Gallifrey Forest Farm

June 4: dehesa australis

2016/06/04 Danielle 0

Dehesa (in Spain) or montado (in Portugal) is a type of agroforestry practised across the Iberian Peninsula. Traditional dehesa is an oak woodland, mostly cork oak (Quercus suber) but also holm oak (Quercus ilex), with various shrubs and grasses – and sometimes crops – growing under the tree cover. In many areas livestock are grazed under the trees; cattle and sometimes sheep graze on the shrubs and grasses, and pigs are herded through to eat the fallen acorns. In an Australian context, a similar system of value-add agroforestry seems very plausible. The tree component could be any one of […]

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 […]

June 2: Seed Planting

2016/06/02 Danielle 0

Winter is here. Cold nights (and cold days, too, at the moment!), rain and wet, black soil. Every night there’s the smell of woodsmoke from wood-burning heaters in the neighbourhood, and the deciduous trees are all in the last stages of losing their leaves. The sweetgums are glorious, red and purple and gold. Everything is settling in for a good winter’s hibernation. Perfect time to plant tree seeds. I’ve had some stone pine (Pinus pinea) seeds and cork oak (Quercus suber) acorns in the fridge for a couple’ve months, getting the chill they need to start germinating. They’re going […]

June 1: chicken feed

2016/06/01 Danielle 0

One of the issues that anyone with pets or livestock runs into is feeding them. Not just the expense of providing them with the best possible nutrition, but also the practicality of it. The cats, for example. We make up a raw meat mix for them, using human grade beef mince, minced ox heart, minced ox liver, calcium, gelatin, and a selection of supplements. Amusingly, it ends up being cheaper to do that than to feed them commercial cat food, although it does involve an early morning start every month or so to go to the meat market and […]

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 […]