Cooking for Ukraine

I've been learning a lot about Ukraine over the last 12 months as a Patreon of Olia Hercules. She is a Ukrainian food writer and recipe book writer, living in London. She is using patreon to raise funds to support her father and other family and friends who are either fighting or supporting the fighting in Ukraine. She shows that every little bit helps, and the funds often go towards medication and other personal items to people living in Ukraine.

Some people may think of Ukrainian food as being a bit plain or stodgy, and yes, they do eat a lot of bread type things and potatoes and cabbages, but it is more than that. Ukraine is a very fertile country, and the average family has a strong link to the land. The land that produces the food they eat, the land that has already been disrupted by Russia once before, and now the land that they want to keep their own.

It could perhaps be considered peasant food, and this is because they traditionally grew a lot of vegetables over the summer months and then preserved it for the winter. They did not have supermarkets like we have now, so ate simple good quality food.

Fermenting was a common way to preserve, and they would ferment the food and then store it in cellars or even water bath it for longer keeping. Yes, we now know that heating kills all the good bacteria, but through fermentation, it has become acidic enough to safely water bath for long term preservation. Water bathing or cooking doesn't destroy the vitamins etc in the food. They didn't only ferment vegetables, they prized pork fat, so would preserve this with salt and keep it in the cellar too - not rendered fat, salted fat. I haven't tried it yet, but probably will when we kill a pig that has enough back fat on it.

I even got to learn about a new cheese - Syr

I have bought the book "Summer Kitchens" by Olia and just about everything in it resonates with the way I like to cook. The secret to serving/cooking delicious peasant food is to use very good ingredients. 

Practicing some bread rolls - garlic buns and pyrizhky (filled buns)

I am hosting a #cookforukraine luncheon this weekend. This is a fundraiser for the children of Ukraine. Olia is an ambassador for this program through Unicef, and she has inspired me to do more, even though what I can do is limited. So, if you'd like to support this cause, please donate through my fundraising page. Nothing is too little. Thanks so much.

Donate here

Permaculture

I did my PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) in 2020, while we were living in Canberra. I had the time and so I chose an online course, which if I had a choice between online and in person, I think in person would be better. I did learn a lot while doing it, but more than that, it reinforced what I already knew, and maybe came up with some terms I hadn't really heard of before. In reality, I've been practicing permaculture for many years. One of my very good friends introduced me to Biodynamics many years ago and then organic gardening and it just continued from there. I now think that the permaculture lifestyle is the overarching modality and that the different methods I use to garden, farm, eat, live, shop, interact with others, are just tools or methodologies stemming from that lifestyle. 

The foundation of Permaculture are the three ethics:

• Earth care
• People care
• Fair share

As a regenerative farmer, I look after the land at the same time as making a living off the land (or trying to!). We started rotational grazing in 2000 and this form of grazing management ensures that stock are moved from paddock to paddock, before they overgraze. By doing this, ground cover is maintained, thus less runoff happens, which causes erosion. Since we moved to this region, we've been slowly improving our rotation and now we have finally put the sheep, goats and cattle together, things will improve even more. 

We had sheep and goats in one rotation and we only moved them every two weeks. This was not good for the pasture as they would eat too much of the better grasses. It was difficult to get the stock density required without using portable electric fencing, which is certainly an option, but for us, it was just too much more work to do. One problem we've had is the goats tend to escape, looking for fresh pastures, now that they are with the cattle and moving a lot more frequently, they don't escape. Which is amazing as the fencing is not what most people would call goat proof! On a side note, we don't have a guardian animal with them anymore, we used to have donkeys, but they went back to my daughter. We're hoping that our Nguni cattle will act as a guardian. Half of them have nice spikey horns and they tend to turn around and face you when threatened. Joining the mobs hasn't really made a difference to how often we move the cattle, so we've gained more animal impact (which is a good thing), more fertiliser diversity (from their poo), but most importantly, we'll gain a far better rest period, and we won't have the problem of uneven grazing. And....it's less work for us - win/win!

Cattle move into a fresh paddock.

The sheep and goats are often a little slower to move than the cattle. Means more exercise for me!

