Eight Acres

Here's a post originally from 2012.  It is interesting to read this again now, as I've lately been finding that I can grow a productive and varied vege garden for most of the year, so a lot of the veges that I had preserved were not getting used up anyway.  I prefer to use things up while they are fresh, but there are advantages to fermenting food and few things that I do want to use year-round, such as herbs, chilli and garlic, are easily dried.   The first year in our new garden we had so many zucchinis and beans, we were giving them away to everyone.  But we hadn't got to know when we would have gluts and famines, so we didn't keep any for ourselves.  Of course through winter, we had to buy veges again as I hadn't kept any.  A few years on, now I'm starting to learn how to preserve some of our veges so that we will have a supply through winter.  I have been drying herbs and greens, freezing zucchinis and beans, fermenting pickling cucumbers and re...

Last year we made dried garlic granules, and we found them really useful.  It took an hour or so to peel 1kg of garlic, but then over the year when we were cooking we could quickly and easily add a teaspoon of granules to cooking without having to fiddle around with garlic, so it was worth the effort and stick fingers at the time!  We also didn't have to buy any foreign garlic when the Australian garlic ran out towards the end of winter. The finished product - 1 kg of garlic dried to fit in one jar Seeing as the granules were such a success, we decided to do them again this year AND I remembered to take photos to share with you.  The process is really very simple.  We peeled the garlic, put it in the dehydrator (I ave a cheap sunbeam one), and ran it for a few hours (less this year because it was so hot anyway, I just left it outside for a few days).  After a week the garlic was not quite dry, still a bit sticky and gooey, so we whizzed it in the food proc...

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...

A while ago I had a lovely tea with ginger and rosella.  It got me thinking maybe I should try to grow some rosellas myself, so this season when I was offered some seed (thanks  African Aussie !) I planted some and ended up with four in big pots.  I kept them in pots because I was a little unsure what to expect.  I didn't know how big they would get and where they would prefer to grow.  I find keeping unknown plants in pots the first year helps me if I need to move them around to find the best spot for them.  Next year I'll probably plant them out in the garden instead. Rosella dried for tea I am still waiting for mine to flower, even though I planted them in September, but a friend of mine had excess fruit from her plants and gave me a bag of them.  I decided to dry most of them for tea, and kept a few to add to a fermented drink. the rosella flowers?  I don't even know what to call them! the calices peeled from the rosella seeds...

A guy at work who grows garlic commercially was selling it for $10/kg.  It was pretty good quality, just the same as the garlic that is $30/kg at the shops, so I bought 2 kg of it.  We weren't sure how well it would keep, so we decided to dry it. We spent about an hour peeling 1 kg of the garlic and laid the individual cloves on the tray of our dehydrator.  We ran the dehydrator on and off for several days until the cloves were no longer sticky.  I then whizzed them all in the food processor to for granules.  We dried the granules on baking paper in the dehydrator for another day.  This produced about half a jar of granules.  As this translates to 1 kg of garlic, I imagine that they will be rather strong! We are going to use up the rest of the fresh garlic first, and then use the granules.  During winter we often find that the Australian garlic runs out and we have to buy Chinese or Mexican garlic, so I hope this year we will be able to stretc...

My zucchini plants suffered a set back due to chicken attack back at the beginning of spring and I haven't harvest any of my own yet, but a friend was struggling with zucchini overload and gave me several kgs.  I have been wanting to try drying zucchinis, so this was the perfect opportunity.  The last time I had a glut of my own zucchinis I resorted to making zucchini soup!  It was awful!  I though dried zucchini might be more useful. I sliced the zucchinis using the slicer on my grater, which was very quick and produced a nice thin slice.  Then I laid them out on the dehydrator trays, about 1 zucchini to a tray.  I ran the drier on and off for several days until the zucchinis were dry enough.  I then sealed the chips in vacuum bags, so that they will last longer.  I hope to be able to get these out occasionally in winter when we miss zucchini, so they can be added to soups and stews. How do you deal with a zucchini glut? Have you dried a...

