The Value of Mailing Lists

I joined the mailing list for my local stockfeed supplier.  Every so often (and fortunately it’s not too often) he’ll send out an email with his latest specials.  Once in a while, though, there is an extra one that has animals for sale or to give away.

I got one of those yesterday.  A lady is moving from her small farm into town and the buyer doesn’t want her animals.  Most of them are much loved pets, so she didn’t want to sell them and risk having them not go to good homes.  I went round last night to have a look at her lovely 3 year old pedigree (with papers even) Kune kune boars - who must go together.  Darla needs company you see, and I’m still hoping to breed from her.  Kune pigs have the sweetest nature and are all round lovely pigs to have.

I also asked about her hens.  There were 17 free range hens.  All quite tame on the whole and mostly purebred (which doesn’t really bother me either way).  There were Sussex hens and Wyandottes and Barred Rocks and Araucanas.  I wasn’t sure how many we should get.  While we’ve built a rather large run for the chooks, I’m not sure if their house is big enough for 20 birds.  It would take some rearranging and more nesting boxes and another perch.  Hubby has suggested that we build a second chookhouse in the run for them.  There is certainly no harm in having more chooks.  We don’t want the roosters though.  One rooster is enough we believe and she has 3 purebred Wyandotte roosters.  They’re beautiful, but much bigger than our Howard.

So while we’re building another chookhouse, we also need to think about a better place to run these extra pigs.  Darla is probably a miniature Kune after seeing these boys and she is quite well behaved so I don’t mind having her running around the outside of the tunnel house.  But I can’t see the tunnel house walls keeping these two out if they wanted to get in - and I can’t see how I’d get them out easily once they were in.  We’re thinking about putting them under the trees in the woodlot.  There’s plenty of shade there, it would just need water and the macrocarpa branches that we dumped there to get them out of the cow’s paddock would need shifting.

We've been saying that we need to get more chooks and some company for Darla, but money is a little tight, especially with Christmas getting closer all the time - immediately followed for us by Master 14's birthday.

Some of the mailing lists might seem like a hassle and may seem to fill your email inbox with junk, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them.  You never know when something useful (like this) may pop up.

Food For Winter

A few years ago, I went to a talk about the old British festival of Samhain.  One of the things said has always stuck with me.

“For the ancients, if they didn’t have all their winter food by now and have it stored or preserved correctly, there was a good chance that they’d die by spring.”

In our modern society, we don’t think of Winter as being this potentially dangerous.  I decided then that I would try it.  I wanted to be able to not buy food over winter.  It didn’t happen for a number of reasons but the main one is that our modern houses are just not designed to store that much food. 

The standard suburban pantry is so small that you couldn’t fit a months worth of supplies in it for the average family, never mind 3 or 4 months worth.  Our mentality doesn’t fit it anymore either, we get paid weekly or fortnightly and do our grocery shopping each week, getting enough for the week, with maybe a little extra.  Or we rotate and buy different things each week but so that we’re spreading the load for things that we only need to buy on a monthly basis.

I also looked at the preserves I made.  Jams and pickles covered most of it.  They were things that you add to food, not really food itself.  There was no way we’d survive on quince jam and mustard pickles.  Oops sorry, I forgot the 10 litres of tomato sauce and another 6 litres of plum sauce.  The 20 bottles of mead might make it seem more interesting for the first week or so, if we remembered it.  I really needed to rethink what I grew, how much I grew and how it was preserved.

The jars of apricots from our very prolific trees didn’t last very long.  My oldest daughter went through them as snacks.  I had heaps of runner beans in the freezer but no one really liked them much and I seemed to be the only person who would eat them.  Our carrots and peas were pretty much eaten straight away - they never made it to the freezer for more than a month.  Even the broccoli didn’t last that long.  I never had much luck growing potatoes, I’d get enough for about 5 meals and after that they were just the little tiny ones that weren’t worth the effort.

I sat down and made a list of what we actually eat regularly and what I buy in the groceries.  This was a far better starting place.  Much of it I could grow and in some cases already did, but perhaps I needed to think about the quantities that I grew.  How many 10kg bags of potatoes do I buy in a year?  How many potatoes do you normally get from each plant?  Perhaps I should also look at successive sowing of my veges, so that all of my broccoli wasn’t ready within two weeks, although, I could still blanch and freeze the excess.

I’m thinking that the one purchase I really should make is a decent dehydrator.  Usually I use my oven, but as some things (like quince paste) can take three days, it’s rather impractical when I have dinners to make for my family as well.

