summer

Life has been good, but not particularly eventful here.  We are probably in one of the few parts of our state that has not had extraordinary rains, although still more than is typical for summer.  We have also been lucky to not have our typically hot weather - with more mild 20-35C so far this summer.  Summer usually makes me nervous, and adds a whole new dimension of work as far as watering the garden goes.  So the garden is growing well, the grass is still green (not the usual thing in mid January!). 

sweet corn

zuchinni - the best I've ever grown!

We are devoting most of our spare time to building the house, along with other urgent jobs like shearing (which we finally got around to do this week - again Brad did them using the hand shears), and pulling out Ragwort.  The Ragwort has been very prolific this year, not just in abundance, but also in the sheer size of the plants (some are as tall as us).  Personally I don't think its such a big deal, its real problem is that the most common livestock here don't eat it, so therefore its taking the place of grass.  I've been doing some reading on 'natural farming' although I use that description loosely - a book by Joel Salatin.  The book (The Sheer Ecstacy of Being a Lunatic Farmer) has 'joined the dots' on alot of things I read about and know, and the issue of Ragwort is one of them.  By consistently grazing the same animals, and getting them to graze the grass down before moving them on, you are actually encouring the growth of plants that they DON'T like!  As they eat the stuff they like and let the 'weeds' grow strongly.  Makes sense, yet that is how pretty much all 'produtive' farming is done.  Litres of chemicals poured over the land to deal with an issue that cross grazing with sheep or goats would control....



I've been inspired by Salatin's example and am currently reading more about our food system and diet (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food).  Its definatley a topic that is close to my heart, and we are pretty passionate about producing real food, that hasn't been adulterated by the industrial food system. I'll leave it at that for the moment, but I highly recommend reading about these topics, especially about how our food system works and what you are eating.  Food is probably THE most important thing in our lives, and we should be eating the best food (even if its expensive) and in its 'natural' state - not processed.

The weather (apart from when it has been raining) has been very nice for taking photos.  Such beautiful blue skies.  Here are some snapshots of the last few weeks.

Sourdough

Its been about 2 years since I first started making sourdough bread.  Since that day, I've made pretty much all the bread we eat, I think I may have bought 2 loaves in that time, if that.  For the last 18 months or so, I've also been baking our bread in a wood oven which has added a new degree of challenge and planning!

I'd love to say that I'm a great baker (I suppose I'm not too bad) but I've had many failures and flops in that time.  Between heavy loaves that didn't rise to over proved loaves that crumble up in the middle when cut!  There is something of an art to baking bread, you need to bake it at the RIGHT time, and usually the flops are when I try and bake it to suit me, eg the oven isn't hot enough yet and while its heating the bread over proves, or its late at  night and the bread hasn't risen enough and I give up and bake as is for the sake of getting some sleep!  One day I will be more organised though!

What I love about sourdough is that you don't need to buy yeast.  I have my own little community of yeasts and bacteria that I look after and use to make our bread.  All you need is flour, water and salt, nothing more! 

Lately I have been dabbling in making sourdough pancakes.  I was inspired by this blog post.  We have made them a couple of times, and they were are real hit, even with Brad, who was sceptical about makeing pancakes with sourdough (he makes lovely crepes which are dearly loved by our kids).

I want to experiment more with making sourdough 'stuff'.  I have heard of using the starter to make cakes and muffins.  Something to try, come winter.  Right now the plants are popping out of the ground, and its hard to stay indoors to bake!

Cheese

With all the lovely spring grass that is growing madly, we are getting more milk from our milking goat Dorka.  About 1.5L per day.  We don't drink that much milk, so every week or so there is enough milk to make a small batch of cheese.  We started off just making a soft ricotta type cheese, just with vinegar to curdle the milk, which worked fine, and made a soft cheese that was nice on crackers, or in a cheese and spinach pie.  We then decided to buy some rennet to experiment further. 

Its amazing the difference in the curdling between vinegar cheese and rennet cheese.  Vinegar is instant but the curds are small and the cheese soft.  Rennet needs to sit a bit to set, but the curds are so solid you cut them!  Its almost magical. 

The first batch of rennet curdled cheese became this fetta!  Which was great, and had a slight resemblance to halumi cheese. 

We have since made a batch of mozzarella type cheese which was nice too.

Lots of 'playing' to do, experimenting with the technique to get the types of cheese we like.  Really happy that we are able to skip yet another thing at the shops, and reduce the amount of packaging that we use.

Since I haven't posted a photo of the kids for a while, here they are growing fast (and eating enough to show for it!!!!  Next winter I will be planting LOTS of apple trees, as these 2 clean us out of apples!!!!)

Real Eggs

Our hens are laying well at the moment - spring is definately in the air! We have been enjoying an abundance of fresh eggs, real eggs, laid by hens who actually spend their day roaming around our land, doing what they like (and laying eggs wherever they please too!).


