One of the houses on our land has been gathering lots of gunk in the gutters as well as having some pieces needing a good mend.
Guttering time!
Most was done by moving ladder, ascending, de-gunking, descending, moving ladder. Rinse, repeat. Brushing where I couldn`t quite reach, spraying with the hose to blow the rest into the downpipes. Most of the gunk went into a tub to join a compost somwhere. Much fun was had, as standing in ladders doing work makes me tingle a bit. In a good, but still decent way, of course.
Mother dearest has a beautiful garden with all kinds of flowers, including a patch of lavender I was quite lucky to be able to harvest from.
Did also grab a few live plants as well as some seeds, both to be planted near the beehives to give my little girls some nice smelling treats.
Hung my bunches in the hallway where I do most of my drying, where I have a fan making a soft breeze to speed the process _slightly_.
Steve Mendez wrote:We are in the process of making 6 gallons (23 liters) of wine. This is our first attempt at winemaking and so far everything is proceeding according to plan. It will be ready to bottle in December
Plum wine! That sound amazing. I hope you will bless us with pictures of the colour and a description of the taste when it's ready to be sampled.
We don't usually get wine amounts of plums, but we _do_ get enough blackcurrants. Made 20liters last year as a first attempt at wine making. We read the sweetness meter up side dowm and thought a mid-range sweet wine was dry, so we added extra sugar. Now we have lots of bottles of what turned out an amazing dessert wine :p
I just wanted to share one of my favourite recipes for gluten free bread in hopes of trading for other recipes.
A lot of the gf bread to be found in stores or bakeries often end up way too dry, or with that "gluten free" taste and texture that large amounts of white rice flours give.
This is my edit of a recipe that originally comes from the Norwegian language gf baking book "Ekte Brød" (real bread) by Kristin Granli and is a treat to work with, wait for, and eat!
I have found that as long as I keep the ratio of lighter to heavier flours and grains balanced with the wets a lot of experimentation can be done with which flours to use. Also trying different wets will do good stuff. Substituting whey for the sour milk was a great success. Using both made for an awfully sour bread
For two loaves:
Dries:
Buckwheat flakes 1 cup
Buckwheat flour 1cup
Oats 2 cup (originally 1 cup as well as 1 cup of white rice flour, but adding extra oats and removing the white rice works wonders for the taste!)
Tapioca starch 2 cup
Brown rice flour 2 cup
Teff flour 1/2 cup (I am always out of teff, so quite often corn flour is my go to here)
salt 3sp
pofibers/potato starch 4tbsp (have tried corn starch to great success too!)
xanthan gum 4 tsp
psyllium 2 tbsp
powdered yeast 2tsp
dried nettle 2tbsp
Pumkin seeds 3 tbsp
Wets:
Cold water 3 cups
Sour milk 1 1/4 cups
Sour dough 6 tbsp
vinegar 2 tbsp
Oil 6 tbsp
Eggs 2 (If you want to go vegan it works very well with whatever egg replacement you`re used to.)
Honey 2 tsp
Your preferred pan greaser
Oats, buckwheat or the seed of your choice for decoration
Mix the dries and wets separately before mixing it all together.
Let rest for a few minutes to let the psyllium swell for a bit before mixing a bit more.
Divide into two greased bread pans and smooth it all over with a spatula.
Grab your topping and spread it all over like a crazy person.
Cover the pans and put in a cool place over night.
Pre heat your oven to 400f and bake for about 45 minutes.
Get them out of the oven and remove the pans, putting the loaves back in for 10 minutes.
Cool on a grate, and wait until completely cooled until slicing.
Angela: that butter looks amazing. I am loving the addition of cinnamon and cardamom to the plums. Both warm flavours that I`d expect would work well with the sour sweetness of my plums! Sadly, no lemon or lemony things about, so this one is noted for later!
