Tag: vegetables

Reflections on homesteading and self sufficiency, and our journey over the past two years

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Around two years ago I wrote a big update about what we were up to, and our homesteading plans for the next year or so. There have been so many changes and reflections since then, so here is an update some changes here, and on our progress with self reliance and growing food on old logging land.

Changes

New baby
Born in April 2024. She is beautiful and healthy and loves homemade cheese.

No hay, no cow
Every year in my memory, hay has been easy to find, and relatively cheap, so I had figured we could rely on bought hay to feed a cow while we worked on transforming parts of our land into pasture. With dry weather in the springtime, and possibly also from the media constantly bombarding everyone talking about how dry it is going to be here for the next few years, hay was extremely scarce, and I’d never seen anything like this before. If hay could be found, $20 for a square bale was considered cheap, $30 being the usual price, and round bales were extremely hard to find. Even lucerne, which is irrigated and has never changed in price much in the past is was selling for $45 a square bale.

I am glad that we had the sense to attempt to secure a years’ supply of hay before we found a cow. Not getting a cow was a bit of a setback, but nowhere near as bad as it would have been if we had a cow and found that we couldn’t feed her.

The hay supply problems have really brought home the importance of being self reliant in animal feed. I was reading the “5 Acres and a Dream” book a while ago and admire that animal feed self sufficiency has always been one of their top priorities. Animal feed is often taken for granted, but in times like these, it reminds me to never take anything for granted. Animal feed self reliance has become a bigger priority for us.

I’ve stopped selling food at markets
I liked the idea of helping to create a local food system and a cash-only business, but found it was interfering with actual self sufficiency, and it was annoying my family.

I can’t drive, so to get to the larger market, I would have to get all the children up, and my husband would drive all of us to the market, and they would sit in the van playing board games and reading while I had my stall. The market organisers started getting fussy about wanting all stallholders to stay until the official end of the market, even if my stall had sold out, or if the market was really slow, making it a much longer day that it could have been. In winter the goats were nowhere to be found before daylight and wouldn’t come when they were called, and sometimes I was also running late, so I was having to go to the market without milking, and then do the milking when we got back from the market at 2pm. The goat’s milk supply decreased.

My heart was not in it, and I started feeling happy whenever I had a reasonable excuse to not be at the market – one month I was sick, the next month there was a problem with one of our dogs, the month after something else, and the way I was feeling about going to that market was starting to feel like the way I felt when I used to have a 9-5 job. I enjoy baking, but I don’t enjoy standing around for 5 hours dealing with customers.

The smaller market closer to home I kept going to for a while longer, but felt frustrated a lot of the time because most of the people going to it were not going there to support a localised economy, but going to it as a social event while they continued relying on food from the supermarket. In the end I decided I’d rather be homesteading, so I decided to stop going to that market as well.

Producing enough sauerkraut and kimchi for the market also was making me less appreciative of the vegetables that we were growing ourselves: when I am making larger amounts of ferments, what we were producing in the garden seemed like a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of vegetables I needed to bring in for the fermenting business, and when there are bulk carrots and cabbages in the larder left over from the kimchi making, it’s sensible to eat those first, before they go bad, before we harvest the roots growing in the garden, so the roots in the garden kept getting left until later and not appreciated as much as they should have been.

The whole market experience reminded me of an episode of “The Good Life” when Tom discovers that he’s actually really good at pottery, and has a bunch of people wanting to buy his crafts, in the end, he decides his heart is in self sufficiency, and that the pottery business was sidetracking him from where he really wanted to be.

Changes of plans bringing inspiration

After experiencing the issues with the hay and the market stall, I began to see more where my heart really is. Sometimes it might be important to remind myself of what I don’t want to be doing, before I can understand once again where I really want to be. Self sufficiency has been what propelled me to start this life, and the thought of creating a self-sustaining system that feeds us, feeds our animals, and grows the soil is what sends shivers of excitement down my spine.

With the market stuff, I lost sight of this focus for a short time. Getting debt-free, and having a cash income that doesn’t rely on the internet are both good goals to have, and can help towards the goal of self sufficiency, but where my heart really is, is in not relying on money at all, and providing for our own needs, and that is how I want to live my life.

Self sufficiency priorities for the year ahead

Potatoes
For many years here I grew all our own potatoes, and they were a big staple food for my family. In 2023, when my husband started getting inflammation reactions to potatoes, they became less of a priority, I focused on other crops, did not give the potatoes the attention they deserved, and for the first year in many we didn’t not grow all the potatoes that we needed. Last year, I started with new seed potatoes, and we’ve had all the potatoes we need, plus some to use for this year’s seed potatoes

I planted them a bit close together last time I think, with around 2 feet between rows it doesn’t give much space for hilling them up. This year I’ll either plant in rows spaced 3 feet apart, or put a double row down the middle of our 5 feet wide garden beds.

