We're back!

Well. That was the biggest break from blogging I've had since I started the blog some years back. There have been times in the last 6 weeks where I've wondered if I was going to come back to it. But hey: this thing is a record of our adventures, and the adventuring ain't stopping here. It's a place for us to rant about the things we're passionate about, and we're passionate about a lot. It's a place for us to share stuff and (hopefully) teach or inspire people, and there's a lot to learn. So we're back.

What have we been up to since the canceled party debacle?

Heaps of stuff! And also heaps of relaxing!

We have a little break from chicken farming over the summer because we find the chickens really struggle with the hot weather. Also, chicken farming is bloody exhausting, especially after the year we've had, so we need a break!

Life without chickens is roomy and free and relaxing. There's space for new friends, foraging (blackberries! plums! raspberries! oh my!), baking, crocheting, quilting Australiana-themed baby-quilts, reading, swimming, eating, old friends, bee-swarm-catching, a trip to the big-smoke for circus shows and visiting, and general merry-making.

After processing our last batch of chickens for the year and (happily) providing delicious chicken Christmas dinners to the people of the Bega Valley (and one lady who comes all the way from the Snowy Mountains for our chicken!) we headed out to the coast for a luxurious 2 week holiday with some of our nearest and dearest. It. Was. Amazing. Eating, swimming, reading, crocheting. Repeat. Oh, and we harvested a bucketload of native wild raspberries, which we dumped onto a baked ricotta for New Year's dinner. 

Not a bad spot for an afternoon of foraging

There are no words to describe the deliciousness, but here's a picture...

When we came home to the farm the garden was ridiculously overgrown, but we didn't mind. We harvested and made merry.

Our neighbour called to say there was a late swarm of bees at his place, so we caught it in an esky and installed it in our top-bar hive. We've been waiting for a swarm for 2 years since our last lot of bees got hive beetle and evacuated, so that was a happy day.

Me in my "crazy person" beekeeping 'suit' and Gunnar in his proper suit.

The roadside plums came on, and we had a harvest-and-preserve party with some new lovely friends.

I finished a custom baby-quilt order for an Australiana fan in Sydney. Love this quilting bizzo...

The blackberries have come on, so we're harvesting and freezing daily. When the season's over and we've got our haul, we'll have a massive jam cook up. In the meantime, we pick and pick and eat our fill.

Locavore dinner parties with friends, including plum cakes with Jersey cream!

And in between it all we've been working at our off-farm jobs. I've started a new job at the local wholefoods co-op, which is AWESOME, and of course we've been running and working at our little abattoir, which continues to process for small-scale chicken and duck farmers and backyard growers around the traps. Sometimes, the abattoir cleaning (not processing!!) is a family affair. 

The kids don't mind at all (it's an excuse for us all to hang out together playing with high-pressure hoses, after all), and we feel it's important for them to see us (and share in) working hard for the things we believe in.

Oh and I've been thoroughly enjoying exploring the instagram world. Never thought I would, but there you go. Life's full of surprises, right? 

On the immediate horizon we have another little break and then we dive head first into building and chook-enterprise-expansion and abattoir overhauling and school and uni and show season and roadside-apple-and-peach season and all the other busy-ness that comes with this life we're living. I'm excited.

Autumn Farm Chook School

It's been a little over a year now since the first Autumn Farm pasture raised chickens graced the dinner tables of the Bega Valley.

In the last 15 months or so we have learned an INSANE amount, including, but definitely not limited to, 'Dogs are way better than electric mesh fencing' and 'How to run a farm single-handedly while your partner suffers through cancer treatment'. While the learning definitely isn't over (though hopefully we're done with that last lesson), I feel like we've got a good handle on things and we're now pretty comfortable with our operation and all it entails.

A big part of our Autumn Farm vision has been education: educating people about food systems, educating people about sustainable agriculture, educating people about good food and nutrition. It's awesome to be able to share knowledge with people, and to empower people to make positive changes in their relationship with the food they eat. We love love LOVE answering questions and sharing information, hosting farm tours and taking people through the abattoir.

Pearl talking to the group of Making a Buck from a Beetroot course, run by Bega Tafe.

We also get lots of inquiries from people who are interested in our chicken farming methods, which is why we're looking to run some 'chook school' tours from around April next year.

At this stage (we're still planning) chook school will probably consist of a day (6 hours?) at Autumn Farm, where we'll take you through all the components of our chicken system from managing the day old chicks, to growing the chickens, to slaughtering, to legal requirements, and marketing. And a big local lunch to boot!