Abraham, Phil: Inspired by you both I ventured into the unexplored land of making prunes with the thought of heading over the top into Saladito valley. I definitely left the plums in the oven for WAY to long, so they went far past soft prunes into something akin to sun dried tomato-territory. Still tasty, but I think I left the chance for Saladitos behind a few hours before rescuing from the oven the driest prunes I have had the joy of encountering.
Dried plums ain`t all bad, and a lesson about diy prunes is made. Still a win!
John: the Dakota Kuchen looks absolutely amazing. Am without pie pans, but I am definitely keeping this for later as it is a very good excuse to get some There was an attempt at plum jam that turned into two kinds of plum sauce.
One "asian" style with chili, ginger, garlic and onion that turned out pretty alright. I might have been sampling it through the evening yesterday to get that slight burn that is working remarkably well with the plum taste!
The other I added some of the rum pickle juice from my initial post, and some licorice root and kept at a low boil for some minutes more. To my licorice-addicted taste buds, that was an absolute success. Just a tea spoon of powdered licorice root into about 0.5l of the sauce went a long way!
Barbara: Kolaches. Never heard of them, and they look really simple, so I had to try! As my nest mate has celiac disease I had to find a gf version. Did, and while I fudged mixing the flours to get a substitute (gf living is a lot of experimentation for a lad who`s been living the wheat life) and ended up with a dough that didn`t get as airy as it looks on the pictures, the taste is marvellous. Did a splotch of the sweet licorice-infused plum sauce and despite a slightly hard crust: WOW. This is definitely a part of my recipe book from now on. Yum.
Tereza: How do I plum vinegar? I am a vinegar making virgin, so I know nothing about this. Do you just add plums to vinegar?
Jay: That looks delicious! Plums work remarkably well for making savoury sauces, and this looks just perfect for my cheese habit :O How do you reckon adding some hot peppers as well to make a plummy hot sauce?
Last winter got a bit too snowy for our single plum tree, and the poor thing broke several branches from the weight. This year it`s been healing good, but no fruit. *sadface*
But a friend in need is a friend indeed, and our friend Linn took her wonderful little dog, Tarek, to visit. They brought 10 liters of plums for us!
Plums are tasty. Yum. But eating ten plums a day for several days will make me need more friends who want their natural medicine straw badges (I see a D word on the Quinn list)....
So far I have rum-pickled 28 of them. That doesn`t seem to actually make much of a difference with the actual amount of plums we have. I will probably make another batch.
But we can`t rum pickle all of them! I crave variation!
Therefore I turn to y`all. Some of you beautiful permies and horticulturalists and doomsday preppers and pickling connoisseurs and what have you will probably have THE BEST way of storing plums!
What`s your special go-to super high quality awesome tasting recipe for keeping your plums delicious over the winter?
Come share your recipes with me! Please?
As a trade, my rum-pickle recipe:
28 plums.
3.cups / 0.75l of water
1 1/5 cups / 3 dl sugar (I used the whitest of sugars, but am quite sure other sweeteners will do.
0.5 Cup / 1 dl brown rum.
(I have tried translating my silly metrics to your supreme post metric system. Please forgive any inconsistencies.)
Welcome witches, hello herbalists, greetings ginger enthusiasts.
Gather round and witness the creation of a wonderous salve, a magnificent cure for all ailments, a permacultural panacea!
GINGER ROOT SALVE!
I travelled far and wide to find the ginger for my salve *
And the rapeseed it has granted it`s magic even from further and wider aways.**
The wax I am gifted from the familiars of our coven, the beautiful busy bees spear-headed by their queens the fair Euphemia and the belligerent Maude! ¤
A recipe I was granted by my teacher P.Ahnert from her alchemical grimoire.¤¤
Too powerful was her salve, and my force is not as strong, so this is a mere shadow of hers. £
Two score seven of fiery oil!
Halfscore two of wax!
Heated on the fires of hell! ££
Fear its power! @
*(45 minutes to the store. at least 10 minutes in the store and 45 minutes back again. A proper voyage!)
