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...

Wow its good to be home on the farm!  After two and a half years of part time city-living, I was nearly getting used to it, but I was missing the country.  Each weekend I would head home early Friday afternoon and it was a massive relief to turn off the motorway and get out into farmland. Smell ya later Brisbane! Access to alternative health services When I first came to Brisbane I made a commitment that I would find a yoga class.  I have done pilates classes in the past, but never yoga, and I really wanted to try it.  Unfortunately in a rural area there are not usually many options, and even though a lovely yoga studio has recently opened in Kingaroy , I'd rather not drive 30 minutes to get there!  I wanted to take this opportunity to learn more about yoga.  I attended classes in West End for a while, and then over winter I didn't like getting home from there in the dark, so I tried a few different classes in the suburbs and on youtube.  Fina...

Starting a homestead, or just living more sustainably where you are, is a daunting project.  There are so many factors to think through.  First you might get chickens to provide eggs, but then you have to think about what you will feed them, do you want to rely of store bought feed or try to grow your own?  Are you going to hatch your own to replace the layers as they get old?  With an electric incubator or a broody hen?  Are you going to kill and eat the older hens or the roosters?  Each decision leads to another, and gradually you piece together a sustainable life that meets your needs. Fortunately there are many great blogs and books around that step through the thought processes of other homesteaders.  One that I have particularly enjoyed recently is Leigh Tate's book called  5 Acres & A Dream The Book: The Challenges of Establishing a Self-Sufficient Homestead ( affiliate link here ) .   Leigh also writes a blog called 5 Acres...

Soon after the invention of the microwave someone must have realised that you could microwave a small sack of wheat and use it to keep people warm. I remember seeing them in physio clinics in the early 90s. I wonder who first had the idea! I first made one when I was at university, living in a small cold house and too cheap to pay for heating. Sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night, freezing and unable to sleep, and reheat my wheat pack before going back to bed! I had to leave that one in NZ (due to biosecurity you can't take plant or animal material into Australia), so I made another one when I got to Australia, and now I thought it would be useful to have more than one, so I’ve made some more. This time I included dried lavender from my garden as well as the wheat, so they smell nice too. I prefer wheat packs to hot water bottles because when they cool down, they stay around body temperature.  Hot water bottles tend to turn into "cold water bottles",...

I had made three batches of soap already , so feeling like a seasoned professional, I went ahead with another batch, even though my digital scales needed a new battery and I couldn't find my good thermometer.  I figured that I was so good at soap making now that I could be able to use my spare analogue scales and my cheese-making thermometer, even though the scale on both is pretty dodgy and the scales don't seem to zero properly.  Yes, the scene is set for a soap making disaster.  Unlike cooking, in which the amounts don't have to be completely accurate, soap making is really a chemical reaction in which you do need to measure out very accurately or it won't work.  I knew something was wrong when the soap took a very long time to reach trace.  The suspicion was confirmed when the soap did not set hard after several weeks in the mould.  Luckily all is not lost, it is possible to rebatch soap disasters, it just takes a slightly different method and some pati...

Since I wanted to start making soap I thought I'd better get some moulds.  You can buy plenty of fancy moulds online, but I just wanted something simple and the right shape for our soap shaker.  I went to th op-shop and checked out various containers, I did find a little silicon mould which is good for the overflow, but the plastic lunchbox I bought didn't let the soap out and we had to cut it off.  Pete decided to make something, and this is what he came up with.... Its a piece of stainless steel plate folded up in a "U" shape, with steel plates help in place with booker rod and nuts.  I made gaskets from a truck inner tube to seal the ends.  When the soap is set, you just undo the bolts and the soap slides out of the mould. Do you have any creative alternative soap moulds? this is the mess I made And the final product, one bath soap one wash soap Pete cuts it with a pizza cutter! You can get all my tallow soap recipes in my ...

One of our goals is to set up our farm to be self-sufficient, mainly because that the cheapest way to do things, and also because it means that we don't have to rely on external sources to provide what we need.  A weak point is the chickens.  Even though they provide us with plenty of tasty eggs and meat, we still have to buy grain to feed them, so that's not exactly a self-sufficient system.  I've been on the lookout for ideas for food that we can grow for the chickens to at least replace part of the grain we but for them. a couple of hens tasting the mealworms One thing that does make a difference is allowing the chickens to free-range, they eat far less grain.  I wrote a while ago about feeding the chickens only corn and sunflower seeds .  Since then I've read more about chicken nutrition, as it seems that they do need meat, or at least the amino acid methionine , as it is not found in significant proportions in grains or legumes.  The theory is th...

Of all the options for preserving what we grow , or can buy cheaply in bulk, I prefer to ferment or dehydrate .  These methods do not cook the food, so the raw enzymes are preserved, along with any heat sensitive vitamins and other nutrients.  However, if something is going to get cooked anyway, like tomato sauce, it doesn't really hurt to cook it into a sauce and either freeze or can it. Lately I have been freezing everything because I didn't know how to can, but with our next steer due to be cut up and the gift of a bucket of lovely ripe tomatoes, I thought I'd better learn how to can, so that I don't fill the valuable freezer space with more tomatoes. As far as I can figure out, canning and bottling are really just different terms for the same thing.  You either pour hot food into heated jars ( overflow method ) and seal them with hot lids, or you heat the food in the jars (waterbath canning).  These low pressure methods can be used for anything t...

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... For some reason I've always thought that making soap seemed too hard.  For a start the number of ingredients required was confusing and all the safety warnings about using the alkali put me off.  The worst part for me was that most of the ingredients had to be purchased, and some even imported (palm oil and coconut oil), which never seemed very self-sufficient.  I can definitely see the benefits of using homemade soap instead of mass produced soap (that often contains synthetic fragrance, colour, preservatives, and has had the glycerine removed), but it seemed to me that if I was going to buy all the ingredients I may as well just buy the soap and save myself all the hassle.  For the past several years I have bought homemade soap from various market stalls and websites, and that...