We're pretty excited,  because we love growing chickens, and we think other people should grow chickens too. It's an awesome way to improve your pasture, make a small income from even a small acreage (we only have 7 acres) and feed your community. 

In the meantime, though, I'm going to be posting some little videos about our system, and about the way we run things.

And here's the first video! This one is called 'Day old chicks in the brooder house', and there will be more coming! So if you're interested in growing chickens, or you know someone who might be interested, please forward this on to them, and/or let them know about chook school.

We're looking forward to seeing some of you at Autumn Farm Chook School next year!

A day

Today was an exceptionally average day. I don't mean average in the way that it's often used to mean "not great" (quite the opposite in fact) but in the sense that today was a day like so many of our days here on the farm. When I think of today, I feel peaceful and full of joy.

Lots of people - friends, family, and strangers alike - often comment on how hard our life seems. It's true that we do forego many of the creature comforts most people in the west take for granted, like internal plumbing, for example. But these 'sacrifices', for us, generally have a flip side, like experiencing the surprising and immense joy of things like bathing and doing the dishes outside. It's also true that many of the things we do take for granted, like carrying 20kg barrels of water and bags of feed over several hundred metres, several times a day, may seem a lot like hard work, but the work keeps us strong, and means we don't have to go to a gym to get our daily exercise.

So what does an exceptionally average day on Autumn Farm look like?

Pearl, Oski and I rose at around 6.30 (a little later than usual) and set to work tending to the animals - letting the chickens out, letting the dogs off, making sure everyone has food and water. It was an overcast morning, but we could see the sun trying to bust through the clouds. We cheered it on, for the chickens' sake - they've had enough dampness these last few days.

When we returned to the homestead, Olive had woken up and was reading in bed in the loft. We made tea and hot water with lemon, and the kids had spelt pikelets with the last of the preserved blackberries from last summer for their breakfast. We packed lunchboxes (leftover veggie dumplings, more pikelets and fruit) and Pearl headed off for her day's work cooking at a cafe in town.

The kids played wild games with the dogs as I did the dishes, and then Olive got the bus to school.

With the 'morning rush' over and done with, Oski and I set to work on the important business of sewing  and harvesting and preparing food, which took up the rest of the day.

I made 3 skirts for the Mumbulla spring fair, and a bolero for my friend Genna (she's making me a hat as a trade!), sitting at the big table outside where we do pretty much everything, while Oski played around me, making 'jam' from some mulberries he'd picked. 

My dad came over to chop up some firewood for us, and we chatted, he played with Oski, and helped me to move the chicken houses and top up food and water before heading off.

Around lunch time, Oski and I harvested 2 massive bowls of broad beans. We sat together at the table and shelled them, then blended half of them with garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, grated parmesan and mint to make a broad bean pesto, one of our favourite springtime treats, which will provide snacks and lunches for the next few days. The other half we reserved for our dinner. We then dined on a pretty random but delicious luncheon of broad bean pesto, leftover chicken, kimchi straight from the jar, fruit, nuts and the last of the pikelets.

Our appetites sated, we once again did the rounds of the chickens, played with the dogs, admired the new ducklings in the orchard, and tended to the 5 day old chicks in the brooder house.

A few days ago Pearl's dad had caught us a massive salmon, which was to be our dinner. Inspired by one of our favourite cookbooks, Moro East, we stuffed it with fennel, lemon and parsley, wrapped it in foil, and set it on the barbecue to cook. As the most delicious smells started wafting from the cooking fish, we headed into the orchard to take out the compost, admire the babies again, and collect many many eggs.

The afternoon is maybe my favourite time of the day for wandering and looking, and it was especially beautiful today given the weird mix of sunshine, big black clouds and enormous, intermittent raindrops.

And then Pearl and Olive came home, and much catching-up and storytelling, pesto-tasting, kissing and cuddling ensued. Final dinner preparations (cous cous with broad beans and yoghurt dressing and a simple cabbage coleslaw) were made as children played and water was delivered to the chickens.

Dinner was, as always, chaotic and rowdy and delicious. We're all pretty exhausted by this time of the day, but it's also a joyful catch-up time, especially on days like today where we've each been doing our own things. Meal times are possibly the times we feel most rich, because we feast so well on a bounty of home-made and home-grown goodness that is almost ridiculous, looking out over our beautiful valley, listening to the birds and, tonight, watching the kangaroos. It's hard not to feel blessed when your meal-times look like that and home made chicken liver pâté and fresh broad bean pesto are your go-to staples.

