Gallifrey Forest Farm

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 […]

June 8: animal profile – guinea pigs

2016/06/08 Danielle 0

Today is not a task-completion day. Everyone needs a day or two off every now and then, and the bed renovation had some bits & pieces to tidy up anyway. I’m aiming to start getting the cat furniture (climbing shelves and some whole-tree climbing toys made from trees removed during the house build) finished and installed over the next few days. For the moment, though, here’s another animal profile: Guinea Pigs (Cavia porcellus), also known as cavies or cuy, although ‘cuy’ is usually used to refer to meat breed cavies. Yes – guinea pigs are kept as meat animals by many […]

June 7: Animal Profile: Chicken

2016/06/07 Danielle 1

Not an activity post today, but it’s been a cold rainy day with no notable achievements beyond running a bunch of meetings at my day job. So instead, I’m writing about chickens. Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are the archetypal poultry in Australia, the bird that everyone thinks of when they think of farmyards. They’re descended from the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), and gentic studies have shown multiple points of origin across South-, East and South-East Asia. Due to selective breeding, both for specific traits and for simple survival ability in different environments, there is a wide variation in size […]

June 6: furniture modification

2016/06/06 Danielle 0

When I was 19 or so, I built myself a bed. To be precise, a queen-size loft bed – effectively the top bunk of a bunk bed, but with no bottom bunk and instead space for a desk or couch underneath – made of large chunks of jarrah and aged pine. Today’s project was modifying that bed. We’ve cut the legs down a bit, so it’s only 80 cm off the ground, rather than a full 1.5 m. K got to use the table saw he got for his birthday (and thinks it’s the best toy ever). And then […]

June 5: community and support

2016/06/05 Danielle 0

Yesterday was the 5-weekly cat food run. Four ox hearts from the meat markets, and 2 beef livers, which then had to be cut up and minced. We were a bit low on taurine – I need to order more, which I didn’t realise until we started making up the mix – so we added extra lamb hearts to the mix in place of some of the minced beef. Heart is rich in taurine, and taurine is an essential amino acid for cats. So we borrowed my parents’ mincer and spent a couple’ve hours cutting and mincing and mixing and […]