Eight Acres

When our cows first calve , we have to milk them daily and end up with so much milk, we nearly have to make a cheese daily to keep up !  The occasional cheese can be matured in the back of a normal fridge.  Sure the temperature is a bit low for proper maturation, but there's no point turning on another fridge just for one or two cheeses.  But when we start to have 10 or 20 cheeses, we need the cheese fridge so we have somewhere to put them all! Fortunately for us, we had a spare bar fridge, that wasn't being used for anything and wasn't really worth selling.  We set that up with a thermostat and can easily adjust the temperature to suit cheese maturation.  Ideally cheese should mature at around 8-12degC, which is warmer than a normal fridge temperature of 5degC.  We just plug the fridge into the thermostat, and the thermostat into the socket.  The temperature sensor goes in the fridge and we set the temperature on the dial to about 10degC. ...

Back in December we bought a house .  Not a house and land, just a house that someone didn't want on their land any more.  The house is a "Queenslander" style, which means its up on stumps to keep out the snakes, termites and flood waters, and it once had a wrap-around veranda, which is now half built-in, but still very generous.  The original parts of the house are probably nearly 100 years old, with some parts added in the 1980s (and already tested negative for asbestos, phew!). It has taken SEVEN months to organise all the council paperwork and for the removalists to be ready, but our house finally moved this week! Half of the house on the truck ready to move The first half coming down our road around 3am The first half in the house yard The second half still on the truck The removalist just has to put the roof back on and stump the house.  Then all we have to do is connect power, install rainwater tanks and septic system, replace the roof,...

We bought the guinea fowl as day-old chicks in December last year.  The idea was to raise them to eat the ticks that were affecting our Braford cattle at Cheslyn Rise.  I may have over-estimated how easy it would be to get them established on our property.  Now that they are 7 months old we can see that they are very different to chickens and we are starting to learn how to manage them. .... and when we first got them as chicks I know everyone said that guinea fowl are noisy, but I didn't imagine they would be THIS bad!  They are currently living close to the house and they squawk nearly constantly, it really amazes me just how loud they are.  See the video below for an example of some guinea fowl noise.  We are gradually moving them away from the house. We recently decided to let them free-range.  The first night we were able to herd them back home.  The second night was the same.  The third night they all decid...

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 concept that is mentioned frequently in permaculture is “keyline”. I started reading about it when I reviewed “ catch and store energy ”, but I got stuck, and now that I’m up to “ design from patterns to detail ”, I thought that I'd better figure it out. What is keyline? P. A. Yeoman (1904 – 1984) was an Australian engineer and agronomist who lived and worked in New South Wales. He observed how water flowed over the land and developed a system for harnessing water to build soil fertility without chemicals, which he called the keyline system. A keyline plan is developed for a property using the concepts of the keyline system. His ideas are published in four books, three of which are available free online: Yeomans, P. A., The Keyline Plan (1954) Online version Yeomans, P. A., The Challenge of Landscape : the development and practice of keyline , Keyline Pub. Pty., Sydney, (1958). Online version Yeomans, P. A., The City Forest : The Keyline Plan for the Human Envir...

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...

Farmer Liz: Today I have another interview in my series on " getting started with chickens ".  Linda from the blog Greenhaven lives in the country on forty odd acres with her husband and three of her children. As part of their effort to live in a way that is thoughtful of this planet they garden, raise chooks and live fairly frugally. They find chooks fit in perfectly with their lifestyle. How many chickens (and other fowl) do you keep, what breed and what do you use them for (meat, eggs, slug control etc)? Linda: We have quite a few chooks. We have an Australorp rooster and six hens. We have a Dorking rooster and three hens. We also have an Isa Brown and a bantam. We also have three geese. The geese are a recent addition because we needed to keep the grass down in the orchard. Our chooks are for meat, eggs, pest control and to add fertility to our property. We carefully chose breeds that should be suitable for our climate and be good for meat. I rec...