After dinner was Oski's 'pretend birthday', complete with a sand cake and pass the parcel presents.

The light was starting to fade as we got Oski ready for bed, and he and I retired to the loft for stories and cuddles and sleep, while Pearl and Olive locked up all the chickens and delivered the dogs to their night-time chook-guarding posts.

In all, I'd say that from wake-up time to sleep time, we spent a total of about 15 minutes inside the house. It was a lovely, average day, and I wouldn't swap the hard work for all the creature comforts in the world.

How was your day?

So we barter

When I was young and idealistic I entertained various fantasies of being self-sufficient: Building my own house, growing my own food, and basically being a hermit. No environmental footprint for me.

Now that I'm older (though still idealistic) my feelings about self-sufficiency have changed. For starters, I now have a family who don't necessarily share my hermit plans. But more significantly, now that we've really and whole-heartedly embarked upon a life where we are attempting to provide for ourselves in as many ways as we possibly can, we've realised how bloody hard it would be to actually produce everything you need by your own hands. Not to say that kind of life wouldn't be rewarding - I'm sure it would - but my feelings about 'how to save the world' have ripened a bit now, and my ideology has ultimately found a home in community-building.

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean talking to people. I mean valuing the work people do. I mean supporting people who are creating and growing things in our local area. I mean sharing and providing food for people. I mean sharing knowledge and information and encouraging people. And maybe more than anything else, I mean swapping and bartering as much as possible. 

One thing that hasn't changed for me since those heady early days of ideological veganism and Grass Roots idolatry, is my belief that money is pretty much the root of all evil. Unfortunately for us, (and even more unfortunately for the billions of impoverished and enslaved peoples around the world) we live under capitalism, which means that, short of the aforementioned hermit lifestyle, you kinda need to participate, at least a little bit, in the money economy. So what can you do about it? Well, you can be super-hyper vigilant about who you give your money to. Yes folks, it's true that under capitalism, one of your most powerful weapons is what you do and do not choose to spend your money on. Ask yourself: What kinds of things is this purchase supporting? Child labour? Slave labour? Crapy living conditions for factory workers? Environmental destruction? Cultural destruction? If you're answering yes to any of these questions, find an alternative, or go without.

Springvale community food swap at Linda and Paul's, down the road. What the heck kind of  shop comes with these views, cups of tea, cake and friendly advice about gardening and craft???

While that may seem like a kind of crazily austere or strict regime to adhere to, let me tell you that it's actually a ton of fun, because in the process of seeking alternatives, you'll probably meet people and make connections you wouldn't otherwise make, and you will strengthen your sense of community. By supporting local people you will build resilience in your community, and you will help people find alternatives to the confines of capitalism, even if just for a little bit. Liiiiike.... you might start or participate in your local food swap, or you might think of some other way you can barter for the things you need. 

And more food swap action at Autumn Farm

You might get involved with a local food co-op, or you might start buying your produce (and I mean all of your produce) direct from the person who grew it. You might start growing more of your own, and sharing it with a neighbour!

We are pretty much massive bartering devotees these days, bartering our chickens and craft for as much as we possibly can including acupuncture, veggies, fermented foods, art therapy,  spoon carving lessons, pork, art classes, lamb, hand-knitted gloves and bread. Yes, many of these things we could produce ourselves, it's true. But you know what? Our friends Thea and Tim have the most amazing market garden. But they don't have the time and inclination to also grow chickens, just like we don't have the time or inclination (or watering prowess) to grow massive beautiful bunches of coriander and celery. So we barter.

Bartered veggie box from Thea and Tim's Fish Bone Farm

 Similarly, our friend Emily makes incredible sauerkraut,  kefir and kimchi. Yes of course we could make these for ourselves, but that's her thing, so she's really good at it, just like we're really good at growing delicious chickens. So we barter.

Bartered fermented awesomeness courtesy of Emily

I can't knit, but I really wanted a pair of rainbow-hand-dyed fingerless gloves for riding my bike in the early morning chill, and Vee really wanted one of my skirts. Her handy man Grimm knits beautiful fingerless gloves. So we barter.

Awesomely awesome riding gloves knitted by Grimm, bartered for a skirt

You see what I'm getting at? By valuing other people's skills and interests, you don't have to be super-skilled at everything yourself. And besides which, sharing the love just feels plain old awesome.

Fish Bone Farm abundance gracing the Autumn Farm kitchen. Happy days..