Other ways that I practice earth care are:

• growing plants and animals without chemicals
• buying my extra produce from local markets so that I don't need to get it wrapped in plastic - most organic food in the shops is plastic wrapped whereas the non-organic isn't (go figure???)
• trying very hard to not use single use plastic - also helps if you buy produce from the markets and also to choose shops other than colesworth if possible - co-ops or bulk buying stores. Although these still have a lot of plastic involved, it's just bigger bags and you the customer don't always see it!
• not buying "stuff", try to recycle, re-use, refurb/renovate - landfill is a big-ticket item when it comes to damaging our earth and our oceans.
• composting as much rubbish as possible so that less goes into your bin

There would be so many more ways, so please comment below with what you do.  I'll talk about the other two ethics in future posts. 

Serenity update

I've been worrying that my garden is under performing, and wondering whether it's just the fact that I'm still trying to build soil.....but after putting a bit more effort into watering, things are looking up. I think that it's just been so dry that I haven't watered enough. We haven't had much rain over the last couple of months - just little showers that really don't impact enough. Tis is a problem especially when I don't have a lot of soil as the gravelly clay just dries out. 

Even though some plants don't look too good, I'm still picking lots of food. In fact we've hardly bought a vegetable for months, except for the odd things from the markets. 

My goal for this year is to really focus more on NOT buying fresh food that has had to travel a long way to get to me. I tend to buy organic fruits and vegetables from the shop, but most of these come from distant places - still Australia, but not Queensland. Our local F&V store, does stock local produce and sometimes this is labelled "spray free". I do buy these, but when you buy local and you have a fairly good garden, you are only really able to buy the same things that you grow. One of the challenges to buying local only is not only the lack of choice, but fruit is a problem. It's sometimes really hard to buy local organic/sprayfree fruit. For this reason Kim is reluctant to support me in a "local only shop" as he likes to eat a lot more fruit than I do.

I am in control of the kitchen and the purchasing though so this is what I'll do:

• grow as much as we can here
• buy local spray free or even conventional fruit if we have to
• preserve what I can - especially fruit that I can get locally so that we can eat frozen, dried or water bathed fruit. But sadly, there is no mangoes locally this year.....
• buy conventional fruit for Kim when there's nothing else
• change the way I cook to use home grown ingredients instead of bought. Eg spring onions instead of brown onions, sweet potato instead of white potatoes. Although I will try and grow more spuds this year. They'll grow anytime, so if I have to buy some that have started sprouting to plant, I will.

Anyway, to finish of this post, I'll say it in pictures.......what may garden is doing today.......

I planted out very healthy zucchini and corn seedlings, but these have not grown very well. I have gotten a few zucs, but only when I fertilise them myself. This is something we've had to do with all the squash this year.

This is where the pigs and then the potatoes were. It's growing alot of tomatoes and I've got a few random things like pumpkin, beetroot and lagos spinach in this area.

Trying to grow as many green onions as possible. These are walking onions that I planted last February and I've already taken off little sprouts and transplanted them. 

The turmeric was dug up, but you wouldn't think so by the amount of growth I now have.

I'm doing my best to get sweet potatoes growing throughout the food forrest.

Scarlet runner beans - they have a beautiful flower, but I'm still waiting to see some beans develop! I don't think it's cold enough here - maybe I need to wait until next winter.

Rhubarb - we've eaten quite a bit of this. Maybe this will satisfy Kim's desire for fruit???

This part of the food forest was bare when we came just over a year ago. There's now turmeric, lychee, pidgeon pea, pumpkin, tomatoes, pineapples and a few other random things.....

Kale is still growing well, but I do need to check the back of the leaves for grubs and eggs.

Manure tea to try and build soil fertility. This is fresh and dried cow manure, comfrey, failed BD cowpat pit and failed BD500, seaweed, weeds, biochar and water. It stinks!

Miracle fruit - one of the trees we've bought to add to the food forest.

New Guinea Bean - This is flowering heaps, but not setting fruit and I'm not sure how these get fertilised.

Perenial Spinach going well. Some of my other patches are not as good as this one.

Paw paw tree - this is male tree (or is it a bisexual?). Last year the fruit we got to eat was lovely, but then it got an awful fungus so we need to look after it better this year.

This pumpkin vine is on it's second year - maybe it's third as it was here when we came.

Just a random shot of my garden.

And another random shot, with some cavolo nero in the foreground and a parsley gone to seed beside it.

Random garden shot again.

Eggplant - some are wonderful and some are not so good, and today I notice one plant seems to be dying off!!!

Celery - some has gone to seed and some hasn't. We've been using this for months! Curly parsley gone to seed beside it.

Perenial Capsicum - some are good and some have grubs! I've got about 5 plants so hopefully we'll get some to eat. I'd love to be able to preserve some though so may have to wait until the weather cools and the grubs go away.

