Ulla Bisgaard

It depends on so many things. Your climate, you micro climates, age of and how many people you are growing food for, if food production is  important to you.
I live in a warm climate, where I can grow food all year round. Because of that one of my criteria, is that all of my fruits and berries. Can’t be ready at the same time, because it creates bottlenecks in food preservation. Mine are paced out over the whole year. This means that we have fresh fruits and vegetables year round. The advantage of that, is also that your family will eat more fresh. Fresh makes for a healthier diet, and you don’t end up burned out, because you have preserved food until 4am.
I also look at growing conditions and how large and fast, their canopy develops. Some trees also have special needs, so that you have to start developing the ecosystem before you plant them. So you have to add these things into your design.
I am growing raspberries in a microclimate, in the corner of my food forest garden. I grow gooseberries and currants underneath a large pecan tree we have. That tree creates one of the largest micro climate zones in the garden. The soils and air temperature are 17F degrees lower, underneath that tree, which creates conditions where I can grow things we normally would not be able to.
The last thing I recommend is, that if you are growing fruit, you have your family taste it, before you buy the trees producing it. You don’t want to end up with a tree, that no one likes.
I have been playing around this “diagram”. It’s not completely ready yet, but it might give you something to help you decide.

Kara Ann wrote:Ditto on David's comment that this thread of post reads so well!

THANK YOU Ulla for sharing this method for preserving egg yolks - this is great to have and I have saved it so I can try it.
When you are using these salted egg yolks (sliced or grated), are you adding them as a final garnish to items being served (no further cooking)? Or also as an ingredient into food that is going to be cooked?

Since the salt kills off any bacteria, you can use it as you would cheese. Just to be on the save side, make sure to keep it dry.
I grind most of mine up. To use, I will add it to a white sauce for lasagna, or sprinkle it on top of my pasta or scrambled eggs. So you can both cook with it, or use it as is. You can also change the flavors, by mixing the salt with herbs, spices or things like mirin. It’s an ingredient often used in Asian cooking,

Kara Ann wrote:

I had completely forgotten about posting in this thread. When I reread the post I made, it made me laugh, because I am still preserving eggs.

Ulla - what you are doing is really impressive!!! As a newbie who has never heard of salted egg yolks before, would you share what you do to preserve them, and also the ways that you use them? They looked like little gems in the picture you posted earlier!

Salt cured eggs, is my goto substitute for Parmesan cheese, or cheese in general. I am allergic to dairy, and salt cured eggs are way cheaper, than buying dairy free cheese.
Here is how you make them:
Fill a container half way up, with fine salt. Use the bottom of an egg to make little indent in the salt.
Next you separate the eggs to remove the egg white. Then gently place the egg yolk in one of the indents you made. Continue doing this egg by egg, until the container is full. If an egg yolk breaks, either before or after you place it in the salt, it has to be tossed. If it’s right after placing the egg in the salt, remove all of the broken yolk with a spoon. Then add a bit of extra salt and create a new indent.
Once you container is full, with 1 and only 1 layer of egg yolks, you top up the container with salt, until the yolks are fully covered. Next they need to spend 5 to 12 days covered in the fridge to cure. The curing time, depends on how firm the egg is, and how salty you like your eggs, I leave mine for a week.
Once they are ready, take the yolk out, and either brush off the salt, or gently rinse and towel dry them. Now they can be hung on a string, by poking a needle with the string, through the egg yolk. Hand them in a cool space to finish drying completely. You can also use ann oven on its lowest setting, a dehydrator set on its lowest setting or a freeze dryer to finish drying any leftover moisture on the contact surface of the egg yolk.
Now the egg yolks are fully cured and ready to use. They can be sliced, or shredded before use. To get a bit more cheese flavor, you can add a little nutritional yeast to enhance the flavor.
You can reuse the salt up until the salt starts to liquefy, from the water drawn out of the yolks. I made around 50 this year.
The picture shared, was how they looked right after I cleaned off the salt.

I had completely forgotten about posting in this thread. When I reread the post I made, it made me laugh, because I am still preserving eggs. Because the temperatures outside have gone up, I can’t use my freeze dryer very much, this time of year because it doesn’t function very well in temperatures over 80F.
Instead I am making meals, and those are also great snacks. So far I have made a lot of egg muffins, scrambled eggs, Dutch babies, Japanese rolled omelets, frittatas and quiche. I will add a screen shot of my egg preservation.
We are getting green beans with almost every meal. Sugar snap peas, carrots and cucumbers directly from the garden is also a great snack.
Egg season is also finally over. Our chickens take a break once the hot season starts, and while they usually still lay a few eggs, we mostly depend on preserved eggs until February arrives.
We won’t run out of egg though, since we get between 2400 and 3000 eggs in a year.