The vagaries

It's been a little over a year since the first batch of 100 day old chicks arrived at Autumn Farm. It's been a massive year of learning, surviving, nourishing our community, learning some more, working hard, crying, laughing, asking ourselves (and being asked by others) "why the hell are we doing this??" and "is this really worth it??" and then realising that yes, it is what we really want to be doing with our little piece of land - feeding people.

And while it is tremendously rewarding and for me, at least, the fulfilment of a childhood dream of wanting to be a farmer, there have been times when we've had a tiny taste of the tragedy and heartbreak that also comes with trying to make a living from the land, where you're ultimately always at the mercy of Nature. Like my 3rd-generation-dairy-and-sheep-farmer neighbour said: "some days you wouldn't give it up for ten million bucks, the next day you'd give it all up for 10 cents". It is really like that.

In my mind, The Hardships of Farming always kind of took the shape of drought and flood - images of sheep lying dead in a desert-like paddock, old gnarled farmers in check shirts and akubras with their faces in their hands, murmuring desperately about being forced from their land. Or the other extreme of cattle being lifted in helicopter-slings to save them from being drowned.

We, in our extremely small-fry operation will never be vulnerable to these kinds of desperate extremes. But that doesn't mean that we don't experience a little of the rollercoaster. 

On hot days, we spray the chickens with water every hour or so, to stop them from overheating

Take the last 2 weeks. A fortnight ago, the weather was sunshiny spring. The chicks were loving it, the big chickens were loving it. Everyone was happy and healthy and growing well on the beautiful spring pasture. Pearl's and my moods (inextricably linked to the health and happiness of our chickens) were high. It was a 10 million dollar kind of a time.

And then we had a cold rainy snap. What does a cold rainy snap mean for a little pastured poultry enterprise? First of all, it means that we need to buy straw. There's no point moving the chicken houses onto wet ground, so the daily house move is replaced by houses filled daily (sometimes twice daily) with dry straw, to keep the chickens healthy, if not happy. Buying straw means our (already slim) profit margins go down, so while we love and need the rain, it's always in the back of our mind.

It means days of trudging around in raincoats at all hours of the day and night, tending to feed and water and straw, making sure the chickens are managing to stay dry. It means slipping over in the wet grass.

And, sometimes, it means death. This last cold rainy snap came at an unfortunate time for our chicks in the brooder house, who'd been happily acclimatising to the warm spring weather. They'd been born during mild weather, arrived on our farm during warm weather, and we'd been slowly lowering the heat in the brooder house in preparation for their move to pasture. So when the temperature dropped 20 degrees literally overnight, they had no preparation or resilience for cool weather and, in spite of the heat lamp in the brooder house, they piled up and crushed, out of desperation to keep warm.

The temperature, at 10 degrees, was nowhere near as cold as our winter chicks tolerated. But they were used to it. Not so these springtime chicks.

It is really sad. As the peeps at Buena Vista Farm put it, "Who'd be a farmer, eh?" (they have an excellent post with that title, and I strongly recommend you read it if you'd like to understand a little more about the human energy goes into producing your food). Those are the 10 cent days.

But now here we are in the sunshine. The chickens and chicks are all happy again. Yesterday we sold 120 chickens to some very happy local people, who hopefully feasted well last night. Today, across the Valley, people are cooking up bone broths and chicken soups. And that is what makes us keep going. But it's hard - no bones about it.

* Thank you Jay for taking beautiful photos of our chickens

Mystery Berries

Do any of you know what these are?

When we first moved onto our land and started getting the garden established, we accepted plant donations from anyone and everyone. Berry canes were an especially sought-after item, being as we are berry-loving fiends, and lots of people shared and we also got them from freecycle. Happy times!

But you see, I am dreadfully disorganised, and I didn't label anything, so now we have some plants we aren't quite sure of, including the berry that we are enjoying by the handful on these glorious spring days.

The plant is pretty big, at around 1m tall, and is spreading out quite happily. It started flowering in early winter, and these berries are now daily fare, when no other berries are around. Cool!

They're certainly raspberry-like, though they're definitely not raspberries - the little 'globes' (if you know what I mean) are way smaller than a raspberry's, and there are heaps more of them. They're also a lot firmer than a raspberry, and they have lots of little tiny crunchy seeds.

The flavour is somewhere between a raspberry and a strawberry, and they're definitely delicious, though ever-so-slightly more on the tart side than the sweet side.

Any ideas?

We don't really mind if we never find out what they are - we're happily munching them, and the birds don't seem to notice them (or are confused by all the bright red kennedia flowers on the vine that is sprawling all over the berry bush). But of course we're always curious!

