Eight Acres

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about woodstoves, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Did you know what you can get woodstoves that are designed for both heating your house and cooking?  We've owned two woodstoves now, both with ovens under the fire box for cooking.  I hardly ever use our electric oven in winter (and in summer we tend to use the BBQ or the slow cooker because its too hot in the house).  Cooking in a woodstove is easy and convenient.  If you are considering installing a woodstove for heating, you should consider the cooking option too, as it doesn't cost much more and you will be able to cook all your meals for free while your heating the house anyway. The kelpies enjoying the heat from the woodfire The first woodstove that we tried was a  Nectre Bakers Oven .  It was a lovely little oven, that heated up quickly.  Bu...

As you know, we love our woodstove in winter!  We use it to heat the house and cook food as soon as the weather is cold enough.  We have tried the Nectre Baker's Oven in a previous house and currently have the Scandia Cuisine in our house at Eight Acres.  In our secondhand house we are going to need a woodstove.  The house came with a wood heater, but we gave that to our neighbour in exchange for electrical work because we couldn't get building approval with it in the house (and we really wanted a woodstove instead). our Scandia Cuisine We are having trouble making a decision and this time of year I always get a few questions about woodstoves, so I thought I should just step through our options and pros and cons with you here and maybe you can add your experience so we can finally come to a conclusion! Previous experience I wrote about our woodstove experience back here .  I do want to add a few points since I wrote that post.  I have since reali...

Lately its has been relatively cold and we have been lighting the woodstove to heat the house and using it to cook meals, so I wanted to share our woodstove story with you. When Pete and I wanted to replace the old pot-belly stove in our little Queenslander about eight years ago (because it was unsafe and inefficient), we decided we wanted a woodstove that we could use for cooking as well as heating. There are a lot of modern woodstove cookers on the market now. They have a large firebox like a standard heating woodstove, but also include an oven space that is heated by the hot combustion gases. Unlike the older style cookers, that were suited to cooking and designed to not over-heat the kitchen in a time when there was no alternative option for cooking, these new woodstoves really do a good job of heating the house, but are too hot for summer cooking (we use a BBQ or slow cooker for most things in summer instead). In winter when it is cold enough to light the woodstove r...

As you know, through winter we heat our home and cook using a woodstove , so we produce lots of wood ash as a result.  Our current woodstove has a very clever design where the ash tray can be pulled out and emptied easily, this makes cleaning much more pleasant than when you have to scoop out all the ash.  We have to clean out the ash tray every couple of days if we have the woodstove burning every day.  A bucket of wood ash We don't see the ash as a waste product though.  Wood ash is all the mineral matter remaining from the wood that was burnt, so its great for adding minerals to garden soil.  It usually also contains some unburnt carbon (biochar).  I spread the ash through the garden and tip it into the compost as well.  Wood ash is good for chickens to dust bath with , so I put it in their nesting boxes with a layer of wood shavings. Spreading wood ash on the garden - I just hose it into the soil I thought it would be simple to find out ...

During Plastic Free July we have been saving any single-use plastic that would normally be thrown away, so that we can assess at the end of July just how much plastic we consume and how we could reduce that.  Throughout the month I also tested ways that we may reduce that plastic as we go.  This isn't a competition, its a learning experience, so its not cheating if you start to change some of your routine as you realise where all the plastic is coming from. One thing that I knew was going to be an issue for us was muesli bars (granola bars for those in the US).  We go through around a box of 8 per week, and at over $4 a box, they're not cheap.  The brand that I buy is in a cardboard only box, but the bars are individually wrapped in plastic.  I don't think that there is any alternative bar that we could buy that is not individually wrapped, so I started to think about making an something similar at home (also because I bought kgs of organic rolled oats in...

Even though we don't eat much sugar, chocolate cake is still an occasional treat.  The thing I hate about baking is cleaning up, so this "one pot" cake is my favourite recipe!  If I could take the handle off the pot and put the entire thing in the oven I would.... Rather than "creaming" the butter and sugar, in this recipe you dissolve the sugar, cocoa powder and butter in milk by heating it in a pot.  I then stir in the 2 eggs and the flour and scoop the batter into a cake tin.  The only thing to remember is to let the mixture cool enough before adding the eggs, so that they don't cook :) Heat in a pot until combined (keep heat as low as possible, otherwise you have to wait for ages for it to all cool down, the butter will melt just above body temperature, so it doesn't need much heat): 1 cup milk 1 1/4 cups sugar (I use whatever I have, this time brown sugar, when that's used up I'm on to the rapadura) 125g butter 1/2 cup coc...

I learnt to light a fire when I was in Girl Guides.  Actually, to be more precise, my dad taught me to light a fire when I wanted to get my Camp Cook badge!  From then on I used to light the wood stove at my parent's house when I got home from school on cold winter days.  Fire lighting is a surprisingly useful skill and I think there's a few people around who have missed out on learning it, so here's my method. Lighting a fire in a woodstove is a bit different from a fire outdoors, as it is really important to establish a draught.  That means that as the hot air and smoke rises out of the fire and up the chimney, fresh air is sucked in through a hole in the door.  If you don't have a draught, the fireplace will just fill with smoke and the fire will suffocate due to lack of oxygen.  Before starting the fire, ensure that the baffle that closes off the chimney is open and the vents in the door are fully open as well. newspaper and kindling I...

When we first moved into Eight Acres there was a massive pile of wood in one of the paddocks, and even though we knew it was a big job to clean it up, we were pleased to have access to free firewood.  I didn't take "before" photos of this pile, but I did take some part way through the clean up process.  It took us about a year to pick through all the logs and cut them into rounds.  They were branches from iron bark gum trees that were felled for fence posts by a previous tenant on our property. A kookaburra comes to help pick up bugs from the firewood pile As the branches had been in the pile for at least a few years we thought that the rounds would be ready to burn right away, but it seems that iron bark takes a little longer to dry out!  When Farmer Pete tried to split the rounds with an axe it just bounced off the log.  That's when we realised that the wood might need more time to dry.  We set up a wood pile using "besser blocks" to support a few s...

Installing a woodfire is a complicated process!  Of course we decided to do it ourselves, why pay an expert when you can figure it out yourself?  I've already explained why we love our woodfire , so this is more detail of the installation process. The hardest part is the weight of the woodfire.  They are made of cast iron and range from 100-300 kg.  This is not easy to move!  The first woodfire we bought (a Nectre Baker's oven) was only 120 kg, which was lucky because it had to get into the top floor of our Queenslander !  My husband borrowed a three-wheeled stair climbing trolley and he and a friend pushed and pulled the oven up our front stairs (while I watched, holding my breath, worried that the stairs would collapse).  The second stove (a Scandia Cuisine) was 248 kg!  Luckily this one only had to come into a low-set house.  My husband backed the ute up to the verandah and we wheeled the oven off the ute and onto the verandah ...