Spring has sprung!

It seems that Spring is here, tulips, apple blossom, bees in the air, an urge to dig things, and crazy weather, frost one day, snow the next, and sunburn the day after that, Spring has made it!

The pear tree covered in more blossom than it has ever had.

clothes drying outside in real sunshine

Bees

Its winter now, its cold, we had snow yesterday and it is the perfect time of the year to start thinking about bees!
yep, thats right, thats what I want bees in a hive making honey and pollinating and doing their thing. 
First I need to go and buy my hives and paint them ready for their new owners.  Would love to hear from anyone who has any experience in looking after bees, I actually feel a bit out of my depth!
wish me luck!

Old School Beef: Selling Ethical beef

 We love eating meat.  It tastes good, makes us feel good and there are lots of great ways to prepare it.  However, a lot of the animal products that we consume in Australia are part of an industrial food system that doesn't respect the animals that are a part of it.  We believe that animals should lead a natural life doing things that come naturally to them (chooks need to scratch, pigs need to root, cows need to eat grass). We believe it is unethical to keep animals in close confinement where their natural instincts can't be satisfied (battery hens, feedlot cows and caged pigs).

Many people are vegetarian or vegan because they are unhappy about the ethical treatment of animals.  I think that it is great that people are taking responsibility for their food and making active decisions to not participate in animal cruelty.  There is however, I think a third way.  That is to eat meat but:

• know which farm it comes from and get to know the farmers.
• know how the animal was treated in life
• and in death.  

Our beef is 100% grass fed, which makes a big difference in the health of the animal and the taste of the meat.  We have shelterbelts to protect them from the wind and rain.  We move them onto fresh pasture everyday which keeps them free of disease and gives the grass a chance to grow.

There is a great site here that talks about the benefits of grass fed beef compared to factory feedlots.  They include:

• animal stress and abuse.
• air, land, and water pollution
• hormones, antibiotics, and other drugs
• Low-paid, stressful farm work
• The loss of small family farms
• Food with less nutritional value. (reference www.eatwild.com)

We have a beef farm where we are able to sell meat direct to the public. We have our animals killed at a abbatoir close by and we ensure they are killed gently, quickly and humanely.  We dry age our meat for 3 weeks, which means it is hung for three weeks to break down the fibres and make it tender. This process of a calm animal and long hanging time creates a superior taste.  We had friends over recently who couldn't believe that they were cutting up steak with a table knife. 

Ethical meat is definitely more expensive and more difficult to find.  However, it is worth finding for your health's sake and for the animals' sake.  If we are going to eat other animals we need to treat them with respect and give them a happy life and a humane death.

If you are interested in buying meat from us please get in touch, as part of our local global ethic, you do need to be within driving distance to pick it up, we won't post it around Australia. 

An easy lavender sachet tutorial

We have some very long traditional English lavender hedges on our farm.  I think they look beautiful but they do require quite a bit of upkeep in terms of pruning.  We also end up with a lot of dried lavender heads every year. We are always thinking of ways to value-add to products on our farm so decided to make lavender sachets to sell at the market.  We only decided to make them recently and haven't had a real chance to test the market yet.  They are a really nice, easy sachet that is perfect for putting in your sock drawer or hanging over a coat hanger. 

Here is the lavender sachet tutorial in 6 easy steps.  

You can make your bags any size you like.  We have chosen 80mm x 40mm and have used a light cotton for the fabric.

Turn your two pieces of fabric inside out and sew along three edges.  

Turn it right way in and use a bamboo skewer to push the corners out.

Sew the same three sides again.

Fill the bag with dried lavender heads and a small amount of dacron to make it a bit squashy.

Turn the last edge in on itself and pin.  Add a piece of ribbon or fabric for a loop if desired and pin in place.  Sew along the final edge.

the finished sachet. (Sorry about the blurry photo).

Beer, beer, glorious beer

One of the fascinating things about Australia, that is almost unique in the world is the homebrew kit.  You can take one tin  of hoppy malt and 20 litres of water, some sugar and yeast and turn it into beery goodness. 

The yeast is being added here.

Checking the temperature it needs to be around 21 degrees to give the  yeast its best chance.  It then needs to sit in a warm spot for 10 days to mellow.

A finished keg of beer ready for bottling. 

1 tablespoon of sugar is added to the sterilised bottles to encourage secondary fermentation before the beer is added.

Kaori is our resident beer brewer and she makes a mean brew.  We occasionally have a beer apprection society meeting, where friends and neighbours come around to taste and swap and just generally drink.
Homebrew really is the sustainable option in beer drinking.

