Stories – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Sourdough Almond Pancakes

2023/01/12 Danielle 0

The first thing I ever learned to make without a recipe in front of me was flapjacks – a sort of traditional South Afican (and Dutch) miniature pancake. Basically because they’re easy, the recipe is super forgiving of ingredient substitution and changes to proportions (they can be made with 1 egg or 4 eggs, or with 1/2 cup of orange juice in place of eggs, with regular self-raising flour, wholemeal flour, or even almond flour, with oil or butter, with or without milk), and at the time I was working with limited ingredients and unfamiliar kitchens. As a teenager, when […]

Olives for integrated livestock-orchards

2016/11/14 Danielle 0

I’ve been doing an awful lot of research, recently, into integrated agroforestry and pastured livestock farming systems. Specifically the system of pasture and productive woodland common to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) which is commonly called dehesa, or montado in Portugal. Although the traditional dehesa forests are primarily made up of cork oak (Quercus suber) and holm oak (Quercus ilex), the system could work with any number of tree species. It’s basically a Mediterranean silvopasture system, with scattered tree cover (using trees which produce some sort of commercially valuable product) with pasture and animals grazing underneath. Traditional dehesa […]

BlogJune 2016

2016/05/27 Danielle 0

A very dear friend of ours is participating in BlogJune this year, and I figured we’d do so too. So this June, expect one post per day. The plan is to complete (at least) one task on the farm or house per day, and record it via the blog posts. At the end of the month, we’ll have a pretty detailed story of our progress for June 2016. I’ll try to put photos up where I can, although not everything we do around here is photogenic. Today’s task, for example, was mucking out the chicken coops. I don’t think […]

if not you..

2016/01/18 Danielle 0

This weekend just passed, I attended an event called GenghisCon. It’s a small science fiction / speculative fantasy & gaming convention, which runs every year in Perth. It’s run every year for the last 15 years, which is a pretty impressive run for something which gets no funding or support from any corporate or government body. Every year the committee (elected at the previous convention) does fundraising to make sure there’s enough money to pay for the venue and insurance, and organises a program of events to run at the convention, including discussion panels (on anything and everything from how to […]

fire season

2015/11/24 Danielle 3

The downside of summer – other than the endless hot, dry weather, which is not as much fun as you might imagine, and the constant dual risk of sunburn and heatstroke – is fire season. So many things can start a bushfire: a cigarette tossed out a car window by a clueless tourist, an unmanaged BBQ, a freak lightning storm (sadly not accompanied by a summer rain), a spark from an angle-grinder, a gum tree overheating in the 40+ degree (celcius) weather and spontaneously combusting due to the oils it exudes into the air, … It doesn’t matter, at the […]