I had this plant in my garden where I'd tossed out some "friendly bug mix" seeds.  I thought it was clover, but it didn't look quite right.  I'd been wondering what it was for over a year when my mum finally pointed out that it looked like lucerne (or alfalfa).  Its so silly that I didn't recognise it, but I'm used to seeing lucerne dried as hay and I'd never really seen the living plant.  Now that really got me thinking because I remembered reading somewhere that lucerne tea is really good because the plant has such deep roots and accumulates lots of minerals, but I didn't want to use any of the hay we buy because you don't really know "where its been" so to speak.  I forget now where I read that, and when you goggle lucerne or alfalfa tea, most of the links are about making tea for your garden rather than for yourself!  (here's one semi-helpful link )  Anyway, I didn't think it would hurt to cut some of the lucerne leaves an...

I tried some lovely tea at a cafe recently, it was ginger and rosella.  I bought some of the tea to take home, it was expensive, and when I finished the packet I wondered if I could make my own.... I didn't have any rosella, but I thought I could start with trying to dry the ginger.  I bought some organic ginger from the the Nanango markets and sliced it up really thin.  I spread it out in my dehydrator to dry.  I ran the dehydrator on and off for a couple of days (its very loud, so I don't like to have it on when I'm in the kitchen), until the ginger was crispy dry. At the same time I had a massive bag of lemons from a friend's tree.  I knew that they were organic, so I decided to peel the skins and dry them as well, to add some lemon flavour to me tea.  The ginger/lemon smell in the house was wonderful! A jar of dried ginger and lemon peel I have some rosella seeds now after swapping seeds earlier in the month, so I've planted them and maybe I...

Somehow I have managed to grow some mega spring onions over winter, they are HUGE and there's no way we can eat them all, so I thought I'd try drying them.  I just washed them, sliced thinly and spread them out in the drier. I often leave things overnight in the drier to air dry before I turn on the heat, this worked well with the onions too.  In the morning I turned on the drier, and several hours later I had crispy onion flakes, ready to put in a jar and sprinkle on things later.  I'm thinking they will be useful in stuffing and in crackers in particular, but they may find their way into many different things....

Since I got my food dehydrator, I've been drying herbs for cooking, and also some for making herbal tea.  As I don't drink caffeine, I usually stick to herbal teas.  So far I have dried mint, peppermint, thyme, taragon, lemon grass and lemon myrtle leaves for tea.  I keep each one in a separate jar and then mix up a little of each to make a jar to take to work and I use a tea ball to brew my tea. calendula flowers in my garden On ingredient that I've been hoping to add to my tea is calendula, and it is finally flowering in my garden.  I have been picking the flowers and letting them air dry in a jar (as it is very dry here at the moment, I don't need to use the dehydrator).  When the petals are dry I pull them off and put them in another jar, ready to add to my tea. drying the flowers It does take a lot of flowers to make enough petals for tea as they really shrink when they dry, but they aren't hard to grow or dry, so I don't mind having a few in a...

With our frosty winter coming up, I'm not sure if my chilli plants will survive, and even if they do regrow in summer, I certainly won't be harvesting chillies over winter, so I decided to try to preserve some of the extra chillies that I have harvested this season. chillis! I used the solid tray in my dehydrator to dry chilli flakes.  I just put 4 chillies in the blender (tops cut off and chillis cut in half, for some reason I made the mistake of putting my head over the blender and inhaling deeply to see what it smelled like, woo wee, not a good idea unless you need to clear your nostrils!), and scraped the resulting chopped chillies onto the tray (this is a very exciting success for the blender as I hate chopping chillis, you can never quite wash the hotness off your hands and then you have to be very careful where you put your fingers!).  The flakes dried over a few days (with only a couple of hours of drier operation, my strategy is to run the drier when w...

Over summer, I have such an abundance of herbs, its hard to believe that in winter they will all die back and I'll have to resort to using bought dried herbs again.  This year I had a plan, I wanted to dry my own herbs, the aim was herb self-sufficiency! I had borrowed an Excalibur drier  from a friend a few years ago and managed to dry some parsley, as well as tomatoes and apples, before I gave it back.  Our thoughts on this drier were that it was HUGE and loud, but very efficient at drying.  With our small kitchen, and an aim to mainly dry herbs rather than worrying about fruit (as we don't have access to any cheap/free fruit at the moment), I wanted to use something smaller (and therefore cheaper). I did have a very brief  attempt at air drying herbs, but in our humid climate, all I achieved was mouldy leaves! As an early Christmas present for myself I bought the Sunbeam food dehydrator in December. Sunbeam food dehydrator - "healthy and natura...