Fermenting vegetables
Turnips and daikon radish are easily-grown fermenting crops, and we are growing lots of these. I am getting better at growing carrots every year too. Cabbages I am not going to bother with much this year. I’ve recently heard that zucchini put through a mandolin can be used for kimchi, so this is something I’m keen on trying too.

Vegetables in general
Vegetables are a more efficient use of a small amount of land when compared to grains. I still grow grains in the garden, but mainly for the purpose creating organic matter to feed the soil.

Animals
We’ve slowly been replacing our hybrid brown laying hens with Australorps and mongrels, with the hope of having more broody hens and chicks, and hens that thrive on homemade feed. Last year none of them went broody, so we are planning to get some sikie bantam hens to hatch the eggs.

We’ve started keeping pigs every year again. For a while we had a breeding sow and a young boar, but that didn’t work out, so for now we will rely on buying piglets from other homesteaders. Maybe we will have things better set up later on and will be able to keep some breeding pigs in future, but it’s not something I want to do again unless we’ve got a better rotational system set up and are growing more of their food.

Dairy self sufficiency was going really well last year but has recently suffered a big setback that I don’t want to go into detail about. This is always a big priority for us so we will find a way through it, and I’ll go more into detail about this when things are looking more settled than they are now.

A new system in the top garden
Two years ago I was working with 75cm (30”) beds, with each section of the garden containing eight of these beds, which were part of a four year rotation. While this was good for confusing pests and having more diversity in the garden, it was easy for weeds to creep in from the paths, harder to delegate garden work, harder to harvest, and harder to irrigate where it was needed.

Last year I observed the patterns of the irrigation sprinklers and divided the garden up into twelve ‘fields’ made up of 3 150cm (60”) by 5 to 6 metre (19’) long beds, with paths in between. Each of these fields can be irrigated by one sprinkler. The paths are sown to clover, which can be used to feed the garden beds, and provide living roots in the soil year-round for mycorrhizal fungi, while keeping weed pressure down.

If sheep sorrel and other weeds continue being a problem, the new field system can be scratched over by chickens, one field at a time, and we can also focus our weeding efforts on one area at a time.

Although not quite as diverse as the old system, this new system is still not a monoculture. It’s done on a tiny scale, I grow companion plants with my main crops, and I have perennials around the edges of the garden, along with the clover on the paths. It’s been a lot easier to manage than the old system.

Animal feed
Hay and grain in large quantities continues to mostly be something that is more easily done on a larger scale than ours for now, but I am figuring out ways to produce more of it here, even if it takes a few years. This year we got an acre and a bit cleared, which we sowed to pasture and are in the process of fencing off from wallabies. I am also planting more tagasaste and other trees to use for animal feed.

Reflections on self sufficiency priorities

Reflecting on my post in mid-2023, I wonder if I was approaching things in the wrong way. I think we can achieve a lot more self sufficiency if we produce more of what we are already producing well, and rely more on that. It might sound simple to say this, but in practise it is easy to just eat what we are used to eating and to want to produce that, rather than focusing on being more self sufficient with our current situation, even if it’s not 100%. So far we’ve been replacing some butter by drinking more goats milk and eating more goats cheese. We had five does in milk last year. I made cheese every day or two, and I also made a lot of gjetost. Once we got out of the habit of having butter and gjetost together, the bread is fine with gjetost alone and a glass of milk, and we don’t go through as much butter this way.

It feels awesome to be more self sufficient and to be grateful for what we do have.

I still am dreaming of cows, pasture, workhorses, field crops, sheep, and more, and maybe we’ll get some of that (or all) in time. The way I am approaching this is to be a bit slower about it, to be more observant of the land, to keep our true goals in mind, and to use the land we have wisely, dedicating more space to staples like turnips, carrots, and potatoes, and less to experimental crops.

Successes and failures last season


Over the years I’ve been encouraging the dandelions with the biggest tastiest leaves to flower and spread. This success turned one failure into not as much of a failure.

With the 2024 busy spring planting season taken up by focusing on larger crops that needed to be planted on time and tending garden areas further away, I didn’t stay on top of succession planting of greens. Once the overwintered mustard greens and kale all bolted to seed, and the earliest plantings of salad and stir fry greens were finished, we didn’t have much left in the garden to eat.

While some of the chicken tractor beds sat idle, the dandelions thrived, providing us with lots of nutritious greens. There are so many dandelions now that if I can get over the outrage of ripping perfectly good dandelion plants out of the ground I’ll be able to harvest the roots to cut up finely, roast, and make into roasted dandelion tea.

Our root crops went a lot better than the previous year because I’ve stayed on top of weeding and thinning, and not felt bad every time I cull perfectly good carrot seedlings to let the other ones have more space to grow.

