We were finally able to show some of our families a bit of our life during the week just gone, with my parents followed by Alex’s sister and her family. They were our first visitors since February due to Tasmania’s border closures and I’m glad they seized this pre-Christmas window. Although we don’t have very much experience with visitors it seems they are good at picking and shelling broad beans, harvesting garlic scapes, fixing whippersnippers, mowing, thinning apples, setting up trellises and carrying seedling trays outside and inside daily, which is one of our most inefficient tasks. But we did let them off the farm as well.

In Alex’s latest compost achievement, the pile he started a week ago has grown in size and reached 65 degrees – a new PB. For the first time we’re thinking about whether we might need to cool it down! The main ingredients are grass (which we have plenty of!), an annoying vine, cow manure from our front paddock, coffee grounds from a local café, sawdust from our neighbour (after her delivery was wrong) and a dose of our homemade microbe mix. Apart from the microbe mix ingredients (milk, molasses and rice) it’s all very local, which is important to us. We’re not running victory laps yet but it feels like it’s on track. Meanwhile the problematic purchased compost is still measuring 50 degrees!

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After much hesitation I started harvesting the faster-growing of our two garlic varieties (Tasmanian Purple) this week. I wish I hadn’t waited until our visitors left – it took forever to harvest and hang half a bed! Despite much internet searching it really wasn’t clear whether they were ready, partly because some are tiny (thanks to our compost problems) and some looked like a single bulb instead a bulb of cloves. But on Sunday afternoon a more experienced grower told us that he’d had a lot of single bulbs this year (and that they’re more convenient because there’s less peeling) so I’ll get onto the rest. My hanging technique is a long way from the beautiful braids posted all over social media so it’s lucky that there are still so many to go. I’ve dehydrated the bulbs that were marked or had broken from the stem and will pound them into powder. And the last of the scapes (from a different bed) have been turned them into frozen pesto and (fingers crossed) lacto-fermented garlic scapes. Even if the curing process doesn’t go smoothly I don’t think we’ll be buying garlic any time soon!

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Now that I’ve met my goal of writing weekly during our first year, I’m not quite sure what to do with this blog. I think a lot of my reasons for starting are still relevant: to convert my scrappy daily notes into something digestible, to keep writing, and to share what’s going on with friends and family who are far away. But now that the farm is “built”, I’ll experiment with fortnightly posts, which will be a bit more manageable (combined with the off-farm work that I’m lucky to have) and (perhaps) prevent every post being about compost. And I’ll stop counting weeks!