Recently in America eggs have been recalled due to Salmonella contamination - likely due the crowded and unatural way most hens spend their short (18months) life to provide 'cheap' eggs to keep the consumer happy. I recently took notice of the price of cheap eggs at our local supermarket, and they were less than $2 per dozen. A shock to me, as when we have bought eggs in the past we have always bought from a farm we know is truly free range and have usually paid around $8 per dozen. What do these factory farmed hens get fed - to be able to make money off selling eggs so cheaply? I don't think my hens who are outside all day and get a hand full of grain each a day would produce eggs for us so cheaply!!!!! And I don't pay for farm hands, electricity, transport and sorting for our eggs..... I have always belived factory farmed eggs to be rubbish, and now its clear that the hens must be fed 'rubbish'!!!! Which reminds me of the old saying 'you are what you eat'....


Our eggs come in all shapes, colours and sizes. Its my 'thing' to try and breed a flock of hens that will lay eggs of all different colours, I particularly proud of one of my 'babies' who lays a very nice and shiny chocolate coloured egg. But all the eggs have one thing in common, the yolks are truly orange, a deep orange. The colour comes from the green feed in the diet - grass. True free range (its now getting the label 'pastured') egg yolks are nothing like some of the eggs sold as 'free range' in supermarkets, which is basically just hens in sheds but not in small cages. There is nothing 'free' about this. Its worth paying a little extra for the 'real deal' than to buy cheap eggs that encourage farmers to treat these lovely animals in such a disgraceful way.


I love my eggs!

Meet Rosie

Yesterday we picked up the newest memeber of our family - Rosie (our daughter named her). We bought her to replace Gypsy who left us suddenly last week. Like Gypsy, Rosie is a British Alpine dairy goat, about 9 months old. She is from good milking lines, but a more stocky version of the British Alpine. Dorka our other goat (Gypsy's mum) is a British Alpine (or probably a cross with Toggenburg).


Rosie has settled in ok. She is more vocal than Dorka, and despite not actually letting us near her, she bleats and follows us along the fence when we leave! She seems to have bonded well with the alpacas, less keen on Dorka (as she has given her the butting treatment). Like Gypsy, Rosie has small horns, and will remain horned, as from all available information, dehorning at this age is cruel and painful. We plan on glueing rubber balls to the ends of her horns once they grow to reduce the likelyhood of her hurting the others. Most dairy farmers remove the horns for safety reasons, but when you see so many goats with very badly removed horns you have to wonder if its really worth it. The standard method is to burn off the horn bud when the goat kid is only a day or 2 old, but if its not done properly part of the horn will re-grow and this will either be mishapen and potentially grow inwards, or be weak and be knocked off and become infected. Many people don't realise that the horn actually has blood vessels running up the length of it, and its only the outer shell that is 'horn', to cut this off is probably equivalent to cutting off one's finger!!!

Our plan is to have eventually 3-4 milkers, and alternating which does have kids each year, so they all have a rest. British Alpines are well known for their extended lactation, producing milk for several years after the birth of their kid/s, so we will probably stick with them. We might even look at getting a buck at some stage down the track.

I will leave you with some photos of Dorka and the milking process. We are so lucky to have ample supply of healthy raw, un-tampered milk. Very special.

Frothy, fresh milk!

closing the gap

Wheat is also referred to as the 'staff of life'.

Its believed that man's ability to cultivate grains is the reason we evolved from a hunter gatherer society to an agricultural society. Grains are a highly nutritious living food (the are the seed after all and if you plant them will grow).

Modern processing of wheat into flour basically has turned a wholesome and living food into a unwholesome and dead food. The nutrition of wheat is lost within about 3 days of when the flour was milled. And many components of the wheat are actually removed from the flour as byproducts that can be sold for an extra profit (eg wheatgerm and bran).

We recently purchased a home grain mill (just a small bench top variety) to grind our own fresh flour as we need it. Partly for the health reasons - to actually get really nutritious bread and other baked 'stuff', and partly to bring us one step closer to closing the gap on the cycle - one step left to grow the grain, and thats what we will work on next.


As I only bake sourdough bread, good flour is really important. Bleached ordinary flour will kill the sensitive cultures of my sourdough leaven, as will chlorinated water. Freshly milled flour is like a whole food for the leaven, as it is for us.

What has been amazing, besides more flavour (the flour I used to buy was a very good one - so the difference is probably more subtle, than if we had been used to ordinary white flour), is the colour. I always bought unbleached flour, but the freshly milled flour is more honey coloured, so even unbleached must recieve some form of lightening process...

