Kate Downham

I really love making cheesecake from it, my recipe has 3 ingredients - honey, eggs, and ricotta: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2024/03/17/simple-baked-cheesecake/

I also like to make a kind of veggie patty where I mix ricotta (or chèvre that's a bit past its best) with some eggs, and then mix in whatever grated vegetables need using up, like zucchini, turnip, or carrot, add a little flour to help firm it up and some salt and herbs, and then fry them up as patties.

Sometimes I've put some ricotta on pizza too.

And I also like to make pasties (savoury hand pies) with ricotta plus whatever veggies need using up: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2026/06/13/pasties-savoury-hand-pies/

This is something I’ve thought about a lot, and experimented with at times.

One way of applying permaculture thinking to annual plantings and crop rotations is to have guilds of rotations, where one plant in the guild is the focus on the rotation.

For example, I often plant leeks and vetch with my Red Russian kale. Leeks and kale are in the ground for around the same amount of time, and don’t seem to bother each other. The vetch acts as a living mulch in the early days of planting, and then can be slashed at flowering to provide the kale and leeks with more nitrogen. This whole planting gets treated as a brassica planting in my crop rotation.

Or I might have carrots interplanted with lettuce. The lettuce is harvested before the carrots get big, and this bed gets treated as a root bed in my rotation.

I think some brassicas are more susceptible to clubroot than others. Kale, turnips, and swedes are less sensitive than cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Brassicas that are in the ground for only a short time (e.g. arugula, asian greens, salad radish) are also less of a problem for clubroot.

Linda Woodrow plants her annuals in guild plantings, single plants (e.g. 1 cabbage or 1 broccoli or 1 tomato or 1 row of leeks) are surrounded by plants of different species. I think this can work in the place of crop rotation in some ways, because part of the reason we rotate crops is so that the soil is not getting depleted of the same minerals all the time, so because the soil is getting depleted in one small pocket and there are a bunch of living roots and soil life feeding the soil all around it as part of a larger system, it’s not the same as having the same big field planted to the same crop every year.

I think the amount of land you need for the good life depends on how many people you are feeding, what kind of animals you’ll be raising, whether you want to grow all your own hay and other animal feed, and whether you will want to keep a male of the species around.

Where I live, if you’re making all your own hay:
• You need around 5 acres per cow/calf pair, and then you’d want to keep quite a few cows to justify keeping a bull.

• For goats and sheep here, around 2 sheep/lamb or goat/kid pairs per acre seems about right. So to justify keeping a ram or buck, you’d probably want at least 3 acres.

In cooler or drier climates than mine you’ll probably need more land than that.

Without hay, you can keep double the amount of animals, but there are bad hay seasons, and relying on overpriced hay can be stressful.

For 3 acres and a cow, whatever calf the cow has would have to be butchered early, or you might have to buy in hay. 3 acres and goats could work.

Without hay, you can keep double the amount of animals, but there are bad hay seasons, and relying on overpriced hay can be stressful.

For any community venture, I think you’d need the right people, and it’s hard to know who the right people are until they’re put to the test. With dairy animals, some people might not understand how to fully strip the milk out (or might not think it’s important), which could lead to mastitis. Or that some people are good at picking up when something is wrong with the health of an animal and others aren’t. Different people have different priorities and different enthusiasm for things at different times and when animals are involved it’s important to know that they’ll be cared for at all times.

Also something to consider is what degree of self sufficiency you want to have, and what you personally find important to produce.

You can have a good life growing extra of the things that grow well for you and then using the barter/cash from that to buy in stuff that you don’t enjoy growing, then that can be a good part of a community food system, provided that there is a variety of stuff being produced in your local area and it’s not just 100 people growing excess bunches of kale to sell to other people with excess bunches of kale.

The best forks I have used are broadforks with full metal handles. Meadow Creature are very popular in the US, or in Australia, F D Ryan makes great ones.

I greatly enjoyed "The Power of Duck" when I got it from the library a few years ago. I haven't read the other one though.

That is a really tough question! I have a lot of favourites, and will try to narrow it down a bit.

I really like the rare Australian edition of "Vegie Patch" which is a month-by-month gardening book originally written in the UK, but with the months switched around to work in the southern hemisphere. It's not 100% organic or better, so not all things that I would do, but it breaks down the gardening year into things to do each month, as well as having a full guide for each crop.

I like that this book suits the climate I am growing in. Most Australian gardening books don't work in Tasmania.

I like John Seymour's book on gardening (and his full self sufficiency book) for similar reasons, but his garden writing is more season-by-season rather than month-by-month.

