chapter 21: 10 places to hide a goat

 During the week we made home-made cheese. Not only was it easy to make but it was even easier to eat, and we would like to share the recipe with you. Tasting very similar to fresh ricotta, it was made simply with lemons and full cream milk. It was light, creamy and it melted in our mouths, yet it also caused my husband to start acting strangely.

At first, Joe sat quietly on the couch in a brown study. next minute, I saw him outside with his measuring tape, then back indoors and on the laptop. He was up to something. Outside again pacing out the length of the back shed, then the car port, garage, and finally the chicken pen, before rubbing his hands together with seeming delight, and a big dirty grin.

"Darling, what are you up to?" I enquired. At first, Joe seemed sheepish... but on closer inspection, I realised my husband looked far more goatish!

"No way! we are not getting a goat!"

Joe paused to muster the most convincing rebuttal he could conjure whilst pretending to scrape chook poo from his boot. "But darling, it could live in here with the chickens, no one would have to know a thing about it. We could feed it silverbeet and lettuce from the garden, and any clothes that the children no longer fit into. And best of all, we can make more cheese!!!"

"So they eat clothes?" I queried.

"They eat anything!" He said.

Sufficed to say, as this conversation took place directly beneath my low hanging clothes line, I remained even less convinced.

"We are not getting a goat".

How to make cheese

Heat 2 litres of milk to approx 90 degrees, or a rolling boil (not bubbling). Make sure you keep stirring so as not to burn the milk. When heated remove from heat and immediately, but slowly add 5/6 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice (We actually used limes). Continue to stir slowly in one direction, and you will begin to notice the milk separating into curds (the lumps) and whey. Continue to stir for about a minute then cover and leave to cool for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, strain the curds and whey through muslin (like a baby wrap) or cheese cloth over a colander. The curds will remain and the whey can be discarded. Hang the cheese in the muslin over a sink to drain completely for another 3 hours.

Now it is ready for a taste test. Yum! You can season with salt, or for that matter anything sweet or savoury to your liking'. This recipe makes a ball of cheese about the size of a shot put, but not as heavy.



If you don't eat it all at once, refrigerate it in an air tight container. It lasts 4 or so days.

We used our cheese in salads and will be making more in a week or so to make stuffed zucchini flowers.



Lavender Champagne (part 1)

lovely bug adding to the mix



Steve spoons in the vinegar

Another little home-made number we had a go at this week was lavender champagne. We got the initial idea from an elderflower champagne recipe but being short of the key ingredient and after some research we found that lavender could make a good substitute.

A bit of bubbly is an essential for any celebration, and with our FFFC now only weeks away we needed a summer time champs to pop at the end of our challenge.

It only takes a few weeks to brew lavender champagne and so it was exactly what we needed. We're not sure if it will work or how it will taste but we are hoping when we pop our first bottle it conjures memories of long lost summers and searches for cicada shells but most of all we want to make sure it is alcoholic! This is why we decided to add more than the recommended amount of sugar, even though there is a strong chance that the bottles may explode due to the pressure. Its a risk we're willing to take.

Champagne anyone?

Lavender Champagne Recipe

Ingredients
100 lavender flowers
2 lemons
600 grams white sugar
250 grams sultanas
6 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
6 litres of water
1/4 teaspoon champagne/all purpose wine yeast

Remove the lavender flowers from the stems. Grate the zest of two lemons. Finely dice sultanas and mix all three ingredients together in a bole. Boil 1 litre of water, pour into a large bucket or tub (we used a carboy). Add sugar, lavender, lemon zest and sultanas and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add the juice of 2 lemons and white wine vinegar. Then add a further 5 litres of water and allow to cool until temperature is below 30 degrees. Add yeast, gently stir it in and cover with muslin wrap or carboy lid and airlock.
 Leave for 7 days at room temp then strain liquid into sterilised bottles and cap. The bottles need to be airtight. You could cork the bottles or simply use what we are using, clip lock glass bottles. Store for  a further 2 weeks. Taste and enjoy!

At least that is our plan. At the moment ours is still fermenting in the carboy. We intend to btle it  tomorrow and will let you know how it goes.