Feels like we've been waiting for this banana bunch forever!

I recently planted a heap of seeds straight in to the garden rather than doing seedling pots. These are some Ethiopian Cabbage seedlings (thanks Ruth!)

Tatsoy or bokchoy (not sure which yet) that I left

 to reseed.

This is Mick and Sophies garden. They are staying with us for a while and decided to plant their own garden. They chose next to the yards where the pigs have been, but it's also lovely fertile creek flats. Their soil is metres deep, instead of mine that is only centimetres. Their plants are growing really well and are mostly responsible for the cucumber glut we have and hopefully the coming zucchini glut! They better plant tomatoes next!

I'm looking forward to eating local and growing more of our own food this year. I'm a little slack with the blog, but if you follow me on instagram, I'll post more often there. No facebook any more. 

To finish off, I'd like to wish you all the very best for 2023 and hope that in some way what I share here and on insta is an encouragement to you to consider where your food comes from and that what you eat, does have an impact on your health and well being.......now off to put my calves in so that I can milk my cows in the morning.....

Natural Sequence Farming Contours

We told ourselves that we wouldn't make any changes to the property until we'd lived on Serenity for 12 months. Well, we didn't quite make it! We've had trouble with ticks and flies since we've been here and think that the paddock and water placement has been partly to blame. For example there's 20 paddocks or more on the place but only a few of them have troughs. Most have laneway access to a dam, which means we can't get enough rest and therefore aren't able to break the tick cycle if the cattle are always watering on a dam. 

Another problem we've had is the extreme rain events early in the year have created a lot of erosion around the dams and one dam in particular is likely to blow out. We needed to do some earth works on this and on the property in general to hopefully prevent this. 

These photos top and bottom are two different dams.  The bottom one, we'll do more work with if it survives the wet season this year. We did a bit, but I haven't taken photos of it.

In 2020 we did a Natural Sequence Farming workshop with Stuart Andrews and we have finally put this in to practice at Serenity. We had a little play with the concept out at Cherhill last year, but this time, we've had Stuart bring is machines and put the contours in for us. He's also done some remediation around the dams. 

This contour is coming off the dam and going across where it would normally bywash. It was then taken out through the boundary fence and continued on the neighbours place. Picture below shows this contour on the neighbours side.

At this stage we have one large contour that goes almost the length of the property - about 1.5km. This contour has been fenced off, which means that we have a lot more paddocks. We have also put in a water pipe-line and will eventually get a tank and then troughs put in so that we don't need to use the dams. Because the contours are fenced to prevent stock damaging them while they are so new, it's a perfect opportunity to plant trees. The property has been over-cleared in some paddocks, so it will be good to get more trees going. We will plant a mix of trees - fruits, both exotic and native, timber trees, nut trees, livestock fodder trees and also some natives to encourage the wildlife. 

One section of the contour. It's really hard to get a photo of the entire contour! We need to get a drone in and take a video.

We're even recycling fence posts. You can see the top and bottom fence and this will have gateways as there is also a sill where the water can off load - we can also drive across this area when it's dry. A sill is a ground level area without a bank. The contour is completely level and so the water spreads out along it. In very heavy rain, it will gently overflow the contour and spill out in these areas. Sills are usually put on ridges.

Three wires - one for pigs, one for cows and three hopefully will keep in the sheep and goats.

Our very good friend Mick, who used to work with us on the pig farm, has generously offered his time to help us establish trees and also a small syntropic plot. Mick is incredibly knowledgable about trees and is very keen to use this as a case study for future jobs etc.  

Sophie, Mick's partner who is also helping, planted a few packets of seeds, which included a lot of pumpkin seeds. These are planted on the actual contour as they are currently bare of grass and so the plants will help protect the bank until pasture grows. We've planted so many pumpkins that we may even make some money out of them!!! 

We hired a rotary hoe to prepare the ground below the contour for planting. You can utilise the moisture better with plants below the contour as there is a natural irrigation action that happens with the water being slowed down and held in the contour for a few days - it then seeps through the bank and into the soil below.

This exert is out of Mick's very thorough Plan:

This is just the beginning of what will be a very exciting long term project. I'll write more about it as we go along. 

Spring is sprung

My garden is starting to look pretty good and as the weather warms up and more importantly the soil, some plants are growing well - others not so well.  