Now that we’re out on the lifestyle block, meat is something that I can grow for myself, although it is a long-term thing and I need to have a bit more variety I think.  We’ll all get sick of only beef for dinner after a couple of weeks.  One pig at a time doesn’t really last that long either.

We’ve not long bought a really big chest freezer.  I was looking at our tiny (maybe 200l) one and thinking that there is no way we’d fit an entire cattle beast in it, never mind the usual veges that I freeze, so we splashed out and bought a 700 litre freezer.  It’s huge.  I think that I could fit not only a whole cow, but also a couple of pigs in there too.

That left breakfast cereals, bread, milk, cheese, margarine, juice, salt, sugar, coffee.  I can’t see getting away from buying salt, sugar or coffee.  While I understand the process of making salt from sea water, I don’t trust our sea water to not be polluted.  I stopped buying juice when I started making cordials.  The dairy products are one that I’m hoping for a little later down the track.  I have hand-raised a jersey fresian heifer and I hope to make her a house cow when she’s old enough.  I had hoped to do this with Patsy and Eddie, my dexter girls, but they’re just not tame enough for that.  I can and have made bread before, but it is a lot of work and my family prefers the store bought stuff.  Maybe that will change in time.  I’m also gluten intolerant, so making bread for me is a challenge - most gluten-free bread either tastes lousy or needs to be toasted.  I’m not touching breakfast cereals at the moment.  To make a muesli requires me to buy a lot of ingredients that I don’t grow and I’m the only one who eats a muesli (even if it’s a gluten free one).

There will always be some tweaking, I’m sure.  We’ve more than doubled the size of our vege gardens, so we’ll see how we go and alter to fit next year.

You may wonder why I'm writing about Winter when Summer has only just arrived, but if I left it until Winter, it would be too late.  The work needs to be done now.

Onion Jam

Onion Jam!

A few years ago, I went to a BBQ at my sister’s house. Friends of hers brought the most amazing potato salad I have ever had. It was new potatoes mixed with an onion jam. These friends own a salad business that supplies to many supermarkets in the North Island but sadly, due to issues with transport companies, they don’t sell to the South Island.

I tried a little Google Fu to see if I could find a similar recipe online.

I found heaps of recipes for Onion Jam, unfortunately, they all seem to be Caramelised Onion Jam. I’m fairly certain that the onion jam in this potato salad wasn’t caramelised and brown the way all of these came out. I spoke to my parents who were also at this bbq and they remembered it being like a chutney. Most of the recipes also contained a number of ingredients that I would need to buy and that kind of defeats the purpose.

I have a few philosophies when it comes to preserving my excess. I won’t add any interesting chemicals that I’m not sure exactly what they are - citric acid is fine, acetic acid is vinegar and I’ll buy yeast for making wines, but beyond that, usually no, I’m trying to make it all simple and natural. If I have to go and buy a number of exotic things to make it work, things that I wouldn’t normally have in my pantry, then it defeats the frugal nature of preserving my excess so I won’t do that either.

So, being me, I found a simple recipe and decided to try making it without fully caramelising the onions. I used this recipe with a few minor alterations. I diced the onions and didn’t caramelise them.

No liquid to set.

The thing that struck me as it was nearing completion is how little liquid there is compared to the onions, making it difficult to tell when it was thick. There is barely a coating on the bottom of the pan. My other concern is how will this cover the onions in the jar and preserve them? Was this recipe meant to be used immediately perhaps? A quick check back at the original recipe showed that it made no mention of bottling it, storing it or anything much beyond serve with barbecue steak or beef sausages.

Much better! After adding extra sugar, vinegar and water.

So I doubled the sugar, vinegar and water. It looked better, but I was thinking about the ratio of sugar to liquid - is that enough to make it set? I checked through chutney recipes and found that usually, the sugar either equals or is close to the weight of the fruit. So I added another 1/2 c of brown sugar. That looked much better. 5 - 10 mins later, I have a jar of onion jam.

If you don’t have a jam funnel, don’t stress and don’t make a mess - cut the top off a plastic milk bottle (leaving the handle attached). This makes a great jam funnel, the handle makes it easier to manage and you can throw it in the recycling afterwards and make a new one next time.

Jam funnel from a milk bottle.

My final recipe turned out to be:

600g onions, diced

2 sprigs of thyme

4 tbsp balsamic vinegar

3/4 C brown sugar

1 C water

Heat oil in a saucepan, add onion and thyme. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally until golden. Add sugar, cook, stirring for 3 mins. Add vinegar and water. Bring to the boil then reduce heat. Simmer, uncovered until thick.

It’s sweet, but not overly so. The bite of the vinegar is still noticeable.  This recipe made one 300ml jar.


