I’ve written before how I set my garden and orchard up based around the food, I liked to cook most.  My strategy which has proven correct is that when you’re tired and exhausted or when people drop in you prepare meals you are familiar with, your old favourites. For me that was a good Italian pasta or an Asian stir fry or with a little more time with the oven alight and heated, real pizza or a slow cooked stew.  (Planning Your Garden)  Having your favourites always available reduces the desire to make a quick trip to the shop to get a few things.  Self-sufficiency to me is about growing everything you need. Zero cost living is being able to obtain, trade, swap, sell what you can produce to afford the items you can’t produce yourself. Flour for example I can’t make but I can sell a dozen free range eggs and buy heaps of flour. Sugar try as I might I just can’t get Stevia (My Stevia Trials)  to work for me as sugar to thicken jams to p...

Some spinach can loose 90% of it’s nutritional value within 24 hours of picking. The term paddock to plate as far as I can see is just some chefs with their heads up their own bums trying to convince people their food is fresh – “more seasoning you bloody idiot, where is the salt you fool”, that’s because the produce has already lost it’s flavour.  Now I’m not a scientist I’m just a farmer these days who likes to read what scientists whom study stuff about farming have found. Following is my quick summation, main sources listed below.  Many articles with actual scientific data are from the US where methods of getting food from California to the supermarkets in New York then into the fridges of consumers has been studied.  After harvesting  plants continue to ‘live’ or  ‘breathe’ and that process is called respiration.  This process is the breakdown of materials such as carbohydrates, fats and proteins that leads to a loss of...

The thing I love most about farming and why I made the move to the country is the variety of opportunities you get each day to use your brain and brawn. The city to me had become all about routine, traffic and waiting, waiting, waiting.  don't get me wrong the city was my place for many years but the time came and I just knew there had to be more more. I wanted to be somewhere that offered endless challenges every day, where the nature of the work was both physical and mental and I knew when my corporate career came to the end I didn't want to spend my retirement inside 4 walls.    The best laid plans ..... blar blar blar, when you have a farm you do have a plan the next day and for the week then you get up in the morning and most usually that plan immediately changes. A cow has gone down sick, pest are attacking the vegetable garden, a tree fell across a fence, the horse has gone lame.... the list of jobs is endless but I'd not change a thing. Here is just one issue I ...

The wet season was late this year but it's certainly making up for it now. The farm has become a bog and its walking only there is no way I can get anything heavy onto the paddocks even the ride on mower is digging deep furrows and leaving deep tracks.  When it's like this you have to find other projects to do so today it was a flowering rock or maybe a porcupine rock. I have this difficult little intersection in pathways to get through the garden and I needed something in the V of the path way to direct traffic - when there is any. I could have just put a plant there but then you have to trim it regularly and it gets big and ugly eventually and the roots will grow into the pathway. The answer my friends was no blowing in the wind it was to make a rock that flowers. Using available resources, the rocks I cleaned from the paddocks and a few extra I hunted from a local river I made the perfect corner piece. not only does it depict the corner and direct traffic but its another...

The idea of my small farm is to make it a bit of a ‘Foodies Tour” where you can see how a large variety of foods are grown from things like beef and chickens through vegetables and to fruits. One can get an idea of where food comes from. To achieve this people have to walk, you know that old fashion thing, move the legs and transport ones-self from place to place. To make those short walks as interesting as possible I’m separating the paddocks with gardens and in those gardens adding interesting things to see on the way.  This last weekend it was a very simple project  - Japanese Tower. A rather simple project anyone can do. Here is the DIY Video and the list of materials you will need.  The great thing is you will need 5 rocks so you can go for a bush walk or ultimately like I did, drive to the coast and go hunting along the sea shore.  You will need 8 - 200mm by 100mm concrete pavers 3 - 300mm by 300mm concrete pavers 2 - 400mm b...

This year the 3rd year of my orchard I had enough quince and figs spare off the trees to make enough containers of paste to give away to family and friends. Part of the dream of owning a small farm and all the hard work to establish it from overgrown bushland is the feedback you get when people see the progress you have made. Although I only made 21 containers of quince past and 14 of fig paste that means at least 14 people get a gift of the set and give their feedback on the progress. Let's call it motivation in a tub. Last year readers might recall I had an oversupply of Rosellas so I froze a few bags for this year and used them in both pastes. I used the husks of the rosella with the quince to insure the paste came out a deep red colour as my quince tree still being young doesn't yet produce fruit that go a real deep red of commercial brands of quince paste even after 3 hours of cooking. With the rosella seeds I boiled them in water to release the natural pectin to use wit...