Here we relay a lot of homemade convenience foods. Because of my neuropathy, I never know if I will be able to cook or not, so I do a lot of prep-work on good days.
Here is a list of what I do.
- leftovers are always portioned out and frozen
- dehydrated or freeze dried soup cubes or powders makes for a fast snack that feels like a hug from home, and they are so easy to make.
- during the season I can, dehydrate and freeze dry fruits and berries
- freeze dried mixes for dips and homemade chips is something we all love
- gluten free baking mixes, makes fast and easy cookies, muffins, brownies, rolls and so much more
- homemade pudding mixes makes for a fast and easy snack
- homemade hot cocoa mix and homemade  instant lemonade are always a hit with the kids
- canned, frozen, dehydrated meals or meal ingredients helps too
- fermented vegetables also makes for a nice snack.

There are more, but these are what I remember as of now. We are also privileged in that our climate enables us to grow food year round, so often a snack is just a short walk away.
I did do one important thing, when I planned the food forest. We didn’t just pick fruit trees based on our preferences, but also on when they are ready for harvest. There are several reasons for that. I wanted us to have access to fresh fruit and or berries all year round. Right now only November and December isn’t covered, and those will be once my sapote trees starts to produce. I grow 4 types of raspberries,  8 different kinds of strawberries, 2 types of blueberries, Boisen berries and mulberries, which gives us access to berries most of the year. By doing this, more than half of what we produce gets eaten fresh, so I have a lot less food preservation work to do. It also prevent seasonal bottlenecks in food preservation, where you rush and work against the clock to get everything preserved before it goes bad.
Canned desserts like lemon curd, pie fillings and homemade candy are also stables in my pantries. Homemade granola bars and hot cereal mixes are also a stable.
In a way, our food production is centered around eating fresh and what’s in season, while minimizing the amount of work needed. I keep my root vegetables fresh by leaving them in the ground until I need them, and just adding more seeds so we don’t run out.
We did do a lot more preservation while the kids lived at home, but we don’t need that as much anymore.
I am running low on broth right now, so this weekend I am starting a large batch of that. We are also in the main egg production season, so I have pickled eggs in the fridge and egg muffins in the freezer. I freeze dry whole eggs, yolks and whites, and I salt cure egg yolks to use as a cheese substitute. Egg heavy breakfast dishes freezes very well, so those I am also making a lot of.

Erika Gruber wrote:Hello Ulla Bisgaard,
Thank you for your hard work and for sharing your recipes. I know that developing gluten-free recipes from scratch takes a great deal of effort; I have been doing this myself for about 20 years.
As a European, I seem to have quite different dietary habits and recipes compared to you. Your recipes rely heavily on starches—such as cassava, sweet potatoes, and the like.
These ingredients are relatively expensive where I live, so I do a lot of baking using legumes, millet, buckwheat, corn, and similar ingredients instead.
I try to incorporate as much fiber as possible into my meals so that they keep me feeling full for longer.

I am actually from Denmark in Europe, so I have a little of the same background.
There are several reasons I don’t use legumes, buckwheat and corn, but the biggest one, is that my digestion system, can’t handle them. For me they create inflammation in my gut. I do grow them, but only as chicken feed. Another reason, is that I prefer to grow my own baking ingredients.
Where we live, cassava grows extremely well, and with temperatures up to 50C,  I have plants, that need  a little shade from the sun. While I do use shade cloths and grow native plants, cassava plants/trees works great for shading hot spots. Cassava loves heat, so I use it to create  shade for more delicate plants, like strawberries, and since strawberries grow on the top of the soil and cassava deep in the soil, I can stack plants, so I get more out of the space.
The sweet potatoes are because I can’t eat plants from the nightshade family, so no potatoes or tomatoes for me. Most commercial gluten free companies rely on potato starch for texture, so I substitute that for sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are also a perennial here (using my method that is), so I always have them ready available. Since they are fresh, it’s pretty easy to separate the starch from the rest of the sweet potatoes, and what remains after making starch can be used for hash browns and things like that. I can buy sweet potato starch, but it’s very expensive, from China and not organic so I prefer to grow my own. I do grow sorghum, and they have turned out to be a great substitute for rye, and they make a good porridge too. After the kids and I was diagnosed with celiac in 2005, I thought that I just had to switch to using gluten free flour. It turned out, that I still got sick from that. We went paleo for over 10 years, with me using the AIP protocol. That helped a lot, but the real healing, didn’t come until I started growing my own flours. On top of the ones I have already mentioned, I grow and make pumpkin flour, banana flour and starch, arrowroot flour and tapioca starch.
Right now, I am testing out different methods to get more stretch in my dough, so I can make things like puff pastry. So far using sweet rice flour, cooked and cooled before kneaded into the dough seems to work, but the method still needs tweaking.
So, the flour choices I make, are pretty much the same as yours. Like you, I use what I can grow or buy inexpensive here where we live. I will say though, that going from growing food in Denmark to growing food in Southern California has been a big change.