Banana passionfruits are rocking our world right now

Several years ago, at Alfalfa House, our beautiful friend Jay introduced Olive and I to banana passionfruits. Jay was super-enthusiastic, having grown up eating them. I was less enthusiastic, having had a disastrous encounter with some passion pop around the age of 15.

Banana passionfruit inside. According to Oski, they're "just like little lollies!"

In spite of my passionfruit aversion, however, I could still see the appeal (most significantly that they have more pulp and are easier to eat than a normal passionfruit) and planted one about a year ago, here on Autumn Farm.

The thing went beserk.

The vine, along with a bit of fluoro pink geranium and a hardenbergia

So much so that I began to think that the weedy rootstock (which most commercially-grown passionfruits are grafted onto) had taken over. Just when I was beginning to think I had a really really tedious and enormous weeding job on my hands, some flowers appeared, and a quick Google consult confirmed that they were indeed the flowers of a banana passionfruit. Yay! The best thing about this discovery was that we had HEAPS of flowers on our vine, which we hoped would translate into HEAPS of fruit.

And they did. Right before winter.

Green banana passionfruits on a mattress spring fence in winter, getting ready for their spring flush

I couldn't quite work out how this would work. Do they just hang there, green, over the winter? Through frosts? Then ripen up when the weather warms? It seemed unlikely, but it turns out this is exactly what they did. The first glimpses of spring brought the first glimpses of yellow fruit on the vine, and we're now reaping the bounty.

Easy and delicious for kids! Oski demands one in his lunch box, always

Yes, even I am enjoying several of these little beauties every day. It seems my passionfruit aversion (and my very dramatic and vehement dislike of peanut butter) was 'cured' by chemo. When I read on the chemo side effects lists that my "taste buds might change", I was sceptical. Especially when it came to peanut butter, which I couldn't even stand being in a room with. But here I am, eating passionfruit and peanut butter like there's no tomorrow. Amazing! Delicious!

So if you're thinking of planting a passionfruit, or a climbing vine, or a shade-supplier with edible side benefits, have a go at a banana passionfruit. They're ridiculously vigorous (ours covered a 3-mattress-springs-long fence in a little over a year) and will supply you with beautiful, delicious fruit at a time of year when you might need a little break from the citrus. What more could you ask for?

The first days of spring, oh how we're loving you

How exciting that it's spring! Given that we've just experienced what we hope will be The Crappest Winter Ever, the springtime this year is more welcome than ever - bring on the new growth, both literal and metaphorical, I say! My hair's growing back (it feels like a little baby lamb!), we're slowly recovering our energies after the exhaustion-inducing chemo regime, and everything is looking extra sunshiny and new given the deepened gratitude we're experiencing as a result of the last 6 months or so. We've been absolutely revelling in the warm sunny days, picking early raspberries, resting, enjoying spring rains, watching our chickens loving the new shoots of grass, smiling at rosellas in the kennedia, and working working working on the garden - weeding, mulching, harvesting and spring planting yay!

We've also been...

Crocheting veggie tea cozies for lovely gardening sisters,

 Debuting new birthday frocks and devouring the goodness (mushrooms! Honey! Profiteroles! Jersey milkshakes! Crazy amounts of beautiful, bountiful veg! Fresh and smoked fish!) at the Moruya Farmers' Markets,

 Being thrilled by big digging and dreaming about another little strawbale house growing from the mud over the next couple of years,

Crocheting around jar-lid-rings to make bangles for the Mumbulla School Spring Fair,

 Eating duck egg omelettes with greens from the garden and bartered kimchi in the sunshine almost every morning, and loving our life.

How about you? How are you heralding the warmer days?

Happy spring!

I do believe that my favourite thing about living in our tiny house is the way it makes us super aware of and in tune with the seasons. 

For most of the year, we eat our meals outside at our big hardwood table. It's beautiful, being as it is almost in our vegetable garden, and we can see what's growing, we can watch the birds and the wildlife and the changing sky.

But when the weather's cold (Bega gets cold in winter!), and darkness comes before dinner time, we retreat inside for our evening meals. This is pleasing in its own cozy way, but by the time the days lengthen and the weather warms up, we're busting to get back outside.

2 nights ago, it was warm and light enough to eat outside, so we made the transition. Just like that. And it was delightful! The kids did their thing of flitting back and forth between the cubby, trampoline and table, shovelling in mouthfuls as they passed us, as Pearl and I sat and enjoyed our dinner.