• You can reuse the beer bottles indefinitely, some of the bottles we are using are 40 years old. Commercial breweries don't reuse their bottles and glass manufacture is extremely energy intensive. 
• Beer is heavy, so moving it around is expensive and takes lots of energy.
• It is a great way to encourage local community.

Some people claim they get less of a hangover reaction the next day after drinking home brew, which makes it worth a shot.  If you are serious about getting into home brewing there are dedicated places to find out what you need to know, some are here and here.

The garden

We grow all kinds of vegetables.  The list of vegetables we grow or have tried is very long and some have been more successful than others.  This is the list off the top of my head that we grew this year.  In the past I have got a bit ambitious with things that will always be marginal in our climate, and I didn't bother this year, they include Loofah, Watermelon, Rockmelon, Eggplant and Chillies.
So what we did grow: 

• Tomatoes (Roma type Pacesetter for cooking, Tommy Toe Cherry, Grosse Lisse, Rouge de Marmand for eating)
• Curcubits (Costata Romanesco Zuchinni, Black Beauty Zuchinni, Yellow Button Squash, Large Grey Pumpkin, Butternut Pumpkin)
• Brassicas (Cabbage, Broccoli, Broccolinni, Cauliflower, Red Cabbage,Kohl Rabi, all fairly generic varieties)
• Corn (got hit by a very early frost and didn't do very well at all)
• Beetroot, Carrots, Turnips, Radishes, Daikon(white Japanese radish)
• Green Leafy (Lettuce, especially Cos, Iceberg, Fleshy Trouts Back, green and red mignonette, corn salad, rocket, chicory, snow pea shoots, calendula, nasturtium)
• Asian Green Leafy (mustard greens, mizuna (green and purple), tatsoi, mibuna, bok choy)
• Snow peas, green peas, green beans, scarlet runner bean, broad beans
• Garlic, French Shallots/Potato Onions
• Herbs (basil, dill, coriander, parsley, tarragon)

It has been a very wet and cold summer this year which has meant that everything has grown a lot slower than usual and we have battled fungal mildew on our snowpeas for the first time ever.
The vegie garden is firstly about making our lives as self sufficicent as possible.  We try and grow enough tomatoes to vacola for ourselves for the year, which is about 100 bottles.  With a very wet and cold summer I'm not sure if I'm going to get that number this year. We also grow our own cannellini and borlotti style (actually tongue of fire) dried beans for cooking nachos, minestrone soup etc.  I love green peas so they are one of the few things we freeze.  We instead try and focus on having vegies in the garden year round. 

I am trying to get a big enough sunflower patch to have sunflowers for our chooks, a great source of healthy protein and fat for them, as well as corn for ourselves and the chooks.  I haven't succeeded yet, but I always tell myself there is always next year!

All about garlic

Garlic is a pretty amazing product, it tastes great, looks beautiful, and has amazing health benefit.

To get the health benefits you need to grow real garlic.  A  lot of people like to grow elephant or russian garlic which has big bulbs and a very mild garlic flavour.  Elephant garlic is actually  not garlic at all, but a sort of leek and doesn't have the health benefits of garlic.  Imported garlic is fumigated and irradiated and sometimes bleached and sprayed with growth inhibitors to stop it sprouting so it is  nice to find Australian garlic or to grow your own.  
We plant our garlic in March/April to give it lots of time to get big green shoots before winter.  The more green leaf it can grow the bigger the bulb at the end, so it is good to keep the water and fertiliser up to it. 
We harvest our garlic in late December, when we get a good week of dry weather to keep the bulbs dry and we hang out our garlic in our roof which is warm and dry and airy.
We clean all our garlic and chop off the roots for selling as they look a lot nicer that way.  I have found though that if you are going to clean them, the outside paper comes off better when they have just been pulled, if they dry out too much they are more difficult to separate. 

I have tried making garlic plaits in the past, but you need to do it straight away when the stalks are still green.  In our soils the garlic also gets a hard neck which is much more difficult to plait, so we  have started making garlic bunches.

Now is absolutely the right time to plant garlic, you just need to find a spot in your garden that you don't need until next summer.  Head on down to the farmers' market and see if you can get a few bulbs to plant.  Supermarket garlic is often sprayed so it won't sprout, so won't be that useful for this purpose. All you do is break them up into segments and push them into the soil.  If you don't think you have any space just push them in your ornamental garden.  It will make your roses very happy.  Or do a bit of guerrilla garden and poke them in at the local park, you might just be surprised what you find next summer.