Last blog we said we were going to mull over our mulberries, intending to make something delicious from our multitudes of mulberries. Unfortunately our mulberries haven't quite come to the party yet but stay tuned. Instead we are going to take you right back to the birds and the bees and chat about hand-pollinating zucchinis.


pollinating Zucchinis and Pumpkins

 Our zucchinis are well and truly doing their thing and have produced nothing short of very eager flowers just sitting there waiting for Joe and his little paint brush to come pollinate them each morning. Zucchini's, pumpkins and other similar plants of the gourd variety have male and female flowers. In order to bear fruit, pollen from a male flower must travel to a female flower for pollination to occur, and thew fruit to grow. Usually the bees will do this for you, but as they have recently been dropping dead due to excessive mobile phone microwaves (at least that's what the communists want you to think), you may have to do it yourself to get results.

our Turk's Turban pumpkins successfully taking over the yard:)

You will need:

1 paint brush (Soft)

1 sunny morning

to be able to tell male and female flowers apart.

Its actually very simple. female flowers have a bulbous miniature fruit at their base, while the male flowers stand on a long thin stem. inside the male flower is the stamen, which is covered in pollen (when the flower is mature). take a brush and carefully collect some pollen on the end. (choose the strongest, sexiest male flower you can find).  Then transfer the pollen to the female flower, brushing it on the claw looking pod (pistil) in the centre of the open flower.

pollen from a male flower

You will know if the pollination is successful when the fruit bulb starts to swell after a few days. if the female fruit pod turns yellow and shrivels, then unfortunately, its an old spinster.


Time to get busy in the pumpkin patch with your paint brushes.





chapter 20: Eating your greens...reds, purples, yellows and oranges too.

Chapter 20:Eating your Greens...Reds, Purples, Yellows & Oranges too.

Taking (Chicken) Stock of Life and Death

A month ago we noticed Charlie (one of our remaining three chickens) had gone 'dickie'. We had noticed that she seemed a little out of sorts, but it wasn't until Gramps 'the chook whisperer' pointed it out in no uncertain terms for all to hear at a recent bbq "You've got a dickie chook there lovey". Joe smiled with discombobulation. Behind his polite smile, he was thinking 'what the hell does dickie mean?'

"well matey, it means her organs are systematically shutting down and she's only got about a week to live, you can tell by the frumpy tail and the colour has gone from her cone. You'd best put her in a box in a quiet corner or she'll be pecked to death by the others."
Joe had grown close to Charlie, particularly because she was named after his father...I could see him thinking 'surely it's not that bad. Jo's dad is prone to exaggeration. Perhaps Charlie is just having a bad day...too much porridge can cause bloating...?'

But dickie she was, and within the week Charlie passed away in a cardboard box on the back porch.

I called Joe to break the news..."can you pick up some milk on the way home, I haven't paid that bill yet,  and by the way Charlie's dead."

After letting Joe down lightly, I thought about the kids. How were they going to take it, they had grown so fond of the chickens, perhaps they are too young to understand. Later in the afternoon when Joe arrived home the whole family stood around the hole under the lemon tree. Joe shook Charlie out of the box and she landed with a stiff thud in the shallow grave, a moment of silence followed until Joe said with a sense of ceremony "would anyone like to say a few words?" After a brief pause our 4 year old (N), spoke up " um, well are we gonna pull her feathers out?" he said shrugging his shoulders. "Why sweety? " I replied.
"Well, we are having chicken soup for dinner; we may as well just add her to it."

Kids eh..Joe sent us all inside as he slumped on his shovel in a state of grief and disbelief at our sons carnivorous pragmatism.

But this was more than a month ago and with only two hens left and eggs at an all time low, Joe quickly recovered after we purchased 4 more hens, Thelma, Louise, Georgie and Noella.


Bean and gone


Talking of has beens we had our first major spring harvest last weekend. Our broad beans were ready for picking. Broad beans are not commonly found in the shops but are a delicious bean and very easy to grow. Plant them on St Patricks day (Autumn) and they will be ready for harvesting in early Spring. You can eat them straight from the shell or freeze them for later use as we decided to do. Alternatively you can leave the mature pods to dry for planting next season or adding the dried beans to next winter's dishes. Simply soak the dried beans overnight. The mature plants grow up to a metre in height and yield about 15 pods, each with 3-5 beans. We harvested enough to fill a wheelbarrow.

Shelling the beans was a fun family affair and is set to become a favourite annual tradition.