The mill was not cheap - I lashed out and bought a pretty good one and an electric model (no guilt here as we are totally solar powered!!). It mills about 1kg of flour in about 4-5 minutes, its only downside is its pretty noisy on the fine setting. There are cheaper models and hand operated models available too, but since we go through about 3-4kg of flour a week, it seemed sensible to get the best we could. And it runs perfectly on our solar power system, doesn't even make a dint on the battery charge!

So, another step towards self sufficiency has been achieved, minor as it is. I look forward to the day I can bake our bread using our own home grown wheat. First we need to buy the pigs, who will be our rotary hoes and prepare the soil for grain growing.... Before that I need Brad to build a pig shelter!!!! One day!

Oh, we still have the goats - Dorka and her baby - they didn't abandon us, and we are getting milk each day (although less than we first thought we would get - so no cheese as yet...)

Sourdough bread

One of my new years resolutions was to resume bread making. For years I made our bread, then for some reason, not sure what I stopped, and then got out of the habit of it. But this time, I've decided to give sourdough another go (I tried it a few times but failed to raise a leaven). This time I have had some sucess, although there is so much to learn about the craft of bread making. I recently bought this book, and it re-inspired me. Good 'real' bread is hard to find, the stuff (or should I say fluff) supermarkets sell, is not 'real' bread. Bread should be wholesome and nutritious.

I am concerned about what we humans are doing to our food and how that will affect us and our kids, so I am doing all I can to provide my family with good food. We mostly eat organic (unless we eat out), and yes it costs more, but you are what you eat, and pesticides can bioaccumulate so every bit counts. The other important thing about eating organic, is that by doing so, you are supporting farmers who (mostly) care about doing the right thing. I have worked on farms, and know many people that have worked on farms, and I KNOW that the right thing ISN'T always done, and sprays that shouldn't be used (because they are illegal) do get used, and that crops are picked when they have just been sprayed (even if there is a longer whitholding period). This doesn't happen all the time, but at the end of the day, its a business, and if the fruit needs to be picked, well too bad for 'right or wrong'....

Anyway, back to sourdough. I know people probably think making your own bread is too much work, but it really isn't that bad. Especially if you use sourdough rather that commercial yeast (because of the the longer proving (resting) periods), as you can leave it during the day while you are at work or whatever, knead it and bake it when you can. To make a starter all you need is flour and water and a glass or pottery type of bowl, and a tea towel or cloth. You mix flour and water to a batter consistency (check the web for the various recipes there are so many individual ways), and let it sit for a few days (feeding it more flour after a day or 2. It should start bubbling if the wild yeasts have colonised it.

my starter!

Then you mix this with you flour - I usually do about 1kg of flour (2 loaves) at a time - and salt, to a dough consistency, knead it for a few minutes, let it prove (rise) for however long it takes to double or a bit less (I left mine for most of the day, which seemed about right for it), knead it, shape it, put it in a tin or basket to prove again, slash and bake. This is just my version of it, but do read up before trying it as I may have forgotten something.

I have got to work on the whole slashing, as all I seem to get is cuts rather than the really cool looking loaves I have seen, oh well, practice makes perfect and we do eat alot of bread - so there will be plenty of practice!

The breads that you can create are truly works of art (once you get the hang of it), its very inspiring. And the best part is that its actually good for you!

Next on my list is to buy a flour mill and grind our own flour fresh, as freshly ground flour has alot more nutrients in it. (and yes on the one day in the future list is growing our own wheat, and yep you guessed it, cutting it with the scythe!!)

New gadget!

Since summer has decided to try and make a comeback (nearly a week's worth of high 30C temperatures...) I've decided to dry some apples. Unfortuantely they are bought apples, but they are organic, so I guess that makes up for them not being home grown....

I just recieved my apple peeler/corer/slicer gadget, and its great! Its nice and solid (not plastic!), and its all manual (no electricity required), and should last a lifetime. So I've put out 2 trays of apple rings to dry, hopefully the next few hot days should dry them out, otherwise I'll throw them into the dehydrator to finish them off. Our daughter loves dried fruits, and will probably eat all these apples in a matter of days, but I can always do some more....


Have been doing lots of pruning in the garden, mostly because the goats require so much variety in food (they are not impressed by dry grass - and I'm desperate to keep them happy - a happy goat is less likely to cause me trouble.... and yes cookie has been escaping still, he was visiting our neighbour's cattle...). So they are getting Peach prunings, roses, jerusalem artichokes, lemon balm, camelias, and some old pumpkin plants. Soon I'll prune the raspberries, and they will like that!

I've been busily knitting on Brad's vest. I'm getting really worried about running out of yarn though, fingers crossed I can finish it.... This is my first real cabled project (I've done little practice cables, and 'fake cables' on socks, but this is the most intricate), and I'm really enjoying it!


Not much else to say, just trying to survive the current heat wave, and hoping my trees will hang in there... this could be the straw to break their poor little backs....