** (The ecological rapeseed oil is from a store about a minutes walk away from where I got the ginger. Which adds at least two minutes of journeying...)
¤(We had three hives last year [now four!], and wax here was scrapings from two of them)
¤¤(Beehive Alchemy. A great addition to your bookshelf if you want to do things with wax!)
£(I halved it due to not having enough oil for a full batch)
££(Our wood fired oven)
@(I haven`t really tried it yet, but ginger is great for a lot of things, so I have faith in this`n)
Now that I actually discovered we had calendula in our garden, I picked what was available and am ready to make all the calendula things!
I have made some lip balm before, but no salves, so this was an interesting experiment.
The recipe for salve is from Petra Ahnert`s "Beehive Alchemy". The book is filled with a lot of great things to make out of gifts from honey bees. Honey, propolis and wax, oh my!
Recipe is 79% herb-infused oil, 20% beeswax, 1% vitamin E oil. That latter to increase the salve`s shelf life, but I want to see how long it`s going to keep without extra stuff, so I just cut that out.
Book says 95g oil, 24g wax, but that`d use all my oil! :O Wanting to keep oil for other things, I did something akin to halving. PLan WAS halving, but the pouring went a bit overboard, so I tried scaling up a bit. Hopefully it works!
I had no idea what calendula was until I happened to see the latin name of a plant we have in our garden. Calendula Officinalis! "Ringblomst" (Ring flower) in Norwegian.
To my luck there was a handful of flowers left, despite it being quite late in the season around here!
As with all my other oils, I infused the calendula in rapeseed, which is a favourite of mine. The teacher in my beekeeping class also did herbal remedies and was quite convinced rapeseed was the bee`s knees for northern skin and skin care.
My attempts at oil infusion for BBs have previously all been cold infusion - standing in the kitchen window for two weeks - and I wanted to try warm infusion as I want to try to make Calendula Salve.
So for the method: Calendula flowers went into a bottle. Poured in enough oil to cover and then some. Heated oven to 150C and put the bottle in it. Turned off oven.
Here is where I think it went the wrong way: there is a fan in the oven that turns on to cool it, and trying to counter that I put the oven to 50C for a little while - this was just enough to cause a lot of movement in the oil. Is this supposed to happen? is it good? Is it bad?
I am not quite sure how this went. It mixed alright and smells OK, but I am unsure about what the oil going muddy means. Some years ago I tried making oil mixtures with the hot method and that stayed clear.
Does the muddied colour mean that something went wrong?
I have read that warm infusion will not have the same amount of the good stuff as cold infusion, and am prepared for that, but would over heating do anything to the oil to make it "bad" somehow?
I do like the way it looks, but seing as all the other oils have come out clearer, it makes me wonder.....
Is there any of you wonderful permie-herbalists who have any input?
Mandatory I got this ginger from the store, seeing as ginger sadly does not grow well in Norway.
I chopped the ginger and put in a pot with water.
Boiled it up and let it infuse for 7 minutes under a lid.
Straight into cup, including all the bits since I really like chewing on them.
Added a dash of the syrup I made just before making the infusion.
Tastes alright, and helped clear out my clogged nostrils with its gingeriness!
Inspired by all the candied ginger snacks (YUM!) over here, I wanted to do the same.
I took two fingers of ginger - peeled by scraping a knife all over - cut them in nice flat slices - put in pot with some water- boiled it up once to remove some bitterness from the ginger.
Drained and strained
Added just enough water to cover the ginger in the pot (3/4 cup)-mixed in the same amount of brown sugar (3/4 cup)
heated sloooowly until simmering then lowered temperature to keep at just above simmering temperature
kept on until syrup reached a thickness close to where I wanted it
removed ginger
continued simmering the ginger until syrupy thick
bottled
Sampled some of both the candies and the syrup and both taste great!
