April 2025 Updates

April 2025

Written by Katrina Miller

Farm happenings

Wine

• We are still patiently awaiting our latest wines but in the meantime we have plenty to do at our cellar door and new vineyard in preparation for opening in a few months.
• Ev designed, built and installed new wine and gift cabinets at our cellar door. They look incredible and fit the space perfectly.

• More time has been spent clearing out Tagasaste trees that are taking over the abandoned vineyard at the cellar door.
• We went to our first wine tasting event organised by the Perth Hills Vignerons Association and hosted by Plume Estate who provided delicious cheese boards. We tried some amazing wines from Australia and beyond, which were all chosen and briefed by Rachael Davenport from MyattsField.
• New stockist alert of our 2024 Chittering Chardonnay now available at Copper and Oak.

Flowers

• A lot of our time this month was spent planting out in the flower farm. We planted many of the banksias that Evan grew from seed and it was extremely rewarding to get these babies in the ground, as he has been nurturing them for over a year now. They have been hardened off very well since being taken out of the shade house a few months ago. 
• Unfortunately, our worst enemies in the flower farm (birds, namely 28 parrots) found our precious Banksia coccinea plants so we shade clothed them in hope that would deter them. We also ended up netting our South African Leucospermums (pin cushions), as all of their new growth, including new flower buds, were getting destroyed by all the hungry birds. 
• Evan also planted out his next batch of banksia seeds for next season's plantings. There are some new cool varieties to come that we are excited to trial in the flower farm.
• We have also been doing more flower deliveries to Perth since our grevilleas have been popular and they continue to bloom most of the year.
• With known potential of grevilleas for the local market, Ev is starting to experiment with them by first collecting seeds and seeing if we get any interesting crosses between our different varieties. 

Sheep

• Our cross-bred ewes and rams were shorn. 
• Time was spent baling up wool for the market - though it isn’t worth much at all.
• We are still hanging onto some lambs from last year in hope that they fatten up in the coming months with market prices expected to continue to soar due to the droughts over east.