The garden is feeding us
I felt anxious here and there over last spring. There was so much overgrown, so much to plant, urgent fence repairs needed to stop naughty goats, clearing took longer than expected, and some things got delayed. After our failures the year before with not producing much in the way of potatoes or roots, it brought a lot of joy to be harvesting turnips, broad beans, snow peas, new potatoes, followed by garlic, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, pumpkins, mustard greens, salads, swedes, and lots more potatoes and turnips.

It’s hard to find balance between not pushing myself enough, and feeling stressed and worried that there’s not enough being done. It’s something I need to work on, and I’m getting better with it over time.

The best way to make stir fry

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Stir fry is one of those basic meals that is often overlooked. My way of making it is a bit different to most, and I don’t think I’ve posted a recipe for how I make one anywhere, so I’ll share it here.

Ingredients

My formula is usually something like:

1 part onions or leeks

1 part carrots

2 parts turnip or cabbage

1 to 2 parts dark leafy greens

A bit of garlic and maybe some ginger

However much meat we’d normally eat in a meal

Some lard or tallow, for cooking

Maybe some coconut aminos, and maybe some cider vinegar and honey


Method

1. Cook rice

If you’re serving this with rice, first get the rice fully cooked. Keep it warm while you cook the stir fry.

2. Chop vegetables

Next, get all your vegetables chopped and ready. For most meals I don’t do this, I just chop stuff up as other things get cooked, but stir fry cooks very quickly and needs a lot of hands-on attention, so it’s easiest to just get everything chopped up and ready to throw in the pan before you begin cooking.

3. Cook meat

After that, cook your meat. This is where I probably do things a lot differently to most people, but I really like the results from doing it this way – there’s no doubt about whether the meat is cooked through or not, no overcooking the vegetables, the meat gets browned and not boiled, and cooked meat is easier to chop up than raw meat. You can either use steaks such as round, rump, or topside, of some sort or mince (ground beef). Boneless skinless pork goes well in this stir fry too.

To cook the meat, heat your pan over medium-high heat and add enough lard to coat the base of it. When a drop of water jumps up in a lively, noisy way when dropped onto the hot fat, it’s ready to cook. Put whole steaks on the fat (or meatball-sized chunks, if using mince) and sprinkle with salt and pepper Cook on one side without moving them until juices start to run off the steak and into the pan. Flip over and cook the other side until juices rise to the top for beef, allow slightly longer than this if you’re cooking pork or chicken. 

Put the meat in a bowl and allow it to rest for a couple of minutes, then cut it across the grain into thin slices or bite-sized pieces, return to the bowl so that any meat juices stay with the meat.

For the stir fry in the photos, I used misshapen bits of pork loin that I’d messily butchered, they were thicker in some places than a steak, so I just roasted it instead of frying it. You can also just use leftover bits of roast meat.

4. Cook vegetables, then add cooked meat

Next, add a bit more fat to the pan and throw in the onions. Stir them around a bit until they start to soften and smell nice. Next throw in the carrots, stir them around until they are hot all the way through. Next add turnips or cabbage, and garlic, if using, stir around until this is hot all the way through, then throw in the greens and a dash of salt. Stir everything around until it is cooked through, then add in the meat and the meat juices. Taste, and add any other flavourings – for this pork stir fry I used a big chunk of honey, about half that amount in coconut aminos, and then a dash of cider vinegar.

Serve on its own, or on top of rice, with a scoop of fermented vegetables on the side. Sprinkle with chilli flakes (red pepper flakes) if you want to make it a bit spicier.

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Root cellaring without a root cellar: Simple off-grid food storage

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buckets of vegetables packed in leaves

You may be wondering why I have three buckets of leaves in my laundry…

This is how I store root cellar vegetables through the winter:

1. Gather dry leaves in autumn

It can be a bit tricky here some years finding the right time when the leaves have fallen but have not become a sodden mess from autumn rains. I’ve used both maple leaves and blackwood leaves, and both work well, as long as they are dry. Any kind of fallen dry leaves will probably work. Leaves can be stored in old feedsacks in a dry place until needed.

2. Select the right vegetables in perfect condition.

Don’t store any that have cracks or bruises, or any that are missing their crowns. Suitable vegetables include beetroot, carrot, parsnip, turnip, swede/rutabaga, and other roots.

3. Pack a layer of leaves at least 1” thick in the bottom of a bucket or 55 gallon drum.

Top with a layer of roots, making sure they don’t touch. Cover with enough leaves so that you can no longer see the roots, then top with another layer of roots, repeat until you get to the top of the bucket. It’s best not to put the lid on the bucket, as this can cause condensation to drip down, but if you need to store your roots somewhere where mice might get to them then you may have to use the lid – just make sure you have an extra thick layer of leaves on the top and on the bottom if this is the case.