It`s already doing good things to my throat. I am looking forward to creating more syrups. For next time I will probably stop the process a bit earlier. If the syrup is bottled it might be a tad too thick to actually drip out! This would probably work better in a jar.
Ginger is a staple in my kitchen. I do a lot of gingery "power shots" and as flavouring for sauces and teas it is absolute invaluable. Large roots do not stay large for long here! Sadly, though, our climate does not open much up for growing ginger without a greenhouse, and our greenhouse is yet to be built. This then, is purchased from the supermercado in the local town centre.
The oil is rapeseed. Given enough time, I am hoping to grow my own rapeseed for oil as well, but with everything happening at the same time when trying to establish the farm, that`s not really prioritized.
But the future will hopefully hold home pressed oil!
Text for textile toolbox:
I have so many things that need mending. And so many things to mend them with. But still no good place to keep them. UNTIL NOW!
I love thyme. It tastes great, it smells even better, and it holds an endless capacity for puns.
Also good in infusions. I was a bit worried about my stomach after reading Mk Neal over me here, as I have a history of my bowels being pretty shite. But this worked out well for me!
This addendum to atone for my edging: The nettles, freshly cut!
Edit: Also my Editing is going wild. Can we delete this picture and just keep to the one I added to the original post? Don`t want to clutter up the place! :O
I sent my water sample to http://www.sunnlab.no, a local laboratory specializing in water quality testing.
Getting the results back we have a higher level of coliforms than is healthy, and the lab specifies in an email that our water is "not to be considered good drinking water". As we`re working towards a market garden and there are requirements for properly clean water for this, stuff needs to be done! Our plan is installing a UV filter system. It is a bit pricy, but will last for a long time, needs little supervision and will not use a lot of power. Optimally our choice would be a more natural way of filtering the coliforms away, but with the way we are getting our water this is not feasible without an immense amount of work. Maybe in time. But for now we`re going with the tech-option.
Everything written in the forms are in Norwegian - if any confusion arises I will be happy to provide translation in a follow up post.
EDIT for Edge Case clarity: Our water source is a river bringing snow/glacier melt water from the nearby mountains to us. I am told that the intake is not far from our farmstead, but it is not accessible for me. I can provide pictures of the building I believe contains the intake, but not the intake itself, or at least the river, if that will get my closer to my BB.
Submitted for your delight and approval (also apples :p ), this wonderful nettle soup!
Chopped onions and sautèed them until onions are golden
Added some garlic and a tiny bit of fresh chili
Added a big batch of nettle leaf.
When leaf were all mushy added water bit by bit and heated it all to a boil.
Turned down the heat to a minimum. Let the pot stay for a few minutes.
Smoothed it all out with a hand held mixer.
Added some cream.
Served with mushrooms (foraged in the store), chickpeas, pumpkin seeds and some spring onion,
Raspberries previously submitted for SandBB, here are my extras for the fresh list, a nice batch of Bueberries (also called bilberries at least in the UK, I think. ). For any verifiers I`d like to point your attention to the submission from Ane Draxen just above, where the differences between our "true" blueberries and the American bushel-variety, and also the approval of the submission of a forge related, but not quite there.
I picked a total of 4.59kgs of blueberries / 10.1lbs, which my math tells me would be 1 more (5) than the desired 4 duplicates from the fresh list to achieve Sand Badge, yes?
Submitted for your joy and approval: wild raspberries from our volunteer raspberry hedge along the dirt road going to the lake. This year was not the best for the raspberries, with our valley mostly being soaked in rains, but I did manage to get 550 gs on one foraging run.
Wild raspberries are probably my favourite. Sweet with just that tinge of acidity. Yumyums for the tumtums!
First BB-official oil! The Stinging Nettle cycle continues with putting parts of my lovely batch of urtica dioica in oil.
I have chosen rapeseed as it is a great flavourless carrier oil, with the added bonus that it can be grown on our fields. This one is from the store, though, as we haven`t gotten to oil manifacture yet (it`s planned for, like so many other things!)
