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Moving out of the city has proven to be a rewarding “tree change” but I didn’t really know what hard work was until we started our own small business. Farming (grapes or other) is a lot of hard physical labour; both Mark and Andrew agree that farming is about 85% maintenance. There is always something to fix around the farm, the restaurant and the winery.
Most of the time it’s the adults doing the constant work, but sometimes the future wine makers decide to help. One day they filled up the quad bike fuel tank with water. This fantastic babysitting effort, on the part of the vineyard manager extraordinaire, cost at least a day’s worth of TLC on the bike to coax it to work again.
The future wine makers like to help around the farm
Water causes more problems than stalling the quad bike. Poly pipe rules in this part of the world. It splits when it freezes and frozen pipes in the morning often mean that winter mornings, at home, are without water.
Fixing irrigation is a constant maintenance job in the summer season, and both the vineyard and the restaurant vegetable garden require a lot of attention in the watering department. The terrible summer hot spells in the Gundaroo area can fry the garden in no time, and we have to have a careful regime of drip watering in the cool evenings or overnight. Mark will buy at least two or three new pumps – or so it seems. Water pumps seem to have a way of breaking down just when you need them the most.
Life in the country revolves around water – it is a precious commodity. When we operated the restaurant, I was always amused by the phone calls every time someone new moved to the village from the city. “Um excuse me, would you know the phone number for the water tanker – our tanks seem to have run out and we can’t even flush our loo”. We have all done that once and it’s a quick learning curve for all. Living in the comfort of our inner city terrace in Sydney, I never even gave a thought to running a tap or turning the hose on to the garden – all six pots of it, and as for flushing the loo? It was taken for granted!
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