Building a better world… with tomatoes and goats

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019Leave a comment

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Sometimes it’s hard to feel anything but angry about the current state of things, but there are lots of positive actions that can be done that boost personal resilience and wellbeing as well as reducing ecological footprints.

There’s a new book all about this, currently on Kickstarter here. My new book ‘Backyard Dairy Goats‘ is included as a stretch goal on it!

Preserving tomatoes at home

This year I did something I’d been thinking about for a long time. I bottled our entire tomato supply for the year…

I’d delayed this in the past due to annoying finicky instructions that insist on peeling the tomatoes, removing seeds, putting them through an expensive single-purpose gadget, and all kinds of stuff, but in the end I thought it was about time I tried this myself, using nothing more than a kitchen knife.

Our own garden harvest was not that big this year, for a few reasons that I’ve hopefully learned from, but rather than buying in bottled tomatoes from the other side of the world, I found a local organic grower, bought more than 30kg of sauce-grade tomatoes and bottled them all.

This is how we did it:

Step 1:
This step is only worth doing if you have too many tomatoes to fit in your pot at once. Sort through all the tomatoes and separate the damaged and super-ripe ones from the ones that can wait for a bit longer. Put the ones that can wait aside for another day (we preserved our 30kg+ of tomatoes over 3 days).

Step 2:
Wash the tomatoes, remove any leaves and stems (this is a good job for little helpers).

Step 3:
Roughly chop the tomatoes and put them in a big stainless steel pot (I used my 20 litre one).

Step 4:
Heat the chopped tomatoes over medium-high heat, smashing them up as you stir every so often. Once the tomatoes are bubbling you can either bottle them now, or reduce them for a bit. The jars I used were a bit smaller than the passata bottles I’m used to, so I chose to boil them to reduce them by around 1/4 to 1/3, to make for a more concentrated jar of tomato goodness. If you’re using plum tomatoes or paste tomatoes you’re more likely to get away with boiling them for less time, but ‘sauce tomatoes’ here just means any tomatoes that aren’t quite perfect, so they can use a bit of boiling to get rid of the extra liquid.

While you’re waiting for the tomatoes to heat up or reduce, sterilise your jars and lids and keep them warm.

Step 5:
If you’re concerned about the tomatoes not being acidic enough on their own to store safely, then add a tablespoon of cider vinegar or lemon juice to each 500-600ml jar, or 2 tablespoons to larger jars.

Put the hot tomatoes in the warm jars and seal them with their clips or rings, depending on which jar type you’re using. Put a big canning pot with a false bottom or canning rack on the stove (or use a tea towel or some cutlery at the bottom of a normal pot), put a small amount of warm water in it (so that the hot jars aren’t shocked by a sudden change of temperature), then carefully add your jars. Add more water, so that the jars are surrounded by water either to just above the top of the lid, or at least 3/4 of the way up.

Put the lid on the pot and bring it to the boil, or at least above 90ºC (195ºF). Hold it at this temperature for 40-45 minutes, then allow the pot to sit with the lid off for 5 minutes. Carefully remove the jars using a jar lifter and allow them to cool on the bench before storing.

Fill up the next batch of jars for the pot and repeat until you’ve run out of hot tomatoes, making sure that the water in the pot at the beginning is around the same temperature as the jars. You can do this over two or more days, as long as the tomatoes are brought to the boil and kept hot for a while before bottling, and put into hot sterilised jars.

The result:
Bottling my own tomatoes at home has reduced the amount of far-away foods in our diet, reduced our tomato costs by half, made us more resilient, reduced waste, and they taste better than factory-bottled ones. It was an enjoyable time with family, with all of us appreciating the process and the results.

Raising pigs for meat and lard

September 25, 2018September 25, 20181 Comment

Our pigs at around 12 or 13 weeks old. Healthy Wessex saddleback boars, raised in the forest with portable electric fencing.

How much time does it take to raise pigs on the homestead for meat? How much of a commitment is it? What do you need to get started? How much does it cost?…

I write this partly for myself to read next year, so that I remember how it all works, partly for others who are considering raising pigs.

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Curing Bacon and Ham without Nitrates

July 15, 2018July 15, 20182 Comments

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There are two ways of curing meat – a salty brine, or just plain salt. I will share recipes for both.

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Cutting up a pig without a saw

July 4, 2018Leave a comment

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Before our pig kill (see this post) we had discussed what we wanted to do with each part of the pig. To keep costs down, we just had the mobile butcher here on one day to do the kill, hair removing, gutting, and sawing the pigs in half and leaving them to hang for a day before we would cut them up ourselves. If we wanted him to cut them into pieces he would probably have to come back another day.

We’ve never before cut pigs up ourselves, and how we handled it is a bit different to the process I’ve seen elsewhere because we didn’t have a saw. Every other instruction around is for how to do it with a saw, so I will write about how we did this using only 6” (15cm) boning knives, and maybe a firewood axe and a good aim (depending on how the spine has been cut).

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Pig day

June 26, 20181 Comment

Our 6 month old Wessex saddleback boar pigs

The next few photos are of the pig slaughtering process, with commentary, to help others who want to raise their own meat or understand a process that has mostly been forgotten in modern times.

Our pigs have lived happy lives in the paddock above for the past few months. They have been able to express their pig-ness, and have enjoyed a diet of acorns, whey, scraps, and local gmo-free grains. Their natural behaviour is to search for roots in the ground with their snouts, turning over some of the soil in a gentle way, and also manuring it. They feed the soil life and prepare the ground for new plants to grow.