Another handy broad bean tip is that the roots draw nitrogen back into the soil. When harvesting, don't pull the plant out by the roots, simply cut off at ground level leaving the roots in, in time they will break down providing a rich source of nitrogen in your next crop. Follow a crop of tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins or melons (heavy feeders) with a broad bean crop to replenish the soil.

Colourful crops

With spring well and truly in the air the garden is quite a buzz, literally. Our bottle brush trees are covered in bees from dawn to dusk and the other flowers throughout the garden are coming into bloom. The poppies, nasturtiums, roses, camellias, lavender, black-eyed Susie's, hibiscus and geraniums are all doing their colourful thing. But its not just the flowers being colourful in the garden. This month we've pulled up our purple dragon carrots, plucked our purple king beans, had our first ripened red, cherry tomatoes, red lettuce and budding beetroot stems and lets not forget the greens. Silverbeet, coriander, rocket, basil and beans all look great in green.

garlic

purple King Beans

we simply call this our handsome lettuce.

Kapow! Purple Dragon Carrots...

Seaweed in the mountains

Seaweed is a great fertilizer for the vegetable patch, but as we are in the mountains, we have been making the most of our trips to the coast when we visit Joe's family. On our last trip north, Joe and his sister filled the entire boot of the station wagon with garbage bags of seaweed from the local lakes.

After rinsing it in the rain, to wash off any salt, we added it to the pumpkins, tomatoes and potatoes. the potatoes and pumpkins are absolutely thriving! best of all it's free, and can even be used to make a liquid fertilizer, seaweed tea.

Straw and your strawberries
If there is one taste that defines spring, it simply has to be the home grown, hand picked, delicious taste of ripe red strawberries. the only problem is getting them before the snails do. Strawberries are a hardy plant to grow, but the strawberries themselves can fall victim to rotting if allowed to sit on the soil, and become easy targets for fat little snails.

Its worth padding some straw beneath the berries to elevate them from the ground. this reduces the likelihood of rot, and munching mollusc's. In fact, growing them in hanging baskets is a sure fire way to save your berries from the snails and slugs. this is definitely on our to do list, although we plan to leave some in the ground to grow runners and new plants for next season.

Possums in the patch
If you have ever visited the mountains, it’s quite possible that you have crossed paths with the semi-famous Possum Man. Known throughout the district for his cunning possum catching talent, The possum man can be called on his possum hotline (somewhat like ghost busters we imagine), will arrive in his hand painted possum-mobile and (for a fee) proceed to trap your furry possum fiend and then let it go again in your backyard, thanks to the Blue mountains City council’s policy on protecting those poor, poor little possums that wee all over our car, eat our garden and thunder across our roof at 3am in the morning.

one of our cheekiest possums

Since moving here possums have had a go at most things that we have tried to grow including our chilli bush, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs. They have dined on our entire lettuce crop and munched away our heirloom ‘lazy housewife beans’ down to the very last stalk. They even have the hide to do so right in front of us, causing Joe to fling into a wild frenzy of maniacal fist waving and chasing them around in the dark, before near breaking down in tears at the state of our helpless seedlings. It can just about break a man’s spirit.

possum solutions
The possums are here to stay but we have learnt how to live with them. We now cover most of what we grow with bird netting but we have also discovered some things that you can grow that the possums don’t seem to bother with and we feel obliged to share these with you.

Possums have not bothered the zucchinis that grew rambunctiously all over the yard last year. They don’t eat our leek, onions, garlic, shallots, coriander, rosemary, pumpkins or melons, perhaps because of their coarse leaves. Interestingly, with the onset of spring, the possums have become much less of a problem. In fact, we have been able to successfully grow leafy silverbeet, lettuce tomatoes and potatoes uncovered over the last month, and not one leaf has been munched.

The famous gardener, Jackie French, seems to believe that possums don’t like ‘foraging’ for food in dense vegetation, and we have tended to notice the same. This may also explain why the possums have left our sweet potato leaves, which grew abundantly all through last summer. Just don’t leave your harvested sweet potatoes out over night, as they will happily eat them for you.

Even flowers occasionally fall victim to hungry possums. They have eaten all of our beautiful geraniums down to the stalks but don’t touch the nasturtiums or lavender.

Although our grapes are still too small for the possums or birds to care about we plan to net each bunch with stocking as we lost at least 70% of our grapes last year to them. We are not sure if it will work but are going to give it a go.

Next blog we are going to mull over mulberries, talk lavender champagne and get cheesy making our own ricotta.