To celebrate this minor but also significant seasonal turning, I'm going to share the recipe for the dinner we had. I'm calling it Autumn Farm Fried Rice, and it's loosely based on the fried rice my mum made for us when I was growing up, though with a more seasonal, use-what-you've-got kind of ethic. It's a great meal for using up bits and pieces of veggies from your garden or the fridge, and you can adapt it in many sundry ways - go wild! Have a go! It's super delicious and nutritious, and you can make it with pretty much whatever you've got hanging around, like I said. Peas are nice, as is corn, in summer... This recipe is basically the quantities I used to make dinner for the 4 of us, with no leftovers.

First, you'll need to put your rice on to cook. We use rain-fed Australian brown rice, which is quite delicious! Cook 2 cups of rice in 4 cups of water until all the water is absorbed. Set it aside, with the lid off, so that the rice kind of dries out. Of course, if you've got it, you could use leftover rice too!

Next, make an omelette. I used 6 duck eggs, a little bit of salt and 1 shallot, chopped up. Whisk this all together, then pour into a frypan with very hot oil in it. When it's cooked through, set it aside.

In the same pan, cook 2 chicken breasts, so they're nice and crispy on the outside. Set these aside with the omelette.

Now, in a big wok, heat a few tablespoons of oil (I used sesame oil). Add a couple of tablespoons of grated or minced garlic, and the same of grated or minced ginger. If you have shallots or something like that they can also go in now. I also added 3 smallish carrots, finely diced. Just fry them for a little minute til they start to cook.

Then I added the rice! Stir it all around, and add a bit more oil if you need/want to. 

I then chucked in the omelette and the chicken, which I'd kind of torn up into small pieces, and some sunflower seeds. Almonds are also nice if you have them.

Keep stirring!

Then I doused the whole lot in tamari. I have no idea how much - just til it tasted nice.

Right before it was served, I stirred through about 3 bunches of tatsoi that were grown by our awesome friends Thea and Tim who grow the most amazing veggies around. Luckily for us, they're happy to trade awesome veg for chicken. Yeah!

And that's it! We served ours (the grown-ups) with green tomato chilli jam, which just takes it to another level of deliciousness.

A Bell and a Sock and a Violet Von Hungry-Face

One of the ambitions of a sustainable system is that it should be a 'closed loop'. This means that things entering the system (eg resources, energy etc) and leaving the system (eg waste) should be reduced as much as possible. 

We are still a ways off a closed loop system. Honestly, I don't believe we'll ever achieve it because there will always be things we want/need that we can't produce for ourselves. As farmers, we are bringing nutrients onto our land (in the form of chicken feed) and taking nutrients off our land (in the form of chickens for our community to eat). No closed loop there. But that doesn't mean that we can't do everything possible to reduce what we bring onto and take off our land in other ways. And most of it's pretty easy - we compost our waste (yes, even our humanure); we buy food in bulk, using our own packaging, so we don't generate much rubbish; we grow as much food as we can, so that nutrients cycle around our land; we collect and use our own water and solar energy. None of these are closed loops, but they're a conscious effort towards localising energy production and usage on our property.

Mmmmmm....turkey-foot...

And then we got 2 chook guard dogs from a local sheep farmer, and were very surprised to discover we had a closed loop on our property after all. Without even trying.

The inputs required for pets has weighed quite heavily on my mind since reading a bit about the ecological footprint of pets in the West. This information came as a bit of a shock to me, and was something I'd never even considered, in a whole life of pet-loving. But with our pastured chicken enterprise booming, we were wiling to take the plunge into dog ownership in order to fortify our fox defences.

Tiny dog teething on a chook feeder

The first 2 dogs we got - Bell and Sock - are brother and sister  kelpie-collie cross sheep dog rejects. This means that they're trained for farm work, but didn't quite make the grade for intensive large-scale sheep farming. The most recent addition to our working dog family is a little thing called Violet Tiny-Dog Von Hungry Face. She's also a farming dog, whose parents are integral to the workings of our friends at Symphony Farm, and, when she's big enough, she will also be doing her part to deter hungry foxes from our chickens.

A Sock

So the dogs are working for us, protecting our chickens (and herding the chicks who have strayed from the group), their waste doesn't leave the property, and all that they require in the way of inputs (ie. food) is some chicken feet/heads/gizzards/necks, which are left over from our chicken processing. An additional bonus is that the completely unrefined, fresh and unprocessed nature of their diet means that they're healthy and non-smelly. Yay!

