Friday 31 October 2014

Foxes, Chickens and Injured Partners

Once again I find myself writing a blog for our farm experience.

I'm not nearly as prolific as Darklyss and I'll leave the good stuff to her...


So we had another visit from the fella or dame as above - the fox was back looking for an easy chicken dinner.

The target this time was our favourite rooster Lennon...


I was watching A Very Muppet Christmas with our eldest daughter - I'm still recovering from the recent surgery, Darklyss was asleep (she has been holding for fort lately) and the little one was asleep... When we heard a commotion from the chickens.

We had only let them out at lunch time as the weather has been crap and fear of the fox returning when we are not around.

I got up as quick as I could and pulling on my boots (I'm wearing pajama pants, a T-shirt and my anti-clot stockings - the height in fashion you know). So out I hobble, walking is still painful and I go slow, I do a head count of the chickens while looking around the yard. There is something missing - I know there is something I should be seeing but I'm not quite aware of what it is.

Then it hits me, we have 12 chickens and I can count all 12. One is looking down towards the back of paddock and then it hits me - where is Lennon?

I head down towards the back scanning and looking for his tell tale feathers. It was then I saw them on the ground. 

I immediately opened the gate to the unused paddock and headed into the thigh high grass following the trail of feathers and path of pushed over grass. This fox was cunning and had made a little corridor through the grass where it could be invisible while watching out for our flock.

I was not hopeful that I would find anything more than the feathers, in fact I didn't want to find a carcass. 

Then I saw it, the fox bent down over the body of Lennon - I yelled, in my loudest deepest voice "Get away from him you bitch!" (actually no I didn't modify Aliens classic line but it was something similar). The fox looked up and took off, I yelled some more as it scurried back into the bush.

I walked slowly up the Lennon as he lay still in the grass. I was sure he was dead, then he moved. Not much, just a leg and I saw his mouth open.

Quickly I scooped him up, forgetting the pain that is associated with bending over, and I headed back to the house. 

I wrapped him in a towel and left him in a laundry basket while I got the rest of the chickens back into the coop and protection. 

Darklyss awoke soon after and I filled her in on the situation. We went to check Lennon and were both surprised and elated to see him awake and aware. A few minutes later he was standing and looking a lot better.

We checked him out for injuries and found a few puncture marks but nothing that was bleeding, and a lot of feathers missing, including a lot from his left wing - that must have been painful. 

He's not out of danger yet but we have at least got a chance for him to survive his encounter with a fox.

Next time I'm grabbing my tomahawk on the way down... then I'll do more than use my voice at the furry tailed thief (probably I'll miss but it's the thought that counts!). 

Monday 27 October 2014

Lumps, loaves, loss and lacto bacilli.



They said it would have its ups and downs. Boy, 'they' weren't kidding! It has been a week of epic proportions, but finally, I am seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

You'll probably remember from my last post, that on Monday, my poor little dog Henry was hit by a car and killed. Following that devastating day, it was confirmed that my hubby Ben did indeed have a mass on his testicle, and that he would need further tests to see if the cancer cells had spread. 

Cancer.

That threw us all into a state of 'survival mode'. CT scans followed blood tests, and surgery was booked for the coming Thursday, pending results. Chemotherapy was mentioned. 

So what did we decide to do?

We threw a party.


Well, a bonfire really. And a BBQ dinner for all the people we've met in Melbourne so far. What a great way to remind yourself in times like these that you're really not alone. We laughed. We toasted giant marshmallows. The kids played hide and seek in the dark with torches, and burnt sticks, and skinned their knees. We ate Ben's homemade flat bread cooked on the BBQ with way too much garlic in the dip. The girls were tired, sweaty, and dirty. Hair all wild and sticky with marshmallow. It was a great night.

One of the Hill Shadow Farm 'ferals' hard at work on the apple blossoms.

The garden has been loving this rain! And we planted more veg and noticed more fruit.

Oh look! A guava!
Oh look - are they plums? Do you reckon they're edible?

We are now contemplating how the heck we're going to keep the birds off the fig, the apple, the plum, the apricot, and the guava. Looks like we might be spending a fortune on netting... eep.

And to add insult to injury, the loss of our beautiful canine 'chicken guardian' has given Mrs Fox a total free run at our free range chookies. She took 3 this week. So we're down to 13 including Lennon the Rooster, and reduced to dropping everything and bolting outside at the slightest cluck. Our other dog Cookie is completely hopeless. She just lives to sunbake and dust bathe. She cares not for the safety of poultry.

So when all was chaos, I turned to the one bit of affirmative action that the Cancerian in me defaults to.

I cooked.

I could not control the outcome of the blood tests. I could not control cars or hungry mother foxes with pups, or birds, or irrational angry agisters, or sleepless toddlers, or the internal workings of my car when it went 'BOOM!' and decided to no longer operate on gas THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS.

