Food 'n Weather

5:39 PM No Comments

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.

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Going for a walk and ...

6:25 PM No Comments

Going for a walk 

We were up early the other morning, so we decided we would walk up "Mt Martin", which while the named indicates some grandeur, is really little more then a hillock.  We walked up the road, through the bush and across the ridge to to north, parallel with the back boundary of our property, to the top of the mountain, spotted the Survey Station on top

Plaque on Survey Station

Mt Martin Survey Station

Slashing
We had Dave out doing some slashing the other day, looks nice, discourages snakes etc and keeps the bladey grass down.  Took him about 90mins at $120, we though that was value for money! Also saves burning, which really does encourage weeds to grow back.

Always farm chores
Anyone who owns property and is growing their own vegetables etc will realise how the chores are never ending.  Toni went and collected all the sweet potatoes the other day, leave it too much longer and the slugs start to eat them,but it is a back breaking, thankless job.  We store them inside and use them over the months to come in lots of wonderful roasts and soups over winter,

Hard work harvesting sweet potatoes !

Several weeks ago the olives were picked, and put in brine, several times over.  Time to bottle them, adding flavours like garlic, rosemary, chilli etc

Getting ready to bottle the olives !

Some of the finished product

While I don't eat them, Toni is looking forward to enjoying them !

and this mornings bread...

Yummy bread !

including a delicious savoury loaf at the front of camembert & cheddar cheese, garlic and garlic chives

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the garden...

9:44 PM No Comments

Toni has been doing a heap of work in the garden, while I have been busy out on our Mountain Bike Trails, today's jobs where doing up a new bed to plant the strawberry runners we had donated to us by Jan Scott from the Wilderness Rescue group we volunteer with, thanks Jan.  All the new Strawberries were planted.

Preparing the new Strawberry bed

Plenty of other jobs getting done today as well; compost made, preparing the slug traps using old beer from the nearby pub and digging up all the Sweet Potatoes to keep us supplied for many months !

Things are looking up in the egg department, the chooks have been recalcitrant in laying eggs, most of them moulting, but we are starting to get a few more each day, up from 1 a day to 3 or 4 !   We also have another young Rooster to kill, we'll get to that in the next couple days!

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Fruit, glorious fruit

6:06 PM No Comments

We have a couple different fruits being harvested at the moment, particularly Persimmons (a non astringent variety) and Guavas. Unfortunately I don't like either but Toni is enamoured !

Persimmons

Guavas

and other fruits on the way, hopefully some Paw Paw's! yum yum!

Paw Paw, fingers crossed we don't lose them !

and one of the Mandarin trees has fruit that are colouring nicely.


Wit the huge amount of rain we had, we were convinced we'd lost two small avocados, one tree about 2 years old, the other about 9 months.  The both shed all their leaves and looked very forlorn, the larger one came back quite quickly after the rain petered out and after two months or so the small one, the one we were convinced we'd lost, has started sprouting again! Yeah!

Resurrected Avocado shrub !

The great Guinea Pig experiment
When we moved in, there where three female guinea pigs in the Orchard, the idea behind them is that they will keep the lawn trimmed and require no looking after .  One passed away and the other two could not keep up, necessitating some mowing.  So, Toni decided to find a male to mate with them.  I was against it, knowing how quickly they breed and sure enough a few months later, the place is thick with the little buggers.  I am not sure if she's hasn't created a bigger problem but I will let her deal with that!  Apparently she is going to cull the males, that should prove interesting, just trying to catch and sex them !

Breeding like, well, Guinea Pigs !

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back at it..

1:50 PM No Comments

We were away in Thailand and Cambodia for a month (more about that here), we're back into work on the property.

One of the tasks that turned into a bit of a failure last year was Olives.  I don't eat them at all but Toni is a big fan.  This year she is following another recipe that we found in an old Earth Garden Magazine.  We'll see how that goes.  We spent a few hours harvesting the larger Queen olive tree that was prolific this year and Toni then sorted, graded and started the process which will hopefully end up with an edible product this time.

Sorting the Olives !

Dozens of jobs needed to be attended to, so that has been keeping us busy.  It's still raining with 32mm falling last night, hopefully one day it will dry out a little!

Bountiful harvest
This was a pic I took last month, just before we left, showing a days "harvest" ...

Tomatoes, Chokos, Eggs, Tamarillos, blackberries and Figs.

Alas, the chooks are off the lay at the moment and we struggle to get an egg a day !  Hopefully they will come good soon.

We have killed two more roosters and eaten them!  We're getting quite adept at the process now.

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First Chicken killed for meat

12:02 PM No Comments

Killing your own food to eat
Well, we finally killed our first chook for meat, it was one of the first lot of  chickens we had, way back here

He was a male, and had just started crowing, so off with his head.  While it's difficult, it's also probably the most wholistic way of sourcing your own meat.  Buying them from the Supermarket having been raised in who knows what conditions, with you several steps removed from the process seems somewhat surreal in retrospect.  We keep the hens for laying eggs.  I guess I am now one of those people that thinks if you can't kill and prepare your own meat you really should not be eating it.

Slaughtered, plucked and gutted...

Anyway, we need to let him sit in the fridge for two days or so to let the rigor mortis out of his muscles, so he's not so tough.  Being so young he should make a lovely roast.  He weighs 1.5 kg, so the same as a size 15 chook from the supermarket but raised ah la natural.

Doing your own repairs
While we like that we're self sufficient in power and water etc sometimes things break down and need repairing, like this join in our main water line.

We noticed the tank had emptied much more quickly then it should have, with all the rain about it is tricky to try and find a water leak in the rain but we finally tracked it down to a really soggy patch right near the main pump itself, after a bit of excavation this is what we found, sure enough !!.

We had to go into town and grab some fittings and do a few repairs.

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More fruit trees and other things

6:29 PM No Comments

Fruit Trees

We plant a few new fruit trees each year, just planted a Eureka Lemon, 2 Passionfruit and 2 Paw Paws today.  After digging the holes, I filled them with water, waited until they drained then used our compost to fill them, watered the plants and then mulched them with Comfrey leaves.

New Paw Paw

New Eureka Lemon

The Dwarf Mulberry we planted a few months ago (Nov 2010) (below) seems to be doing okay, at the same time we did 2 x Pecan, 2 x Japoticaba, 2x Pecan and 1 x Passionfruit and 1 x Black Sapote.

Dwarf Black Mulberry

The Raspberries are coming along, here's where they were first planted back in June and we've collected a 1/2 dozen off them.  We don't really expect many until next year.

Raspeberry Canes

They all seem to be doing fine so far but the Avocado we planted earlier last year looks like it might have succumbed to the constant months of rain we had.  I assume that's what's done it in ?

Sorry looking Avocado

It has been quite hot here lately, the only warm weather we have had so far this Summer.  We often duck down to a nearby creek for a cooling swim, it's a beautiful spot.  The pic below was taken with me in the water up to about my hips.

Swimming hole in a creek  near us, lovely in the Summer heat

Native Animals

Being in the bush of course we get a plethora of native animals, unfortunately the Goannas are in abundance now and it can be difficult keeping them out of the chook-pen, inevitably we loose some of the eggs to the buggers.  

Goanna enjoying a nap in the tree !

but we also get  snakes of all sorts, like this Python on the driveway

Carpet Python

and a family of kangaroos getting some shade relief under the Olive tree.

Mum, Dad and baby enjoying the shade

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