4. Store in a cool place. 

I use an unheated room in my house that is easily closed off from the rest of the house and does not get sunlight during the winter. The ideal temperature for root cellaring is between 0ºC and 10ºC (32ºF to 50ºF), but up to 15ºC (60ºF) and even a little higher will still work – it just won’t store for quite as long as it would at lower temperatures.

The benefits of root cellaring, even if you don’t grow all your own vegetables:

Food security

By storing vegetables for weeks or months, it means we have more food in the house, for longer, so we are not affected by supply disruptions and other issues that seem to be happening frequently these days. It also means we don’t have to go food shopping as often.

Saving money

When we don’t grow enough vegetables of our own, I buy vegetables in bulk directly from the farm and it works out less than half the price of buying in the shops.

Extending the season of local vegetables

There is a “hungry gap” in many places when the local farms run out of many storage vegetables before the new season vegetables are ready. For growing our own vegetables, root cellaring means I can get the vegetables out of the ground and use the space for a green manure crop or other crop earlier than I could otherwise, or I can pull them out before they bolt to seed in the springtime and still have root vegetables on the table for a few more weeks. By root cellaring, I can keep storage vegetables around for just that little bit longer. Beetroots seem to keep the best out of everything I have tried, but all root vegetables will keep in this way for some time.

Other vegetables, and how to store them without electricity

potato clamp

• Potatoes don’t need to be packed in leaves – just store them in hessian bags, paper sacks, or cardboard boxes and keep them in a very dark, fairly cool place. In climates with mild winters, potatoes can be stored outdoors in a “clamp” – just put straw or hay on the ground, heap with dry, undamaged potatoes, cover with a thick layer of straw or hay, and then cover with dirt.

• Onions and garlic also don’t need leaves – just keep them loose in an airy, dry, fairly cool place. They like to be hung up high if possible. For our homegrown garlic, I plait it and hang it up when I can, or store it loose in a single layer in a box. For the onions that I buy, I keep them in netted bags, hung up from the edges of shelves.

sauerkraut and kimchi in fido jars

• Fermenting is an excellent way to store vegetables while increasing the nutritional value – either grate or shred vegetables such as cabbage and turnip and mix with salt for them to make their own brine, these vegetables, along with most other vegetables can be preserved whole or in slices in a salty brine. Make sure you use enough salt to ensure that they keep well – between 2% and 3% of the vegetable weight is usually a good amount. Keep in a cool place. Many fermented vegetables will keep for a year or more. See my instructions for fermenting vegetables here: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2016/04/18/7-secrets-to-making-successful-sauerkraut-every-time/

• As well as being fermented, cabbages will keep for a month or two loose on a slatted shelf (the outside layer of leaves might start to go bad, but the insides will be fine), for longer storage, the stems can be planted in soil or damp sand.

• Pumpkin/winter squash likes to be kept fairly dry and a little bit warmer than root cellar vegetables, at around 10ºC to 13ºC (50ºF to 55ºF). I am still learning and experimenting with how to best grow and store this tasty vegetable, so feel free to comment with any tips that you have for storing it well, or growing and storing any vegetables well for that matter.

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Building a better world… with tomatoes and goats

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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.

Peas

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“I am very good at hide and seek and so are peas, that’s why I’m so good at finding them”

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Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Salad with Cheese

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I’ve never successfully made a hard cheese with a natural rind before.

On a biodynamic fruit day, back when we still had Buttercup the cow, I mixed some of her milk with some of our goats milk, cultured it, sort-of followed an asiago recipe (I am not so good with all the continuous stirring), pressed it, salted it, and put it in the makeshift cheese cave to age. Roughly once a week, mostly on other biodynamic fruit days, I would tend to the cheese. I would rub more salt on it, brush it, to keep the growth of some things in check, and to help it form a rind. For months I looked at this cheese every week, wondering what it would taste like.

After around five months I cut into it. It’s probably the best cheese we’ve ever tasted!

Today I made this salad with it. Feta is really good in this, as is any hard cheese, or you can use chopped walnuts instead. This is a good salad to make ahead of time, it will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, just make sure the squash has fully cooled down before you add it to the spinach.

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Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Salad with Cheese
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Strategies to move away from cities: Market gardening in small spaces

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Photo credit: here

One of the things many folks struggle with when wanting to move to rural areas is income. Since the increased mechanisation of farming less people are needed to work in mainstream farming operations, and there aren’t many jobs available in these areas. People in cities often feel trapped in them, under the assumption that they need a typical ‘job’ in the country in order to move there.

For most people, a move to the country will involve needing to find a local source of income. Market gardening offers us the opportunity to create our own secure jobs in rural areas.
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