task but not a monotonous one when it’s what you want to do. The task is as heavy or as light as your mood. We reminded ourselves that there were downsides to every job and this was better than office politics any day. Above all, it was real. Rhonda kept us entertained with the ups and downs of farm life: new calves, fighting roosters, and the fattest free-range eggs we’d ever seen. Bron brought homemade biscuits and cakes for us to try and, when she returned from holidays in Europe, arrived with a bottle of apple schnapps, four tiny glasses and a photo album of her eating cakes across Europe. ‘Hil, they’re real cakes,’ she said, already missing them, ‘not like ones you get here.’

  Those were the ups. The downs were never the bottomless downs I used to feel in London, the black moods I now associated with living in my mind, detached from nature. It was hard to feel good about the coolroom freezing over, though. I opened it one morning to find the temperature reading minus 1.9 degrees. We’d practically queued for the very first apples of the new season, now they were covered in a halo of frost. Five hundred zucchini, freshly picked for us the day before by hardworking Lebrina growers Michael and Liz, were as hard as a baseball bat. Six boxes of mushrooms and 550 nectarines that Barn and Des had picked from Barney’s orchard the day before were unsalvageable. It was Saturday, the day before packing, and we’d have to start sourcing produce from scratch. We found our up, though, when we contacted all our growers again and they helped us replace what we’d lost without drama.

  For months I’d been on the hunt for a local asparagus grower. On a fresh delivery morning, Barn and I had just finished our run in Launceston when I spotted a shop sign on the pavement that read ‘Fresh local
asparagus’.

  ‘Stop the van!’ I yelled.

  Barn stopped at the next traffic light and I sprinted across the road, through the traffic, into the deli and straight up to the sales assistant.

  ‘Fresh asparagus, finally! Where’s it from?’

  ‘From Victoria,’ she said, shamelessly.

  ‘Well, that’s not exactly from-here local,’ I replied. ‘Thanks anyway.’ And as much as I loved asparagus, I left the store empty-handed.

  That’s how much the bug had got me. I was so committed to the hunt for local asparagus that if it wasn’t Tasmanian I’d rather not have asparagus at all. So what if Victoria grew ninety per cent of the country’s harvest—why weren’t we growing our own? I’d heard that it was difficult to grow, that it took some years to establish a crop, that it was tricky . . . nothing, though, that relieved my sense of frustration. I even accosted visitors at Jansz’s cellar door who liked to stop and chat. One woman, a market gardener from the north-west, gave me hope. She said she’d planted an asparagus patch that cropped beautifully by the second year. Unfortunately, she wasn’t growing enough for our boxes, but she wished me luck.

  Such unplanned conversations spurred me on in my hunt for local asparagus. As a last resort, mixed with the foolishness of hope, I googled the words ‘Pipers River’ and ‘asparagus’. To my astonishment, up popped ‘Pipers River Asparagus’. It looked like there was someone growing it in my own backyard. I tracked down the number and rang the farm. ‘Well,’ said a woman’s voice, ‘we were growing asparagus but you’re a bit late—we stopped last year.’

  It was deflating to have come this far only to be just a few months too late. Judith proceeded to tell me why, despite growing asparagus for many years, they had given up. For one thing, it was backbreaking work as the spears were cut by hand at or just below the soil surface. Another, she explained, was the way of the supermarkets. The point of asparagus was to eat it as fresh as possible before the natural sugars started turning to starch, undermining both the flavour and sweetness. But the supermarkets, Judith said, wouldn’t allow them to deliver their harvest directly themselves. They had to wait for a truck to collect and transport it to a central depot where it might sit for days, before being transported back to the supermarket. This so affected the quality of their crop that they had given up in despair. It just wasn’t worth it anymore.

  I wanted it to be viable, and while on the phone did my best to try to change her mind, but their decision had been made. In my dreams I craved, somehow, to help make growing asparagus worthwhile again, if not for Judith, then for someone else. I was starting to get a sense that growing produce might be an endangered occupation, because growers didn’t seem to receive the respect deserved for the work they put in. I remembered the ad I’d seen in the old newspaper archive and thought, I want to pay the most for cream.

  All around the Tasmanian countryside were homes with old dairies, cattle yards, chicken coops, barns and farm sheds, many of them derelict and no longer fit for any purpose. It was obvious that self-sufficiency used to be a rural way of life here not that long ago. But it was no longer the way of life; old barns seemed more sought after as backdrops for wedding shoots or as storage for toys, gadgets and tools that had fallen out of fashion. In the letting go of this way of life, I thought, maybe we had let go of running our own lives?

  Each weekend, we travelled far and wide to collect freshly harvested produce for our hilbarn boxes. As much as we were passionate about supporting local growers and buying fresh, I wasn’t sure we would do this every weekend if we didn’t enjoy the road trip. I never tired of the journeys Barney and I took, whether together or alone. There was always a market or roadside stall that invited you to stop and fossick, or people who sold flowers from their garden arranged in colourful bouquets. We stopped the van and turned it around when a mass of red and pink proteas caught our eye for five dollars a bunch, ‘includes plastic bucket’. One of our hilbarn followers wrote on our blog that our trips ‘gave new meaning to market research’.