The result smells and tastes like stinging nettle.
Lessons of the mix: beeswax wraps do not like oil. Oil soaking through the wax wrap stickied up my windowsill, and the wrap is now dead. Thankfully we have much wax and more cotton rags!
I like including the flowers as well as leaf. It adds some colour to what invariably turns a rather dull green, which makes me happy and I think it just looks more appetizing for food purposes. For medicine it`s usually long time soaked which will make sure enough of the good stuff seeps out into the carrying agent anyways.
tl;dr: Leaf dull, flowery leaf pretty
I made this tincture from parts ofthe massive batch of nettles I dried and got a BB for.
I let the leaf soak in spirits for 2-3 weeks and drained them over night, bottling only the liquid, leaving leftover leaf material to the bokashi bucket for later sacrifice to the gods of the land.
Where my fiercest competitor towards PEP-stardom up here, Ane, stay away from the flowers in the drying process, I wanted to include them. Mostly for the aesthetic effect of having deep purple bits, but also because I...uh...wanted to
All my air drying happen hung in a dark room with a low-power fan blowing, to pretty good results
Hey, NatMedPerms!
Concocting decoctions and fusing infusions from essential oils and store-bought herbs to make diverse remedies have been a favorite past time for a long time. With suddenly having access to much land for forage and growing, learning the basics is so much fun!
I picked from my garden, where the strawberries have been growing like crazy all year. They`re loving their life alongside yellow onions and asparagus! The red sweetness have mostly gone straight into my mouth (also quite a lot disappeared with my nephew when he was visiting. He didn`t even wait until they were ripe! )
Tried eating the leaves fresh. That didn`t give me alot. Might just as well dry them and see what that`s like!
"In herbal medicine the leaves of the raspberry bush is the primary ingredient. Dried or fresh leaves contain tannic acids that has astringent propeties, and can be used in a herbal infusion with a hindering effect on diarrea, heavy menstrual bleeding and v*ginal discharge. It is also excellent for menstrual cramps and can be drunk for fevers, cold and influenza. The tea can be used to gargle to soothe and heal wounds and infections in the mouth and throat, with infected tonsils. A wash with raspberry leaves can help varicose veins, burns and slow healing wounds. A cooled and filtered infusion of raspberry leaves have been used as eyedrops for conjunctivitis"
"It is though as a birth preparing remedy tea from raspberry leaf has the greatest actuality in our time. The herb has relaxing, strengthening and contracting effect, and seems especially beneficial to the wom during the last three months of pregnancy and during birth. The contracting and stimulating effect helps strengthening and tightening the muscles of the womb and abdomen, while the relaxing and more calming properties at the same time make the uterus relax.
Raspberry leaves also fortify the mucous membranes in the entire body. They effect the digestive system and may efficiently relieve nausea during pregnancy. Tea from the leaves therefore can be used to secure a safe and easy birth, and to stimulate lactation following the birth, and to ease reconvalesence. The fortifying and calming effect on the smooth musculature of the uterus contributes to relieve pains from contractions during birth, at the same time as it makes the contractions more effective, making the birth both easier and shorter, timewise. Testing in laboratories has shown that tea from raspberry leaves really affects the uterus, but as the exact mechanism of action is unknown, it is recommended that drinking such tea during pregancy is only done under medical supervision"
-From that treasure trove of herbal information, http://www.Rolv.no (Norwegian original, my translation).
Thanks, Douglas! Frankly, I have no idea, but your suggestion seems sound. It looks pretty handy for debarking and pruning purposes. I probably should have sharpened that too
The folder here was one of the rougher looking blades in my knife box - the better to be my sharpening example!
Sharpened with rough and honed with fine grit as well as using both to remove some rust and I am quite happy with how my little friend is doing now!
There was an attempt at plum jam that turned into two kinds of plum sauce.