I recently attended a syntropic course and was blown away by the possibilities for this kind of farming. I can especially see how it would be great in a broad acre sense or for market gardens, but I'll talk more on that another time. We'll be putting our own small plot in soon (hopefully with help from a friend) so I'll share what we do then and will talk more about syntropics later on too.

This post is more of an update on my garden and includes a few ideas I took away from the course. One of the main takeaways, was that it's okay to take a plant out if it's impacting on another plant and it's the other plant that you have a preference for. Plants especially don't like senescence, so if theres a senescent plant, it may stunt the growth of a nearby plant. 

I went through my veggie garden and mulched/weeded with a knife. This is an amazingly quick and easy way to do it. I usually pull weeds out, but they always come back and it also leaves bare ground.  Soil does not like to be left bare! The weeds may come back with this method too, but I'll do the same again and eventually there will be a heavy load of mulch that they can't get through as easily (which is another principle of syntropic ag, actually the most important thing is mulch and the second is mulch and the third is mulch!)

No fancy knife, just a regular serrated edge kitchen knife does the job.

Senescence is when a plant is starting to die or go to seed - basically ending it's lifecycle. I have always had the attitude that if a plants wants to grow, I'll leave it and if it goes to seed, well I'll leave it then too. Do I need 20 pak choy or 10 lettuces going to seed, or will one of each do? Yes one of each is all I need to leave! And instead of pulling out and composting (which means pulling and then walking to the compost bin), I just used my knife and left it in the garden. So liberating!!

Pak choy before mulching, even though the flowers are pretty and attracting bees, we don't need all of them. And they were affecting the growth of the nearby plants.

Pak choy after mulching. Much better to see the ground covered than bare.

I have great big continental parsley plants which I only ever use a bit of, so I cut them right back and mulched them, same with the lettuces that haven't gone to seed yet, but were starting to taste bitter. I have plenty of new ones coming on that will only go to seed if I don't eat them, now that the weather is warming up!

Parsley gets a hair cut.

My three sisters are just beginning. I've trialled a couple of different methods. 

Using seedlings - I planted some zucchini's at one end, then alternate rows of corn and dwarf beans.

Seedling trial - 3 sisters

A trombochini seedling in the middle (as I'm guessing that it will creep along like a pumpkin, although I have no idea as I've never grown them) Then I planted a climbing bean seed and a corn seed together- maybe a few cm apart at most. 

Bean and corn seedlings just coming out of the ground.

We'll see how they go and if you follow me on instagram (@healthyfarminghealthyfood) I'll post updates there.

Also in the garden and currently being eaten - perennial spinach and normal spinach (which look the same). I have a couple of varieties of kale - one lot I planted too close and they haven't been doing very well, so I actually pulled some out (thanks to my new syntropic knowledge, that it's okay to take plants out if that will benefit another plant!) I didn't mulch these, I took them to the kitchen.

Garlic is nearly ready to harvest. I've been eating the small ones as I've run out of last season garlic.

Out of the many varieties of brassicas that I planted, only the savoy cabbages (apart from the kale) look like they may actually grow properly. Some of this is because birds keep eating them - they especially like the purple varieties! I haven't cut the others out yet, I'm waiting until I have the time to turn them into some form of kraut. 

I'm starting to get enough spring onions growing but will still plant more. I have a fair bit of celery which I just cut stems and use as needed. It doesn't get a chance to grow very big, but cutting it small will hopefully mean that it'll last a couple of years. One lot of eggplant are flowering and fruiting and the other lot are abit slow. Both these are from last season. I lost one plant which I think was due to the excessive wet rather than the cold. 

Potatoes - we have planted another couple of patches and they're all starting to come up. Apparently we can grow them a couple of times a year. I know last year I planted some over summer and they did alright. I did okay with the last lot just harvested - 20kg's out of 5kg's planted.

I've got lots of new seedlings planted and if I can keep the birds from eating them I'll be a happy lady - cucumbers, zucchinis, mizuna, lettuce, pak choy, beetroot. Also lots of different patches of carrots.

Seeds planted in pots - asparagus - they are very cute when they start as seeds, basil, capsicum, chillies (I hope I get some to come up!), star fruit, melons, pumpkin and cucumbers.

Now I just need to get some more mulch into the hill area above my my main garden bed and below the fruit trees, where I plan to plant pumpkin, melons and cucumbers that will be ready to plant out next month. Also root planting time coming up soon, so the plan is to plant more carrots, beetroot, kipfler potatoes and radishes. I've also started some sweet potato cuttings, and will have a go at planting some arrowroot seeds. 

What's happening in your gardens?