For an update on this - see here.

Busy Weekends

Scrappy (left), Mrs Wolowitz (centre) and Howard.

It’s Monday morning and here I sit utterly worn out after another busy weekend.  I have a sunburnt face and neck, a couple of bruises and a few aches and pains. Ah the joys of lifestyle blocks!

Hubby has a full time job in town, which means he’s only available to work on our block in the evenings and weekends.  We were warned when we moved here that this can be problematic for a lot of lifestylers.  You only have the weekends to accomplish anything and if it rains, you’re a week behind.  Next week may have other priorities that need attending to.

I work from home which gives me a lot of flexibility, but there are a lot of things that I either can’t do, or I can’t do alone.

We finished building the chook run on Saturday.  That was definitely a two person job.  In a lot of cases, it required one person to hold something up while the other nailed or fastened in some way.  I’m sure there probably is a one-person way to attach fence strainers, or maybe that will come with experience, but we haven’t got there yet.

Joins in chicken wire.

The chook run required multiple joins in chicken wire - we had numerous pieces of about 3m long, so instead of buying a new roll (at $200 plus depending on where you get it from) we used what we had.  We both have hands covered in nicks, scratches and sensitive fingertips after that.  I’m not sure how others would join chicken wire, but the photo shows how we did it.  That was only one fence.  Putting up 12m of windbreak in a strong Nor’West wind isn’t easy either.  It was raining when we finished it, but Howard, Mrs Wolowitz and Scrappy didn’t seem to mind too much.

Sunday was a very hot, sunny day.  Hubby wanted to cut gorse, so I suggested cleaning up a paddock that we currently had no stock in and was quickly becoming rather overrun.  He suggested that I follow him with the spray pack.  We looked into spraying gorse last summer.  When Hubby sprayed this paddock last summer, it took 2 full spray packs of tordon and there were plenty of bits that he missed.  The big problem last year when we started it was that our local farm supplies store was out of the red dye that you put in the spray pack with the tordon to see where you’ve been.  We could only get blue.  Blue is not a good colour for the gorse, it is really hard to see what you’ve covered and what you haven’t.  Tordon is also very expensive - currently $136 for a litre.  90 mls goes into a 15l spray pack and it doesn’t take much to get through it.  Hubby talked to a few local farmers and gorse contractors and learned that if you want to cut and spray immediately, you’ve got about a 15 second window before the cuts seal themselves off.  It will still work after that, but you will most likely have to wait for new growth and do it again.  This is why he was cutting and I was following with the spray pack.

I have a bad back, some days I’m okay with things, some days I’m fairly useless.  I had to get him to lift the spray pack onto my back, but I was pretty much okay after that.  We got through most of the paddock on the one pack, the remainder will have to wait until next weekend.  I noticed though, that even when the pack was empty, it was still quite painful on my shoulders.  Going by what feels like bruises on my shoulders this morning, I think maybe the straps were too tight for me.  The other big bruise came from either a large piece of wood or a stone that the scrub cutter flicked up to hit me on the thigh.

A break, some lunch and then we were off to plant out the 20 tree lucerne (tagasaste) trees that we’d bought for a shelter belt.  The fenced off shelter belt bits were waist high in grass and so full of tyres that it was a job of several hours.  Hubby would go through and cut the grass with his scrub cutter, throw the excess tyres out, and I’d follow along, planting the little trees, putting a tyre around them, filling the tyre up with the cut grass as a mulch and watering them.

We found that while we’d been told when we bought the place that there was irrigation along these belts, the hose was split and damaged.  That’s going to be interesting.  We still also have to find how to turn it on.

A few of the tyres wound up in the paddock my steers are in.  Seeing them pick one up, roll it down the hill and chase it and play with it was a lot of fun.

As we were on the last stretch, I noticed that one of my cows wasn’t looking well.  I called the neighbour for advice and he came over to have a look.  This neighbour is worth his weight in gold.  Never underestimate the value of a good neighbour.  She’d bounced back from the distress that I’d seen her in by that time (don’t they always) but still seemed off colour.  We moved her to another paddock along with her calf, her sister and her sister’s calf.  I looked at the water trough in there.  It was foul.  The cows weren’t impressed by it either.  I cleaned it and two others at this stage. 

That was about the point when I realised I was rather sunburnt, possibly suffering a little heatstroke as well.  One of these days I’ll think to put a hat on.  My feet hurt, my ankles ached, my leg muscles were tight.  I’d done enough for the day.  I was absolutely exhausted, but it was a good exhausted.  I’d accomplished quite a bit in my weekend.