A Week of Catering, Seedlings and Learning

It’s been a bit of a week, and somehow I’m rather glad we made it to Friday and I was back in the kitchen!

The focus in the garden is very much on sowing, pricking out and getting seedlings ready for planting, which isn’t far away now.

The weather has been in our favour, with plenty of sunshine to help everything along.

Spring is moving fast, and after a few slow springs in recent years, I’m working hard to keep up!

This week, we had two opportunities to cater, which is a first for us in the same week.

First up, we hosted the Corangamite Sustainability Committee for their meeting.

We served coffee and cake and had a brief opportunity to share a little about all the things happening here at Drakes Fresh Produce.

Once everyone had left, we scurried around and gave our pack shed a bit of a clean-up.

I was preparing for my first audit with Agriculture Victoria.

Thankfully, I got that out of the way fairly swiftly, as there are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing than spending time on government paperwork and audits!

With that behind me, it was straight back into the kitchen to prepare for our next catering job.

This time, I had the privilege of supplying the food for the Heytesbury Landcare Resilient Farming Course, which has around 20 participants. I’m one of them, too, so it was a slightly different experience being both the caterer and a participant.

Thursday started early in the kitchen, preparing sandwiches and packing everything up for delivery to the course in Timboon. Once the food was delivered, I joined the other participants for a full day of learning.

It was an intense day. We had to enter a great deal of information about our own farms into a spreadsheet, including soil, leaf and biology test results. From there, we worked through the information and considered the outcomes to help us make further decisions for our farms.

There was a lot to take in, and it certainly made for a long day. But that’s part of farming, too. There’s always more to learn, more information to work through and decisions to make about what comes next.

And now, after a week of catering, cleaning, auditing, learning and keeping up with spring, I’m rather happy that it’s Friday!