January 2015,  I was such a 'City Slicker' I didn't even realise a ride on mower had two spark plugs and I kept changing just the one plug to try get the machine to work properly. As a farmer, even a small farmer you have to be a 'Jack of all trades' and be able to undertake many tasks by your self or farming becomes very expensive task in repair coast not to mention the delays while you wait for them. Builder, Plumber, Mechanic and Electrician, you have to be able to do the basics in most tasks or your farm comes to a grinding halt. My old ride on mower is falling apart and I'm doing my best to keep it alive. It's a matter of pride now. I learned how to change my own blades given I snapped so manny on rocks clearing the paddocks. Servicing the machine, changing oil and oil filters, changing the air filter, changing spark plugs and analysing why the motor is coughing are all things that save time and money. The dog ate the seat so I had to built a new on...

Now I'm the first to admit I don't cook to a recipe, I may read it once then it's a bit here, a bit there and a little on the way for the chef. What I've read on home brewing and as a wine drinker my observations are that you need to be rat chemist and mad scientist measuring everything in each portions. Not me, just pour it in until is seem right. Its not an exact science - that's my motto. So making my own ginger beer for the first time followed that process, then after 4 days the bloody sugar ants got into it, bugger, oh well how much difference could 100 or so ants make? It looked alright, just a lot of black spots that could be drained out at the end anyway. Here is the result, pretty refreshing but a little explosive.

When I lived in the city I went riding early morning just as first light was illuminating the streets, we rode an hour before a morning coffee then off to work in my air-conditioned company car to arrive in the underground car park and catch the life up to me air-conditioned office. When work was finished for the day if i has a little time left before dinner with the family I'd call into the gym and destress with a short weights session or just a run on the treadmill while watching the news on the TV screens. Living in the country and farming, it's all different. There is no formal exercise sessions, there is just work. Mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow is a great job, like paddling a canoe at first, the carrying weights across a balance beam to strengthen your core. In the city even though I exercised to "be like everyone else successful" I still sat on my corporate butt all day talking about things that seemed important at the time. Now in the country I'm at th...

Are you having a shitty day? Well I have plenty of them,   all by myself on my farm and here is just one of my shitty days on video for you.

Well not that I shop at a supermarket much these days but I did recently and found myself doing calculations in my head when it got the the chicken section. Walking past the whole chicken the where the chicken pieces are  I was becoming aware that the pieces put back together seemed to be adding up to way more than the original chicken. So I took the pieces home and worked it all out to see what people would pay if they brought a chicken in pieces or they brought it whole and cut it up and used the left overs for stock. Have a look at my 1 minute video ......

Necessity is the mother of invention,  so they say. My local dump, recycling station has a Saturday morning shop where you can go and scrounge around for little treasures. I found any old broken child's wheelbarrow and this is what I did with it.

Well the last in this section of fence which just happens to be the worst I've done. Fencing is rather easy once you know how and going in a strait line is easiest. When you fence around a dam to create a rainforest you turn lots of corners, go up and down gullies which of course then requires more big strainer posts. When you brilliant plan get out of control and you have to carry the posts across a swamp, that's when it gets really difficult.

Just a scavenger hunt around the farm and hey presto - jam. It's rather important when your becoming self-sufficient that you develop the skills to use and/or preserve all the foods you can produce. Jams making is one way to use up little bits and pieces of everything and you will discover some great combinations yourself.

Here is the story about how I discovered world naked gardening day, the first Saturday in May each year. The founders of the day say;  “it is meant to be funny, light hearted and non-political” and I'm all for those days.  Well when I first moved to my farm I was on hands and knees in the middle of one of my paddocks planting a young shade tree. I look up to see one of my neighbour some 500 meters away walking around her garden in the nude. Then her partner came out and also started walking around in the buff and they seemed quite happy just chatting away. I was so embarrassed, there I was now hiding behind this tiny young tree in total fear they would think I had sneaked up to have a perve. I turned around still on all fours and crawled all the way out of the paddock so they couldn’t see me. When I got to the trees I up and ran all the way home and hid inside thinking, oh my god I’ve moved in next to a nudist colony. Turns out that was the only time I ever saw them ...