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Summer is hard. This is not news, really, but knowing that doesn’t make it less depressing when the latest round of seedlings and saplings die in the heat in spite of being babied and watered daily, and mulched to within an inch of their lives. We live in a desert, and getting over that initial hurdle of getting things growing is hard. It makes the things that do work that much more important. Like the hedgerows. Not that they’re growing as fast as I’d like – our “hedgerows” are actually still imaginary lines in the dirt with a series of […]

On Friday I made sourdough English muffins for breakfast. It’s such a brilliant recipe (and such a good use for excess sourdough starter) that I thought I’d share it here.   Step 1: Combine 1/2 – 1 cup starter, 2 cups plain flour, and 1 cup milk (or whey, or buttermilk) in a bowl. Leave in a warm place overnight.   Step 2: Add 1 Tbsp honey, 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), and 3/4 tsp salt to the sourdough mixture. Knead until well combined and no longer super sticky – try to avoid adding more flour, but you […]

Not all of my interests are plant or animal related, although you might be hard pressed to know that from the things I post on here. It occurred to me this morning that other permaculture-ish and farm-minded people might well share some of my other interests. One of those is recycling. Not ‘put it in the recycling bin’ recycling, but actually repurposing or reusing objects and materials. For example, I’m currently collecting soft drink cans, because this winter we plan to build an aluminium smelter so I can make aluminium sculptures (this sort of thing) and timber-and-aluminium furniture (similar to […]

We didn’t do any of the traditional things on the Australia Day public holiday yesterday. No fireworks, no picnic, no BBQ, no beach trip. Instead we bought some new baby chickens, and almost burned the house down. Turns out, when the dough in the bread machine overflows, it ends up directly on the element. Which is fine, unless the element is on, to cook the bread. At that point, you get charcoal inside the bread machine. We did not in fact start a fire, but it was unhappily close – and it took all afternoon to air the smoke out […]