  Then, there were the views of natural landscapes that took our breath away.

  On one of these journeys, while browsing in a roadside fruit and veg store, I finally spotted what I’d been looking for all these months: generous bunches of green asparagus in old plastic buckets. They looked local, sort of roughish, not perfect or conformist like the identikit spears found in supermarkets. Instead, some were fatter than others and they looked just-cut, showing healthy white bottoms rather than the cardboard grey signs of starch and age. I asked the counter assistant for the name of the grower, and she happily gave it to me.

  ‘That’s Jo. She doesn’t have a lot but give her a call, she’s not far from here.’

  We rang Jo, who said that it was only a small patch and that she hadn’t been picking a lot because of her back. Her husband had promised to make her a special picking chair, but he hadn’t got round to it yet. If we called closer to the day of picking next week she’d have a better idea how much she would have. I must have sounded utterly desperate when I offered to help her pick.

  ‘Boy, you’re keen, aren’t you?’ said Jo.

  ‘Well, yes, we really want fresh local asparagus that is fresh and local!’

  ‘Okay, look, I’ll do what I can.’

  Barney rode his motorbike to collect the asparagus from Jo in Sassafras, roughly ninety minutes from Karoola. Thirty kilos fitted perfectly into two bike panniers and he arrived home with flushed cheeks. The roads were no more than lanes in places, winding through timeless countryside where red dirt and bright green produce-filled paddocks fronted blue Bass Strait—like agriculture-on-the-sea.

  That night we sat at the kitchen table weighing and tying asparagus bunches with pieces of jute string. They looked a million dollars, as fresh and cared for as they could be. Hopefully people would appreciate the effort Jo had made—and hopefully she wouldn’t break her back when we asked her to do it all over again next week.

  Once the bunches were done, we put one aside for us, nine spears tossed into a shallow pan of softly boiling water, for just two or three minutes, long enough to make the spears gasp and wilt ever so slightly when you picked them up. We sat at the kitchen table and ate them unadulterated with our fingers. These were good days—long, but good.

  I loved the way Barn and I cooked together and seemed to finish each other’s dishes like other couples finished each other’s sentences. Even though we lived opposite one another, we ate together most nights. We each had baskets that crossed the road filled with food (sometimes cooked and still bubbling), pans, bowls or glasses that got left behind last time, and bottles of wine. Recipes lived on as well as memories, like pears poached in green ginger wine, a reflection of our nights together.

  Karoola Corner wouldn’t be the same if Mount Arthur didn’t dominate our view. It’s one of Tasmania’s higher peaks, home to the mystical burrowing crayfish listed as a vulnerable species, and the remains of temperate rainforest that had long been logged. We often found ourselves jumping into the car to chase a lightning storm round the mountain, or driving to the snow-line to touch the snow. We loved taking the road partway to the summit, to stop at the forest river that passed under the road and walk to the top, or thereabouts, to take in views across Bass Strait. We named one section Fern Corner and took photos of each other waist high in lush serrated ferns that seemed primeval. I loved the quiet beauty of the roadside, how nothing had been planted, how it seemed to have always been there, and how what looked like scrub from a distance was actually, close up, an exploding galaxy of plants.

  Mountains are the beginning

  and end of all natural scenery.

  John Ruskin

  One Friday, we were stunned to see Fern Corner had been logged for woodchips. The route to the top of our ancient mountain, blessed by native bush and wildlife, had been scraped clean of all vegetation, destroyed for at least a generation while it self-healed. Mountain lovers who craved summit roads would first have t
o trek through a version of Armageddon, made worse because it was industrial. Why, we wondered, were public routes of immense beauty, and which gave access to local wilderness, still being treated with such a lack of care or regard by those entrusted to look after our forests? Without warning, seeing the devastation in this place our hearts might so easily be moved to melancholy or despair—and for what? Woodchips sold offshore for hardly any profit now.

  Barney’s teenaged kids were with their dad for the school holidays and I liked to invite them across the road for supper, raiding the recipe books and loading the table with comfort food. A big platter of meatballs in tomato sauce was their favourite, or corned silverside with parsley sauce and mash. The family of four arrived together, bearing baskets filled with wine and offerings for the table, and hugs at the door, one by one. I liked the table set and laid properly, which Billy loved to do himself, always finishing it off with a vase of flowers he’d picked from the garden. Rachael would bake a cake while James could eat twice as much as Barn. Although I wanted a simple life, I’d never thought of myself as old-fashioned, yet sometimes I felt I was with Barn’s kids around. I only knew the rules that I’d grown up with, not the rules of today. I didn’t know their music and thought every song sounded like Britney Spears, but apparently there was a whole other generation after her. Then the family—the father with his children—would leave to go home across the road and the Nuns’ House returned to the quietness of being one. I loved and regretted the way this happened— it left a gap between us—and wondered what it was like for them, as kids, shuffling back and forth between their parents. I thought of all the different ways that families came together, though, and decided that maybe, seen in that light, it wasn’t as bad as it might have been for them.