But I could stuff my husband so full of nutrients and vitamins that bloody cancer wouldn't know what had hit it. Everytime Ben turned around, I was handing him lemon water to drink. Or fish oil tablets. Or an intensly green, odd-smelling juice. Or a purply-red one. Or a fermented drink. Or tea.

"HEAL DAMN YOU!!! HEAL!!!"

Some of this - ahem, well, probably all of it - was completely pointless and based on unfounded nutritional theory. But it made me feel better. I was doing SOMETHING. I was fighting, dammit!

Funny how people react in a crisis.

So one of the things I made was a batch of Lacto-fermented radish pickles that I made from a bag of radishes I bought on the 'reduced' table of my local produce market. LOVE MY PRODUCE MARKET. (But LOVE their 'reduced' table even more!)

I'd never done this before, but I love me a good pickle - German background coming out there. Thanks Oma and Opa! x -and I hear that good gut health and an alkaline enviromment in the body can hinder cancer cell growth (you see how crazy it got?!). So yeah: pickle. Bring it on!

I got this super easy recipe from an article by Asphyxia in Grass Roots Magazine no. 211.
Basically you chop up your veg (cabbage, radish, cucmber, beans, carrot, whatevs!) into bite-sized pieces (but if you're like me, you'll whip out your spiraliser and happily spiral away for hours. Love that thing!). You use a big clean, dry jar, and you pack your veg in tightly adding 1 tablespoon of salt per 600g of veg. Then you top it up until the veg is covered with clean cold water. It helps to add a little culture to encourage things along, but you dont have to. I tipped in about a teaspoonful of Yakult (Lacto bacilli! Yeah!) but you can use some whey off the top of your yoghurt, or a bit of the juice from a previous batch of pickle.

That's it! Let the little critters work their magic! Asphyxia says to weigh the veg down with something to ensure theyre submerged to stop mould, but mine were so full, I just gave them a shake or 2 each day. After 5 days I had a quick sample - and it tasted great! Just like saurkraut! So I popped them in the fridge, and we've been eating them with salads and with dinner. So easy. And such a pretty colour! Looks great in the jar!


The other thing I whipped up - *wink* - was a sour dough. Oh but I haven't got time for kneading and rising and knocking back and blah blah blah.... *Aint Nobody Got Time Fo Dat!*

So I've come up with a little cheat. You wanna know how I do it?

"shh, c'mere" *Looks furtively around and leans in*

I use my slow cooker.

Yeah i know its not really 'baking' or whatevs. Do you care? I dont care! Do you? Nuh, neither do I.

Right. So here's how you do it. Keep it under your hat. You'll be the most popular person at parties. And  no one will know our dirty secret, ok?

Right, so you've got your starter. (You dont?! Oh ok - go back here and start one.)
So if you've done your 'sponge' last night, good on you. If you didn't - doesnt matter too much. I did my first slow cooker loaf just using a scoop of starter and it was fine. but it does work better if you've made a sponge.

So. To your sponge add 3 cups flour (I used rye and wholemeal spelt, but you use whatever you like) 1/2 tsp salt, and about 1/2 c warm water. Knead this into a dough. Now I dont know how long you do this for. I've heard its all "when-you-get-a-window-in-the-dough" or "10 minutes no more or less" or "When you can stretch it and tie it into a half winsdor knot" - I have no idea. I just knead mine for a bit, until it's kinda firm but elastic, and not gluing itself to my fingers annoyingly.

Now comes the hard bit.

Whack it in your slow cooker.

You might want to spray the inside with a bit of oil so it doesn't stick, but you basically are going to let the LOW setting on your slow cooker do the rising bit for you. Genius. Takes about 1 hour, but I just look at it every now and then, and when I think "oh yeah. It's definitley much bigger" - that's the point to turn it up to HIGH. It may expand and conform to the inside of your cooker bowl. Lady, if you're looking for a perfect, french artisian sourdough loaf: This ain't your recipe. But if you dont mind a loaf that is a little football-shaped, then proceed.

If, after a few hours - like I said, not an exact science - the top of the loaf is dry and you can knock on it - it's done! And you can tip that sucker out (WITH OVEN MITTS!) and eat it right now if you like! But if you want a golden brown crust to impress your friends, you might want to just pop it in a 200 deg c oven for 15 min or so. And then your house smells like baking bread. And everyone marvels at your domestic prowess.

"WOW - BREAD FROM SCRATCH?! Where DO you get the time?!"
"Oh this old thing?! It was nothing...!" *wink wink*

 

Yeah it's a bit of an odd shape. But sliced up with butter and honey and the kids will eat it so fast they wont even notice!

