Ferment – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Feast like a Viking

2016/10/08 Danielle 1

This evening we’re off to a Viking-themed pot luck feast – the idea here is that everyone who goes takes a dish, and each dish forms one course of a massive degustation style dinner. We’ve been to a few of these dinners, each with a different theme, and they’re an enormous amount of fun. The food is always amazing, and so plentiful that we all waddle out at the end of the night swearing to be better about taking tiny portions of each dish next time. The idea for this iteration is reasonably authentic Viking style food. So, being […]

Drinking yoghurt and cultured milk products

2016/09/09 Danielle 0

A few years ago (quite a few, actually) I went travelling through Europe. Some of the trip I did with a dear friend of mine, some I did on my own. One of the things I discovered was drinking yoghurt. Now, drinking yoghurt (i.e. yoghurt which is thicker than milk, but thin enough to drink like a smoothie) used ot be not uncommon in South Africa when I was little, but it’s almost unheard of in Australia to the best of my knowledge. I remembered liking it as a child, so I tried some in the Netherlands, and in […]

Turning the rotaloo

2016/07/18 Danielle 0

A composting toilet has a lot of useful and awesome features (primarily the 20,000 or so L of water it saves us per year), but it does have to be actively managed. In theory, the six chambers should fill up over a year – so every 2 months you rotate the composting compartment to put a new, empty chamber under the toilet, and after a year you empty the chamber you started with (which, by then, will be full of harmless compost). In practice, it’s more like once a month than once every 2 months that we have to turn […]

June 23: Making Mead

2016/06/23 Danielle 0

On Saturday I’ll be presenting at the 2016 Less is More festival in Peppermint Grove. I gave a presentation last year, on urban livestock, and I really enjoyed the experience. I’ve signed up to present again this year, this time on beekeeping. I’m no expert bee-keeper, but I do have bees and I love them. They’re fascinating, and very low maintenance, and they produce amazing honey from the flowers around here. My first introduction to bees as anything other than a flying insect in my garden was in Melbourne a few years ago. I did a one day “intro […]

June 9: bread is life

2016/06/09 Danielle 0

Someone said to me recently, joking about our mutual bread-making habit, “Bread is love. Bread is life.” It may have been said in jest, but there’s a certain truthiness to the statement as well. Bread has been central to a lot of cultures around the world; to the best of my knowledge, the East Asian cultures whose main subsistence grain was rice through most of their history are the only ones in which bread hasn’t played a central role (cooked rice replaced bread for those cultures). Even the Australian Aboriginal peoples appear to have had a tradition of breadmaking […]