Eight Acres

The weather When I lived in the city I never used to take much notice of the weather, beyond wondering if I needed to take an umbrella or a sun hat with me.  Now it seems to be my sole focus.  When will it rain?  Will it rain enough?  or too much?  And how hot will it get?  We have had some horrible hot days through January, in the high 30degC, up to 37degC one day I think, and NSW had up to 45degC!  This hard on the animals, hard on the plants and hard on us.  You can't do much physical work on days like that. Then on the weekend of the 26-27th  Jan (happens to be Australia day weekend) we got the highest rainfall ever recorded for our are in January in only 48 hours.  About 300 mm (we got sick of tipping out the rain gauge, so can't be sure), which resulted in the dam at Nanango going from desperately near empty to a flowing river again.  All dams at Cheslyn Rise are full and the grass is green.  I wrote more about it on ...

I know I'm a bit late with this post, but I ran out of time before Christmas to write about my rum balls.  I don't know about other countries, but rum balls seem to be a traditional Christmas food in New Zealand and Australia.  real food rum balls In a traditional rum ball recipe , the main ingredients are sweetened condensed milk, a packet of biscuits, cocoa, sultanas, rum (of course) and everything is then rolled in coconut.  Its not very complicated, but its also not real food.  They are full of refined sugar from the milk, which has been processed to high temperatures, so there's not much goodness left and there's probably canola oil and flavour in the biscuits, as well as more sugar.  I don't particularly like them, they are too sickly sweet, but I did think it would be interesting to try to find a real food version and see if people could tell the difference. I started with this recipe , and I also made some traditional rum balls so I could compare....

As usual, its not until we get a new animal at Eight Acres until I really do some research to find out more about it.  I knew I wanted to get guinea fowl to help us with tick control, so I had been looking for some to buy in our local area, but I had not yet read much about them.  Then I was told about keets for sale and I contacted the seller and bought 10 day-old keets.  The seller mentioned that they were “pied” in colouring, that’s when I realised that I might have a bit to learn about guinea fowl.  So here is what I’ve found out. the keets when they first came home.... Guinea fowl were originally from Africa .  There are several species, and the domesticated guinea fowl is descended from the Helmeted guinea fowl.  It seems that guinea fowl have been domesticated for thousands of years , with records of them in Roman and Egyptian literature.  More recently, in the 20 th century, they have become popular with poultry “fan...

When we have a steer butchered we like to try to use every part of the animal.  We eat the meat and some of the offal, the dogs get the bones and the rest of the offal, we render the tallow and tan the hide.  The only waste is the head, which we bury, so at least it enriches the soil. Tanning the hid is a big job.  This our third hide, so we are getting better at the process every time.  I posted some detailed instructions ( here and here ) when we did the last hide this time last year.  The most important thing to get the hide spread out somewhere safe and dry and covered in salt as soon as possible after the animal is skinned.  If the hide is dried out sufficiently it will last for months, and we have found that it actually improves as it dries.  This hide was in the shed since August, so it was about 5 months, and it was very stiff and dry, which made it easier to work. In the past we have fleshed the hide using a scraping tool, which took seve...

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...

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...

When we had our steer killed back in August, I asked the butcher to keep some of the fat for me, so that I could render it to tallow.  With the previous animal, I had attempted to render in a large pot over an open fire.  This is not how to render fat, I just made a big black sticky stinky mess.  So this time I put the fat in the freezer and did some research first.   This post was very helpful and I decided to use the slow cooker to render the fat.  We don't have a food processor that I could use to chop the fat, so I fed it through our mincer/juicer, which was very messy, and would have worked better if the fat was more frozen at the time. preparing the fat is rather messy I forgot to take a photo of it in the slow cooker, but you get the idea, a slow cooker full of minced fat, turned on low and left for several hours until all the fat had melted.  Pete then helped me to pour the melted fat through a sieve and into old homebrew cans.  From ...