I'm still serene! Still loving living in this beautiful part of the world. It's hot and muggy, but not as bad as CQ, and sitting out on the verandah typing this, is just so nice - catches the smallest breezes.
I have been busy in the garden over the last 10 days - planting, cutting grass and weeds and mulching some areas. Between Edmund and I, we've planted lots - either seeds or cuttings. We've been enjoying eating quite a bit from the garden - beans, green leafy things (salad and veg), herbs, daikon, asparagus and so many tomatoes which self seeded. I've currently got some in the dehydrator.
Bananas that we brought from Cherhill about a month ago. We do have other groupings of bananas, but it's one thing that you can never have too many of. They are really good for chopping and dropping for mulch.
Mulching with cardboard and old hay
Mulching a couple of pineapples. I usually just plonk the pineapple top in the ground, but over Christmas, my nephew Jack showed me how to do it properly. You may or may not know that you should peel off a few layers at the base and then stick the top in a jar of water. Roots will come out of the little nodule things and then you plant it out.
I bought some plants the other day from Green Harvest at Maleny and also the Maleny Co-op. This is a small Sunchoke, but I also bought Yacon, Cassava, Chinese Potato, Kiwi Berry (a miniature kiwi fruit that will hopefully grow here). I'm trying to get a good selection of perenial vegetables for planting in the Food Forest, which is what the garden/orchard area is rapidly becoming!
These delightful yellow tomatoes are providing us with lots of tomatoes. The grow to about golf ball size, so are quite useful. It doesn't seem right, but I will have a go at pasatta when I get a few more. Yellow Pasatta?
Turmeric was existing, but I planted some ginger, which is only just coming up - you may see it to the right of the turmeric. Then on the right edge is some leafy greens. We need to plant lots of these for salads, veggies and juicing (the boys are into juicing at the moment)
I discovered this the other day - not sure if it's a raspberry or a blackberry. I'll have to get some gloves so that I can train it to go along the fence, instead of sprawling all over the ground and outside the food forest area. I couldn't see many fruit, so I may need to look after this plant a bit better.
We are getting plenty of eggs, hatched out two chickens and processed 6 roosters that were given to us. We have the goats and sheep in movable electro netting and we'll probably process a few of them in the next few weeks as they missed out on getting rings on, so we'll do them before they get too old.
We haven't done any development on the farm yet, as we are sticking to our plan to do a plan first! Edmund has been busy setting up a calf branding race as we desperately need to brand and castrate some calves, before they get too big to handle. I'm not really sure what the bloke before us did as there is no facility in the yards for branding.
I'm still enjoying my milking days and have been trying to get some cheese made. It's not easy in this humid weather as the cheese doesn't really dry out properly. I would wait for the weather to cool down, but I'm a tad impatient!
We collected some bunya nuts the other day and I processed about half of them. I still have some nuts ready to use, so hopefully they'll keep. We think we may have overdosed on them a little bit. We have been eating very low carb lately, and these are very high carb, so we're going to have a little break.
Bunya nut pesto with bunya nut crackers. The pesto was delicious, but I need to work on the crackers. Crackers were just boiled nuts processed with an egg and spread out to bake. Next time I'd add some seeds and some spices I think. They were very hard.
I dried some and will turn it into flour eventually. This is probably going to be one of the better ways to use them if the flour is any good.
We had a great Christmas, with a few of the family here. We've had a few visits from others over the period too. Boxing day lunch we decided to do an Asado. One of my favourite ways to cook, especially when I have someone else to do the cooking for me.......
So, until next time - cheerio......
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