 

And while they're not cats (card-carrying 3rd generation crazy cat lady right here...) they are kind of cute, in their own doggy way.

Shallots forever

At our last community food swap (which was outstanding, by the way - sausages! Lemon butter! Bread!) I was lucky enough to snavel a massive bunch of shallots, and was talking to our friend Anneke about our method of planting the root bit of veg like shallots and leeks. To my surprise, she was highly dubious and highly suspicious of the practice - she'd never heard of such a thing! Given that she's basically the queen of Bega Valley Seedsavers, and a well-known guru of all things to do with propagation (if you've seen Pip magazine, you will have seen Anneke's gorgeous house), I was super-shocked, as it's something we do regularly, and have had great success with. I thought I'd better do a little post to spread the good news, in case some of you are also unaware of the awesomeness of the perennial leek and shallot action that you can get for FREE, by saving your cut off ends from the compost.

The cut-off shallot root ends, headed to the garden for infinite re-sprouting

Basically, by planting the chopped-off root bits of your leeks and shallots, you'll get another leek or shallot. If you cut this one off at ground level, rather than pulling it out, you'll get yet another. In this way, you can pretty much have perennial shallots and leeks. The leeks do get skinnier with each successive re-growth, so won't go on indefinitely, but we have a few shallots in a pot out the front that have been going for well over a year. So next time you get shallots or leeks from the shop, market or your local food swap (if you don't have one - start one!), take the root bits out into the garden, make them a little hole, and bury them, roots down, with the soil level just above the cut top. They're great, because they don't take up much space, so you can just tuck them 'round the place as the root-ends avail themselves to you. Within a week, they will have sprouted, and you shall have shallots forever. 

Olive the mulching queen

I love eggplant pickle

Today was a perfect early-winter's day. A little windy, gloriously sunny, a little cool but also kind of warm in the sun. I spent the majority of the day on the day bed out the front, resting and sipping kudzu elixir and bone broth, crocheting and willing my body to recover from the annihilation that is chemotherapy. Around me, Pearl and the kids bustled, collecting kindling for our brand new fire, cooking a slow-cooked beef stew, tending chickens, playing, making pancakes, creating, and stopping by my bed every now and then for a story or a cuddle. It was pretty beautiful, and when we did our regular dinner-time round of "what was your favourite thing about today?" there was no shortage of stories and we all had to tell our second and third favourite things too.

Towards the end of the day, I mustered the energy to jar the eggplant pickle I've been working on, intermittently, for the last week or so. Yes, that's right: preserving is still happening, it's just happening veeeerrrrry sloooowly....

For me, there are few things more satisfying than a bunch of hot, upside-down jars cooling (and hopefully sealing!) on the table. They go into the extra-satisfying category when they contain something as glorious as eggplant pickle. Eggplant pickle, if you've never had it, is an outrageously sweet and spicy condiment, which we mostly serve in enormous quantities on the side of dahl and curries. It is insanely good and I love it, and feel very sad when we run out.

Luckily for us, the last few weeks we've been looking after our neighbour's place while they're on holiday - goats, chooks, geese, ducks, a crazy (but cute!) dog called Ollie and a massive veggie garden. It's a nice little ritual to trot down the road each day and tend what needs tending. And here's the thing: the garden, when we took over its care, was fairly heaving with late-autumnal abundance, most notably in the form of eggplants and chillies. I ask you - what would you do with such a gift?

The recipe we used was adapted from Christine Manfield's Fire cookbook. For some reason her recipe is for only a tiny amount of pickle (maybe her neighbours' gardens aren't as bountiful as ours...) so we increased the amounts to accommodate a bucketful of eggplant, and made a couple of other adjustments along the way. This is a delicious pickle, and you should make some, if you can still get your hands on some eggplants. Here's what you do:

In the food processor, pulse about 30 red chillies of various shapes and sizes, 6 tablespoons of chopped garlic, 6 tablespoons of grated ginger, 6 teaspoons of ground tumeric, and 6 tablespoons of black mustard seeds into a chunky paste. If you don't have a food processor, you could just grate or finely chop everything.

Heat about 500ml of oil in a big pot, then add the spice mix and fry it up for a bit until it smells so good you almost start crying, then add a big bowl full of chopped eggplant chunks... Pearl reckons we used maybe 2kg for this quantity of spice.

Keep it cooking over a low-ish heat, and stir it so it doesn't stick.

