Cassava

Anyone that is into permaculture and lives in the tropics, will have heard of cassava. It's a well known addition to a food forest and is used for it's edible tuber and to chop and drop. When I used to do the markets in Rocky, Frankie next door to my stall, used to sell it and I'd often be given some to take home, but by the time I got around doing anything with it, it was a bit dried out and to be honest I didn't think it was worth the bother. However, recently we visited a friend in Monteville and had a tour of her food forest. She urged me to take some, so Maitland pulled up a heap of roots. We ate some that night cooked like mashed potato. I didn't peel it properly as it was very fresh and soft. That was a mistake, as the outer bark remained quite fibrous and didn't mash very well, but otherwise definitely a good substitute for mashed potato. I decided to make some flour out of the rest of the roots, so this time I googled a how to video.

Peeling the root - just cut into it with a knife and the outer layer comes off quite easily. I didn't actually weigh the amount I started with, which would've been useful information.

After washing all the root pieces, they are chopped small to enable processing in the thermomix (or blender or food processor). Water is added to the processor first and then blitzed to quite a fine dice - almost paste like. You can't add too much water - it comes out at the end anyway. You can also grate it by hand on a fine grater, but that sounds like way to much effort for me.

 

I followed the video and did the first strain through a sieve, but next time I would just strain the whole lot through cheese cloth a little at a time, giving it a good squeeze. You keep this cassava to cook with later on. 

I made bammy with this strained cassava. I made little ones, as I had trouble getting them to stick together. 

Take note of this bowl of liquid above, as this is what it looks like straight after straining.

Bammy is twice cooked. I'm assuming that this is so that they stay together better. Then, when you soak them in the coconut milk for the next frying, they don't fall apart. 

I really liked the bammy, which we had with a Jamaican Goat curry, but I also think they'd work as a dessert with some honey drizzled over them.

Now, back to the tapioca flour, because that's what it's called once it becomes flour. The bowl of white liquid, once it sits for an hour or two, settles out. You end up with some dirty looking water sitting on top of a solid layer of wet starch. If you've mixed tapioca flour with water to thicken something and not put enough water in, you'll know what this white layer is like. It's really thick! (I forgot to take a photo before I poured off the water, which incidentally was very easy to do). The bowl was full, so you can see how much starch you get from all that cassava!

I dried the cassava paste in a 100 degree oven.

After it was dry, I gave it a whizz in the thermomix to make it all fine and fluffy and then I did use a sifter to make sure there were no lumpy bits. The final product was 205g of tapioca flour.

We have one very small cassava tree growing already, but I took some cuttings to propagate some more. I would like to have access to a lot of this food source. It's very high in starch, but I do wonder if once you take the flour/starch out, whether the resulting fibre is just fibre. Fibre is good for the gut. Cassava is also a resistant starch so easier to digest than some starches. I'd like to play around with the pulp and maybe make some different flatbreads, maybe by adding eggs and seeing if I can make them rollable. One thing is for sure, it's easier to make tapioca flour from scratch than wheat flour (growing and harvesting wheat is very difficult on a small scale) It'd be nice to have a good easy bread substitute that we could grow here.

I've done some cuttings (3) straight into the pot and the other 5 pots have a horizontal piece under the soil. I've grown them like this in the ground before - we'll see which one works best. If you've got any recipe or other ideas for cassava, please comment below.

Biodynamics

We have dabbled with biodynamics for many years. For a while at Anabank, we were involved in some carbon trials with other land managers, where we were measuring the amount of carbon that we were building using various methods. It was some time ago, and I can't remember how many people involved, but we were doing biodynamic spraying and another bloke was making and spraying compost tea. We were both cell grazing. It didn't continue long enough to see how much carbon we were building, but I do remember that we tested the spray liquid - ours was BD500 and his was compost tea. The BD500 had better biology than the compost tea. So for those of you that think Biodynamics is just woo woo stuff, it's not. It is grounded in science (and astrology or, is that astronomy).

If you want to read a lot more than I know about Biodynamics, please check out these two sites. This is an American site and this on is an Australian site and the one I am a member of.

The way I understand it, is that it's based around preparations (preps) that are made through a composting process and are a bit like homeopathic, you don't need a lot of them to do a job.  For example BD500 is a prep that is mixed at the rate of about a handful in a bucket of water and then sprayed or splashed by flicking out droplets over your entire garden. It's the essence of a fertiliser, rather than a fertiliser spray.

We have recently put down two different preps. BD500 and Cowpat Pit (CPP). CPP can be done any time of year, however BD500 is done over the winter, so is usually put down around Easter and lifted in early Spring. The CPP takes about 3 months, but will depend on the temperature and conditions at the time. It's easy to keep an eye on as it's only in a box with a bag and tin cover. The horns are buried, so we hope for the best with them.

BD500 is just cow manure, stuffed into cow horns. The cow manure should be from lactating biodynamic managed cows. The horns should also be from females, but ours are a mixture. The manure is from lactating cows, but we haven't been managing them biodynamicaly.

Manure collected from my milking cows. Four cows produce a lot of poo. The horns we got from the Biggenden abattoir. Back in the day when we were regularly going there, we asked them to keep some. It cost us a carton of beer. We did lose some horns because the dogs found them once and chewed a few up.

Me (Lucy) filling the horns. Gloves are optional......

Kim placing the horns in the ground. He dug the pit with the tractor first. We read in a book by Peter Proctor, to "plant" the horns and to have soil around them. When we've helped in the past, the horns were just piled in, but we thought we'd do it this way.

You need to back fill with soil. We put the bag down to hopefully make it easier when it comes time to retrieve the horns.

We had space in the hole and still had manure left so we thought we'd make some CPP. We went down to the shed where Edmund was building a dog cage, and asked him for some timber so that we could frame up for a box to contain the CPP. He quickly put together what we required. I love seeing a craftsman in action! 

Back up the hill to the garden and the box was a little big for the space left. I also love seeing a man on the end of a shovel. Men can handle a shovel so much better than a woman!

The box doesn't have a base, as it needs to connect to the earth.

Mixing the CPP. Manure, 200g crushed eggshells, 400g basalt rock and we also added about 200g seaweed as I reckon that would go well.

I had previously bought the preps, as I had intended to make some of this when we first moved here. 

The 5 compost preps are put in holes and then a liquid prep is added - first in the two bigger holes and then sprinkled around the whole area. 

The area around the BD preparations need to be kept moist, like a garden. We've covered the horns with hay to help insulate them and we'll keep it watered and will keep an eye on the CPP to make sure the bag covering the manure stays moist.

I have done several intro to Biodynamic courses and read some books but am a long way from being very knowledgable about it. It's one of those things that you just need to start doing and learn along the way. If you would like to know more, please click on the links I gave above or just google it and then you can spend hours down the rabbit hole of the the www.

I look forward to writing more about it once we dig it up and start using it. Although, I do have a kg of purchased BD to use yet - I bought a mix of BD500 and CPP - it's called Combine Soil Preparation. And we also need to look at purchasing a flow form or stirring machine when we go to put it out. More on that when we get one.