So today I am plodding along. We got the news that Ben's cancer cells haven't spread (PRAISE BE!) and I'm planning what books I'll read and what knitting I'll take while I'm waiting at the hospital on Thursday. 13 chickens and counting. And we're having pizza for dinner. (Hey: Nobody's perfect!)

What do you do in a crisis?
Are you having the week from hell too?
Know where I can get some cheap orchard netting?

Be kind, stay calm, and get your brothers/husbands/boyfriends/dads to check for lumps. Seriously.
xx


Sunday 19 October 2014

Sad news.

Lost our beautiful little mate Henry today. He was 11 and my constant companion, child minder, protector. There's a huge hole in my heart that he has left. 

RIP Little Buddy.
"Good boy."



Sunday 12 October 2014

Bees, Battery hens, and Baking Bread.

We did it! We started our sour dough culture! Here's a picture of it on day 2.


The idea is to use naturally occurring yeasts in the air, keep them cultivated in a 'starter', and take from it to bake your loaves. In that way, this is our first fully-fledged "Hill Shadow Loaf" with yeasts from the air of Mt Dandenong!

Ben did it. And I was AMAZED how light and fluffy it was!

 

Not at all like any dense, large-holed, peasant-bread-style sour dough I'd ever had before..!? Then he finally admitted that he added packet yeast. He CHICKENED OUT! Bahahaha. So as I type this, the first REAL Hill Shadow Sour Dough Loaf is proofing on the window sill! NO ADDED YEAST. Just spelt flour, wheat flour, water, a little salt, and our homemade starter.

If you want to give it a go too, here's where we got our information.


The next exciting thing that happened this week is that the fabled "Hill Shadow Ferals" proved themselves to be real! We were told there was a perennial swarm of bees that returned each year to the barn wall, un-deterred by sprays or people, although the previous tennant was unsure if they were bees or wasps. Oh-oh.

Then this week!:


They are indeed bees!!! Too big to be natives, but i know NEXT TO NOTHING about bees. But I want to know! What an amazing natural resource we might have stumbled upon! Now I just have to work out what to do next...

We were also inspired by the kitchen garden at Heide Museum of Modern Art. And we put in some tom thumb tomatoes, oregano, and capsicum seedlings. Hopefully they wont go the way of the beans: Only one of them is unscathed by slugs.

 






And finally, we picked up our 12 new Isa Brown hens, rescued from a battery farm by Crystals Barnyard.



Poor girls are in pretty good feather condition, considering. It was heart warming to watch them on their first free-range day: They couldn't believe they were free. Some were reluctant to leave the henhouse. Others luxuriated in the dust and afternoon sun.



It's lovely to know that this will be their life from now on.


Right, now Im off to pick Katie up from Kinder, put my sour dough in the oven, and decide what to do with thses GORGEOUS strawberries I got from the produce market this morning...



Have a go at starting a sour dough from yeast at your place! (You dont need a farm!)
xx

Thursday 2 October 2014

Brownies, baking, and balloon-legs.

Poor old Will has a fat leg! Im not sure how, but he's cut it somewhere in his paddock, and its puffed up like a balloon! I've hosed it out & sprayed the wound with tea tree, and added some garlic and tumeric to his feed for anti-inflamatory effects, and we'll see how he goes. Other than that, he'll be resting.

Which you know he hates.

OHH THE HUMANITY!!!
Today Katie and I cooked up a batch of brownies while Tara had her morning nap. These were using coconut flour, and let me just state from the outset that I haven't had alot of success with coconut flour recipes. And by that I mean, no success. everything Ive cooked has turned out rubbery, tasteless, or dry.

But at last! SUCCESS!!! These brownies are BEAUTIFUL! AND refined sugar and grain-free, which is a bonus! Even the kids wanted seconds!


So of course I will share the recipe! I got it from Pinterest, but I gather the original is from www.naturalnews.com .

PALEO BROWNIES (No refined sugar, dairy, grain)

1/2 c coconut flour
1/2 c cacao powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda

Combine these dry ingredients in one bowl.

1/2 c honey (Raw if you have it. Pretty sure you could use maple syrup too)
1/3 c coconut oil
5 free range eggs
2 T water

Combine these wet ingredients in another bowl.

Slowly add wet ingredients to dry ingredients, stirring well. pour mix into a well-greased 8x8 brownie pan and smooth top. The original recipe says 'bake at 350 deg F for 30 minutes' which I think is about 170 deg C, BUT my oven is hot and fan-forced, so i only baked for 27min at 150 deg C. You know your oven: Just keep an eye on them. If the top is 'dry' and it is 'springy' in the middle, I reckon you're done.
Let cool before slicing.

Om nom nom.


Got any other proven yummy coconut flour recipes you can share?

Now excuse me, Katie and I have some important bowl-licking to do...
xx