Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Food 'n Weather

Weather
Well, Autumn is over it seemed incredibly short as it was quite cool,

Autumn leaves taking an early winter swim

 making it seem that Winter had come early.   A cold Autumn has continued into Winter.  The fire place is getting heavy use, so we are chewing into the wood pile.  I have started the woodpile for next year, mostly spotted gum, it needs 12 - 18 months to cure for use in the fireplace.

Food
One of the reasons to be here is to make use of the home grown produce and to live more reminiscent of a time when this way of living was predominant.  So lots of baking and cooking gets done, lucky me, Toni does most of the work in that department.  I, on the other hand have been out building Mountain Bike Trails and clearing lantana.


Pictures speaking louder them words, here's a few

Home made bread, proving on the fire before baking.


Lemon Meringue; home grown lemons, and eggs used


Recently collected Persimmons for Jam and various citrus for marmalade,
glass jars washed and waiting to be sanitised in the Oven.
Home made Chicken Stock, carcass removed

This is a good book for those interested in venturing into Jams, Preserves etc.

The author, Sally Wise is a stalwart of ABC radio


A few odds and sods
The garden has winter veggies in, and doing a maintenance to the gardens as well, always work to be done in there

Chickens helping weed
A couple of beds have become over grown with weeds, so we put a temporary fence around the bed, bird netting over the top and placed a few chooks in there to do the hard work for us!  Go girls!

Most people living rurally will be on Satellite for their Internet.  We recently had a huge amount of rain over the space of 6 days and I was up on the roof the day after, spotting the water ingress into the membrane cover at the end of the Satellite Dish horn.  The membrane is also deteriorating badly in the harsh Australian Sun, which is why the water is getting in.

Soggy Satellite !

Checking with our ISP this is a common design fault with the Sat Dish and should be fixed by IPSTAR themselves.  I would suggest anyone who has a Satellite Dish for their Internet check theirs as well, and contact thier ISP if they have an issue, make sure you take photos as well, as the water slowly evaporates after a couple days but water inside will eventually destroy the components.