When the eggplant is soft and has sucked up the spicy oil deliciousness, add about 2 cups of raw sugar, a couple of tablespoons of salt, and a stubby of home-brew-that-didn't-work-properly-and-turned-into-delicious-malt-vinegar. If you don't have the (mis)fortune of having an endless supply of (accidentally) home-made malt vinegar, then shop-bought is probably OK as well... Or you could come 'round to our place and get some of ours. We have a LOT.

Then all you need to do is simmer it up til it's gorgeous and gooey, then seal in sterilised jars. If you're feeling generous, you could even share it with your neighbour.

An ode to the salad

One of the main things you need to come to terms with when embarking upon a community food/self-sufficiency/local food type journey, is that your ingredients need to dictate the recipe, not the other way 'round. In our culture, we're so used to being able to think about what we want for dinner, then go to a shop and buy everything we need, with no regard for season or local availability. For this reason, a lot of people don't even know what's grown when, in what part of the world.

Seasonal home-grown salad deliciousness, picked 5 minutes before it hits the table.

When you start getting interested in local food and self-sufficiency, one of the first things you learn about is eating seasonally. We've written before about the joys of seasonal eating. We love it. If you try it, I bet you'll love it too.

Of course, it means that there are, at certain times of the year, things you just can't eat. At the moment, for example, I'm pretty much busting for some broccoli and cabbage. But broccoli and cabbage aren't quite ready round these parts just yet. I've got a few more weeks' wait, but I know when the wait is over, the broccoli and cabbage is going to taste oh so sweet, not least of all because I haven't eaten any for some months.

Sometimes, because of seasonal availability, or weird in-between-season gluts or dearths, you'll have a whole bunch of something, or little tiny bits of lots of things, or strange amounts of something else, and you think - what the heck am I going to do with this!? The answer, I've found, to these kind of seasonal-eating conundrums is, invariably, soup and/or salad.

An heirloom tomato salad's gorgeousness is enough incentive for me to grow my own tomatoes.

It's really easy to make a delicious soup or stew from whatever ingredients you have to hand. All year. If you have an on-hand source of home-made stock in your freezer, even better.

Yesterday, for example, Louisa dug up a massive bowl of jerusalem artichokes, which had voluntarily grown themselves in amongst our lemon balm. With 12-hour-cooked chicken broth in the freezer, the answer to our jerusalem artichoke situation was pretty bloody self-evident, and tomorrow we shall be dining on some super-deliciousness.

Likewise for salads. I grew up eating salads consisting of iceberg lettuce, tomato and cucumber. Delicious! While I still have a massive soft spot for iceberg lettuce, I've since learned that it's nigh-on impossible to grow, so have learned to settle for much more eclectic salad ingredients, dictated, at all times, by what's in the garden or the gardens' of our friends and neighbours. 

roasted pepper , parsley and home-pickled 'caper' salad with home-made flat breads and hummous

Kale (I find curly kale best for salad), red-veined dandelion leaves, rocket (grows like a weed!), nasturtium (ditto!), borage, herbs of all kinds and a plethora of self-seeded loose-leaf lettuce varieties all make regular appearances in salads at our place, year-round. 

Mixed leaves, awaiting salad-making

Grated carrot, beetroot, garlic, and chopped tomatoes and celery, green beans, peas, cooked pumpkin and weeds like fat hen and nettle are also added, according to availability. I'm a massive fan of the grated and finely-chopped salad, because I like to have little bit of everything in every fork-ful. Makes it tasty, yo!

grated carrot and beetroot, dandelion, kale, parsley, basil, chopped almonds, sunflower seeds and feta-stuffed bell peppers, grown and made by the lovely Bev. I love the colour!

I also like to add nuts (chopped tamari almonds are a distinct fave), seeds, flowers (borage, nasturtium and calendula are my absolute favourites), olives or other preserved and pickled type things for extra tasty and extra nutrition. 

Pretty!

For dressing, I'm ever-faithful to a bit of lemon and olive oil, though I've recently been thoroughly enjoying ye olde tahini-based dressing, and sometimes a bit of a miso dressing. I'm extremely haphazard with my salad dressings, and will pretty much mix up anything that takes my fancy, with varying degrees of success. But that's the thing: When you're using good ingredients, it's pretty hard to make it taste like absolute crap.

So even if your garden's patchy, or you've brought home a somewhat random selection of ingredients from your local market, rest assured that there's a delicious and nutritious salad or soup in store. Feel free to post your favourite salad dressing recipes or soup combos in the comments. We're always up for suggestions!!

Extra added bonus of growing your own - you make friends. Anyone know what kind of frog this is?