Projects – Page 2 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

self sufficiency and community

2016/11/28 Danielle 0

A friend of mine asked yesterday how long it would be before the farm was self sufficient. It’s not as simple a question to answer as you might think. One answer is: never. We aren’t planning to grow grain, and although I do have some tubs of potatoes and a sweet potato patch, and plans to put in chestnut trees, we aren’t really focusing on growing what the biodynamic gardening people call ‘calory crops’. Those are the foods which make up the majority of your diet – the carbohydrates that give you a baseline energy hit and leave you […]

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 […]

June 15: staple crops

2016/06/15 Danielle 0

A staple crop is one that provides the majority of a population’s diet, generally providing primarily starch and/or protein. Our current primary staple crops worldwide are corn (maize), wheat, and rice. There are also other staple crops or potential staple crops (crops with the capacity to provide the majority of a population’s diet) grown – barley, rye, oats, teff, sorghum (milo), millet, soybeans and other legumes (beans, chickpeas, lentils, ..), quinoa, amaranth, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, oca, cassava, arrowroot, plantains and sago (derived from the pith of the sago palm). There are probably others, but those are some of the more common ones. Do […]

June 12: Housework

2016/06/12 Danielle 2

This is not a post about cleaning, doing laundry, or even about looking after the cats (yes, that counts as housework normally). The kind of house-work I’m talking about is more along the lines of minor renovations. When the house went in, nine months ago, there were some casualties – a few trees had to go to make room for the trucks to come in. The contractors knocked them over, and (at our request) left them for us to deal with. We collected a few sections and painstakingly de-barked them on the verandah. They’ve been drying out and seasoning […]

June 3: mushroom cultivation

2016/06/03 Danielle 0

Last weekend, we attended a mushroom cultivation workshop run by Urban Kulture in Whitegum Valley. We came away with a wealth of knowledge (and a very informative handout, with all the instructions on it), as well as loads of innoculated mushroom kits, ready to grow us some amazing medicinal and edible mushrooms. I really recommend the workshop – it was great fun, very informative, and we learned a lot. We made up kits for king oyster (Pleurotus eryngii) and turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) on sawdust, reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) on shredded paper and pearl oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus, pearl strain) on […]