Vegetarians might want to stop reading this now.
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Spiced Elderberry Oxymel (a herbal cold and flu medicine)

May 16, 2018May 13, 20181 Comment

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Here is a simple way to make a healthy medicine for the cold months ahead. I can’t say enough good things about elderberries, and this way of preserving them for the winter can be used either as a daily boost to health to prevent colds and flus, or as something taken when you are sick to relieve the symptoms and get rid of the cold or flu quickly. This recipe is cheap to make, using stuff that’s always in my kitchen.

You will need:
Elderberries
Optional spices (see step 3)
Raw apple cider vinegar
Raw honey

1. First you will need to find an elderberry tree in fruit. I found these in the first month of autumn and in the garden of an old homestead we were visiting. Sometimes trees are on the side of the road, or branches are hanging over someone’s fence. Elder trees are beautiful to look at and many people have them growing in their garden as ornamentals that don’t end up being harvested. They’re supposed to be quite easy to grow, and the leaves and branches are good goat food.

Photo credit: here

2. Carefully harvest the bunches of fruits off the trees, gather as much as you’re likely to use. I started with around 2 litres of loosely packed bunches and ended up with around 1300ml of oxymel.

3. Wash the berries and gently strip the berries from the twigs into a cooking pot, it doesn’t matter if a few small twigs get in too. Mix in a small amount of water (for around 1200ml of berries at this stage I added half a cup). Add some spices now if you wish, I added 1/2 inch of grated fresh ginger, a pinch of ground cloves, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.

4. Bring the berries to the boil with the lid on, then remove the lid and continue to cook, while squashing the berries with a wooden spoon to extract the juice and evaporate some of the water. Do this for 10-20 minutes, being careful to not evaporate too much of the liquid, until it looks like you’ve squashed the berries as much as they can be squashed.

5. Filter the juice through a fine mesh sieve, then continue to squash the berries into the sieve to extract the last of the juice. Pour the juice into a measuring cup or jar to see how much you have. I ended up with 400ml of juice. Allow the juice to cool down to a blood-warm temperature.

6. When you can put some of the juice on the inside of your wrist without it hurting, pour the juice into a mixing bowl and add the same volume of raw cider vinegar and raw honey, so that you have 1 part elderberry juice, 1 part cider vinegar, and 1 part honey.

7. Pour into sterilised jars and store in a fairly cold and dry place. Take 1 tablespoon at a time, either on its own or mixed with water. It’s also good mixed with boiling water as a hot drink.

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Nostalgia

May 4, 2017Leave a comment

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We’ve moved into our house in the forest. We haven’t built the mud room/wood storage area yet so every morning I tromp towards the door in my muddy boots and leave bottles of fresh goat milk on the doorstep before taking my boots off.

During my husband’s childhood milk was still delivered each day in glass bottles, a layer of cream would rise to the top. The bottles would be washed and returned, reused again and again. In my childhood memory is milk still being delivered, but by then it was homogenised and in plastic-lined cartons. The old system of reusing the glass bottles was not done with any thoughts of sustainability, it was just the way things were. It made sense to reuse bottles rather than throwing everything into landfill, or throwing it in the recycling pile to be melted down and turned into another single-use plastic item with the use of a lot of energy. At some point in time it became so cheap to simply make new things all the time, and it became so easy to just throw everything in landfill without a thought that the culture of reuse stopped. This happened more recently with a raw milk farm we were buying from, the farmer decided it was taking too much time to clean the bottles and started using single-use plastic bottles. No thought is given to how much time it took for the oil to form in the earth to make this plastic, how long it will take to break down in landfill, how much time it would take to create these bottles if the specialised bottle-making machines were to break down, or what the end result will be of all the tiny particles of plastic seeping into our soil and water, all that is thought of is the inconvenience of washing something versus the perception of an easy and quick solution.

One of the earliest lightbulbs ever made still functions today. The businesses that made lightbulbs quickly realised that they would make more money if their products had to be bought again and again, rather than being made to last.

The other day I saw an advertisement on an ice cream fridge for a new flavour of ice cream. I could only see half the name and thought it said “red vegetable”. The corporation had become so desperate for new and exciting things that they were now trying to make vegetable flavoured ice creams, to appeal to people seeking new things for the sake of the newness of things. It turns out it wasn’t really red vegetable flavour, but I’ll remember it because it prompted some nostalgic thoughts about the amount of foods around when we were growing up. We had treats sometimes, but it was usually in small quantities, and it usually was a particular thing or another, to be eaten as a treat, rather than eaten because it was new and we had to try it. I don’t remember there being any overweight or obese children growing up in the 80s and 90s.

Autumn leaves now drift gently down from the trees while cold winds stir the evergreens, bringing cold gusts of air while the sun radiates the last warmth of summer. Night falls earlier and earlier every day. Soon our wood stove will be ready and our nights will be warmed with fire.

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Autumn Leaves and Hearth Fires

April 5, 2016October 31, 2016Leave a comment

The leaves are falling off the trees today. The wind isn’t particularly strong, the day not much different from the last few, it’s just a combination of things that tell the trees it’s time to go to bed. My oldest son climbs up the apple tree to harvest apples, I never see him happier than when he’s harvesting fruit and vegetables, he used to harvest potatoes with me and would jump up and down with excitement whenever one was unearthed.

Today we’ve lit the fire for the first time this year. It’s only for the warmth it brings to this house and the wonder of watching the flames dance and hearing the quiet roar of the fire. There is nothing quite like working with wool on the couch with the flames in the background and listening to the noises that it makes. In the house we build fire will be more important, it will cook our food and heat our water, as it did for our ancestors in more sensible times.

I am working on a jumper for the son I wrote of earlier. I’ve never knitted a pullover before, or anything in the round, or anything beyond the simplest of patterns, but the body of it is finished and I’m part way through the first sleeve, learning this from books. I learned to knit through internet videos and library books, and it gives me hope for other traditional skills, that if we put our hearts and minds to it there are enough resources around to teach us how.