Hi Everyone,
I have written a small book with recipes for gluten and dairy free baking/cooking mixes. They are recipes, I have developed over the last 4 years. Eventually it might be part of a larger project.
Right now, I will give it away for free, but hope that those who try it out, can give me some feedback. It’s always hard to know if it will work in someone’s kitchen, not just my own.
Note that this is the first draft of the book, so there will be things I have missed during editing.

Joao Winckler wrote:One thing I'd find useful is a chapter on managing the transition period, the first 2-3 years before the system starts producing reliably. Most beginners give up during that gap because they don't know what to expect. Knowing roughly when things start to pay off, and what to do in the meantime, would help a lot.

Thank you. I will add that to the list.

Anne Miller wrote:How to compost, make compost tea, use organic or better, ...

The benefits of using wood chips, leaf mold, and how to grow mushrooms, ...

How to incorporate animals into the system, ...

Thank you for helping with the topics.
I am already planning on adding a chapter on animals,  how they fit into the eco system and what we use them for.
As for compost, it’s the one things I am extremely bad at. Partly because I don’t have the physical strength to turn it. We also don’t produce enough. I will talk with my husband thought since he does the composting.
I will also add the other things to the list.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Master Ula,

I would include a separate chapter dedicated to shade.
Not all warm climates are extremely sunny (especially in eastern Asia). The south western regions will be usually too sunny and even there there exists a lot variation. In California - the lowlands have less intense sun than higher elevations like mine where sun is simply brighter than agricultural lands that are located low and west of me (they are also enshrouded in agri dust). Sun intensity at lower temperature will be more destructive than higher temperatures with clouded skies. This extremely bright radiation will overheat the plant even if the temps feel fresh and pleasant.

I just built an experimental garden (6x9 m) in my eucalyptus grove. It gets some direct afternoon sun. Everything grows just better. I'm having strawberries and will have blackberries that were getting completely scorched before in full sun - no matter how much mulched or watered. The herbs grow better and lush and out of my 40 grape cuttings only 5 died so far (last year at this time 90% were dead). For the first time thyme and also lovage have germinated.
Morning shade garden with figs and grapes is also much better for them as compared to growing in the open frying pan. My theory is that in extremely sunny locations the evaporation rate is so high than watering can not account for it at the given species level of plant physiology.

All of it may seem obvious to some who lived with higher elevation sun for a while, but in my case creating a shaded growing area did way more than soil improvement, irrigation and mulching.
If the garden proves itself throughout the year I will built more and will try raspberries and my beloved currants.

Good idea. We are located in SoCal close to the Mexican boarder, but inland. Our Growzone is 10b and we will get temperatures at 118+ from July through October. I use shade cloths a lot, and I have microclimate zones in our food forest garden, where I grow my berries.

We get a lot of temperature fluctuations here, so the main goal is to keep the soil temperature and moisture levels stable. To do this, we have installed drip irrigation and I use a lot of straw mulch, and mulch I get from chop and drop.
The way we have planned it though, are so that eventually I won’t have to use shade cloths in the food forest garden, but I will probably always need them in our raised bed garden. We have planted a lot of trees with different highs, and once they all have matured, they will provide more stable temperatures and higher humidity levels. This will also improve once I get the swales for the aquatic layer added. Right now the main canopy is a large pecan tree, but I have planted a cashew tree just outside the reach of the pecan tree. I have also added another avocado tree and two sapote trees, to supplement the trees we already have. I love using trees to provide shade, but most take a long time to mature. To compensate I grow cassava in the middle of all of my strawberry beds, I use a 50% shade cloth for my blueberries, tea and long pepper, and for my coffee and shampoo ginger. I am also slowly expanding my banana clusters, that provide shade and moisture for arrowroot’s and grains of paradise.
I will definitely add a chapter on shade and temperature control. Thank you for asking.