Eight Acres

May weekends have been dominated by lantana spraying and installing insulation.  Neither of which are much fun, but had to be done.   Since our little bull Donald died from lantana poisoning , we realised we had to take it more seriously.  There's not much lantana at Eight Acres, we dug all that out when we first arrived, but at Cheslyn Rise, we knew we had a few bushes, and then when we went looking for it, we found it EVERYWHERE, and huge bushes 2m high and 2m wide.  We decided we needed to get it under control quickly, so spraying was the best option (and after that we can start chipping out the smaller plants as we find them).  In total we spent four days and sprayed 800 L of mixed up spray using our tractor sprayer.  The only good part was that while we were walking through the bush looking for lantana, we saw some areas of our property that we had never been to before!  I am hoping we can return for more peaceful walks without all the chemical h...

May has been unusually warm, we haven't had a proper frost, and apart from a few cold days right at the start, since then its been very warm.  This is great because our grass has continued to grow longer than usual.  In the garden, my veges are growing, and so are the weeds!  But I'm not complaining. Finally the chokos are growing and there are so many we can't keep up.  I have been giving them away, and I've set aside a few to sprout.  We are still harvesting tromboncinos and rosellas.  And all the leafy greens have gone crazy, we have tat soi, pak choi, bok choi, kale, silver beet, mizuna and mustard leaves everywhere, most of it self-seeded.  The nasturtium has recovered, as has the chick weed, and there's still plenty of dill, parsley and chervil.  Also the first tiny brocolli (picked before they turn into flowers). May harvest basket chokos waiting to sprout (just leave them long enough and it will happen) This month I set up anot...

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage, its literally made using sweetened tea and a starter culture (called a SCOBY – Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast). Its a bit like kefir, except it forms a larger squishy solid mass that floats on top of the tea. And also like kefir, the origins and exact composition of kombucha are shrouded in mystery ( more info here ). My herbal tea collection because I forgot to take a photo  of the kombucha As kombucha is made from tea and as I don’t tolerate caffeine (it makes me shaky and keeps me awake, even one cup of tea has this effect, that’s why I only drink herbal tisanes), I haven’t been too interested in trying to make it, but I keep hearing about it and I was curious about the taste and I wasn’t sure if it would contain caffeine or not. I bought a commercial kombucha drink from my local vegan store so I could try it out. I would recommend that you do this, just to make sure you like it, before you go to the trouble of trying ...

I'm very nearly finished working on my house cow ebook and very soon it will be available to purchase on scribd with details coming soon! In the meantime, check out my blog Eight Acres for lots of house cow information .

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...

Vets are expensive, particularly for large animals that require house calls, such as cows, so the more you can learn to do yourself, the better. One of the easier tasks that you can learn is giving an injection. If you follow Pat Coleby ’s methods, you will find that she recommends injections of vitamin C and B12 for just about everything. You may also need to inject antibiotics in life-threatening situations or to give vaccines. Ruby looking cute and not needing any injections... There are two types of injections that you may need to give, either intramuscular (in the muscle) or subcutaneous (under the skin). Drugs and vitamins are generally given as intramuscular injections, while vaccines are generally subcutaneous, but you must check for each injection before you start. The best location for the injection depends on the animal. For animals that you are planning to eat (or to sell for eating), its best not to use their rump, as this may damage the meat, and an injectio...

Since I started knitting a couple of years ago, mostly using wool from the cheap haberdashery stall at the Nanango markets, I’ve gradually been tackling more difficult projects and gaining confidence in my knitting abilities. This year at the Nanango Show I decided to treat myself to some lovely smooth alpaca wool. It came in a hank, which is basically a long loop lifted straight off the spinning wheel and twisted into a pretzel. The lady at the stall (who had spun the wool from her own alpaca fleece, wow!) told me that I would have to wind it into balls. Here's the finished balls This is the first time I had thought about the forms of wool, here is a great post that explains the names of all the different “wool bundles” . And here is some instructions for transforming an unruly hank into tame balls of wool. Here's the neatly wound hank pretzel I don’t have a spare patient person to hold the hank, but I had no trouble draping it over a chair, which I placed in...

I have been using a beeswax salve that I bought at a market years ago and finally I can see the bottom of the jar, so I thought I’d better figure out how to make some more. I use the salve mostly as lip balm, but its also good for any other dry skin, so I use a little bit nearly every day, even so, it seems to have lasted forever. Unfortunately as the label on the jar is now so worn it is unreadable, I don’t know exactly what the original ingredients were. I bought it from a honey stall, so I know it contained beeswax, and possibly honey, and it smells like lavender... there are plenty of recipes on the internet though. My healing herbal salve I have also been reading about herbs and using infused oils , so I decided to combine an infused oil with beeswax and essential oils to make myself a new salve. There are lots of beneficial herbs that can be infused in oil, but I didn’t have a huge amount to choose from in my own garden due to the ongoing drought at the time. In some wa...

When you start thinking about how to live sustainability and self-sufficiently, you realise that it changes everything.  Instead of just buying things, I think about whether we really need the item, whether we could use something else, or make something, and then if we do NEED it, can we get it second-hand or locally made?  Instead of thinking of what I want to eat for dinner and going shopping for the ingredients, I now look in the garden, the freezer and the pantry and decide (usually in consultation with Pete) what to cook over the next few days.  This means that I don't tend to use cook books.  I also find many vegetable gardening books just don't quite get into the detail I need about how much to plant and how to use the produce.  Here are two books that I have enjoyed recently, that I think you will like too, both of them are about how to eat sustainably, whether you grow your own or buy from farmers. (Both books were supplied to me as ebooks to revie...