Linda Woodrow's "The Permaculture Home Garden" is a book that I really enjoy, but it's not something I can follow 100% because it's too cold here to do her full plan, and I also prefer to direct seed and she relies on transplants.

David Nightingale wrote:Similar to chop and drop which works great, I still rely on sheet mulching with local unsprayed hay.  10-12 bales left out over winter decomposing separates into thin 2” sheets, and covers my 1/2 acre garden.  Literally cover the weeds, and around the annuals. Equal nitrogen source ie. composted cow manure needs to accompany mass of hay you use to balance soil.  Dense planting, companion planting, vertical scaling all help, together you may never need to weed again. My Mom still can’t believe I never weed.  

Do you ever find that the hay creates a bunch of grass in the garden?

Spilled hay around my homestead often turns into grass. We have a lot of organic hay around locally so it would be good to use this for mulch if I weren't so paranoid about getting grass overtaking the veggie garden!

I was wondering what other folks here with large gardens and market gardens do to deal with unwanted weeds?

Do you have any good strategies for dealing with weeds both during the growing season, and outside the growing season?

This year we managed to keep some parts of the garden well weeded during the growing season, but now it is late autumn and very damp I’m wondering if the weeds are just going to come back to life if I rip them up and leave them on the beds like I do in summer.

I’ve also never quite got the hang of regularly using green manures. Does anyone successfully use these for fertility and weed control on a large garden without tarps or machines? What is your process?

In gardens with lots of annual weeds, which crops do you grow that will actually come up quickly and not get shaded out and taken over by weeds?

We have 3 large annual gardens. One of them is overrun with radish weed from me being lazy and letting weeds go to seed a few years ago (and I don’t like to eat radish weed). The second and third have sheep sorrel problems in parts, along with some other weeds around the place. Grasses can be a problem everywhere.

Thanks so much to everyone that helped make the printing of Sourdough Without Fail possible!

A big thank you to Permies, and all my Kickstarter backers, in no particular order:

Jay Skiles, Andrés Bernal, Bill Erickson, Tina Wolf, Robert D. Stewart, Cate & Mark Mawson - Ontario, Canada, Neil Sun, Gina Jones, J Mills, Akkaydrah, Carl K., A Sourdough Explorer, Lif, Lyle Leslie, Paul Anguiano, Nancy Reading from permies, John Barclay, Sarah Camp-McMahon, Marcos Canek Vazquez, Lynne Tognoni Keating, Steve Welch, Tracy Popey, SB, Allen Ewe, Sandra C Uba, Melissa C., The SP, Terry Wren, Mike Gallowa, Sandy Kanaki, ELye, Tiffany, Steven Lindsay, Steven A Zilber, jjmcgaffey, Michael Tullius, Katrina Hennessy, Susan Boyce, Martin TCUP, Ty Miranda, Barbara manning, Tracey Smith, Alex "MonsterChef" Neilson, Luise, jetts @ ziggo, All Heavenly Hosts Homestead, Nancy Hanson, Rebekah Harmon, Marcel de Jong, Frances Mae, Vincent G., John J. Rynne, Wendi Barker, Thomas Pflueger, Stephen B. Thomas, OreGreen, Sefchen Coho, Boondocks Hawks, Neale Inglenook, Adam Stanford, Mindie and Drew Simmons, Eveline M., ElCocoLoco, Saleh Abdullah, Uskaba, William Hedges, Marshall R. Hilborn, Tilly B., Seattle Mike, Kharra99, Wendy Crazy Plant Lady, Elaine Goodman, Bill 3, Andrew, Han Phan, Balázs Virágh, Andrew Denehey, Eri Michelinaki, Tiersa Lynd, Silke Van der Stockt, ClLy, Ryan Haver, FlavorsByFarore, Elad Swisa, Klemen Urbanija, A. Rossi, Robert Eure, Jennifer Damschen, Christopher Kranz, Justice, Ivica, Micah R, The Krohn Family, Myself&Comics, Alanya L. Anderson, Daniel Iseppi, Leigh Tate, Mike Gherna, Becky Manes, This book is for my dad Jay Lefkovitz, I love you dad - Love Saylem baby puppy Lefkovitz <3, Lara Struttman, Brett Nishikawa, Bao Tu Cen, John Charles, Beau M. Davidson, Tom Jenkins, Heidi Aussie, Elysa Hager, TLit, Gina Jeffries, Paula DiBacco, Marko Sodec, Bala Ramanujam, james wiedman, Permies Shannon, Cardinal House and everyone else that backed the Kickstarter - Thank you!

Summary

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