Burning sunset

This is the dry time of the year for us. Throughout most of Australia this can be a difficult time as water becomes even more scarce than usual. We are very fortunate to live in one of the very few very wet places in this country but even so it is still browning off somewhat around here.
Nevertheless, if life gives you lemons- make lemonade. We treat this time of year as our period in which we are able to do all of the outdoor jobs requiring reliable fine weather. As the wet season looms closer it soon becomes a race to get as much done as possible before the rain comes down for another three months or more.
This season I need to replace the iron sheeting on the weather side of the roof, replace two house stumps, paint the sills and windows around the house, finish the chook pen, cement the pig pen and erect the hot-house. If there is still time after that I need to build a boiler/smoker shed, build a two bay garage, build a shed for the tractor and put up a four bay compost bin system behind that.
I hope it is a late wet season this year.

Just like daddy

The absolute best toy a boy can get is whatever his Dad is working with at that moment. I for one reckon this is a good trait and should be nurtured. He already helps collect the eggs and feed the chooks. With any luck I can have him making the butter at four, weeding the veggie garden at five and milking the cow at six...



Note the toys abandoned for whatever Dad is doing.

 After the butter was done it was time for a farm haircut. He protested loudly that he would rather be doing something with Dad.

Good to see someone has the right idea

 

I was beginning to think the guinea fowl would never get the idea. This girl swanned in yesterday with fourteen keets in tow.

Bringing the bacon home

Well our first bacon is ready!

The first bacon side sliced in half.

 I am quite please at how well it has cured. It is quite firm and has a fresh bacony scent. Note the meat exposed to the air has greyed a little. This was to be expected in a modern recipe as we are supposed to use a lot less saltpetre now*. The flesh when cut revealed a pleasing pink colour which was to be expected. When I fried the first couple of rashers I was pleased with the aroma and the way it cooked. It was a pleasant surprise to find this was the bacon of my childhood. The rind crisped nicely and the fat turned almost completely translucent. The flavour was superb and very rich, however the curing process had made the bacon quite salty. This was easily remedied by soaking the slices in water for ten minutes before cooking (as they used to do in the old days). There is none of the nasty chemical aftertaste I notice in modern bacon and we have found that only a couple of rashers with eggs and toast are a fine breakfast.

I will experiment with smoking a side or so soon as well as having a look at the curing process to see if I cannot reduce the saltiness somewhat. Nevertheless we are overall very pleased with our first bacon.


*This is because the nanny state has decided that saltpetre is absolutely, horrifically dangerous in every way and will kill everything and everyone who even dares to think of using it in food**

**I can't help but note that people in the past failed to die in droves, or at all, when they ate this food over the past thousand years***.

***A bit remiss of them really. After all, I am sure Nanny couldn't possibly be wrong about anything ever and that we should all be jolly grateful to be forcibly wrapped in cotton wool at every turn.  

Chorizo

I made Chorizo sausage yesterday. Chorizo is a classically Spanish form of sausage also known in various incarnations in Mexico and the Philippines also. In essence Chorizo is a pork sausage heavily flavoured with chilli and paprika. But to describe it as such is akin to describing a bottle of '97 Grange Hermitage as old grape juice. Chorizo is so much more! It can be eaten fresh but is more often dried and cured, sometimes even smoked. Treated like this it becomes food beyond belief when eaten in thin slices like the finest Jamon ham.

My recipe uses fresh fiesta chillies and plenty of aromatic sweet paprika as well as garlic and cider vinegar. Packed into a natural (pigs gut) casing. It is then allowed to cure at 4 degrees until it loses all excess moisture before being cold smoked over pink cedar shavings.

The Elders are flowering.

The Elders are putting on a wonderful show this year. Huge sprays of white flowers with delicate scent and a cool shade beneath.

I planted these out about five years ago. They must like our conditions because they are now over three metres tall. These are American elder (sambucus canadensis). I actually wanted Black elder(sambucus nigra) which grows more tree like whereas these will become quite bushy but were all that was available.

Elders are a real medicine chest of a plant. Every part has a use. The leaves when made into a tea are a good insect repellent as well as having fungicidal properties. Very valuable in the vege garden. Elder foliage is well known as a compost activator. Add a few handfuls of leaves to the green waste when building a compost heap and it will break down in half the time to form good friable compost. The flowers are used to brew elderflower "champagne", an aromatic fizzy, clear, sweet wine. They can also be used in elderflower fritters, a favourite of mine. Likewise the elder berries can be brewed to make elderberry wine. Rich sweet and plummy I am told. They also make a rather good jam. The stalks and branches are hollow when dry as the soft pith easily shrinks and is discarded. These were used as simple pipes or straws once as well as flutes. They also were made into popguns and pea-shooters to amuse small boys and annoy small girls.

Lastly, the old Celtic religion believed that each elder was home to a spirit or dryad who, if treated with respect, would protect and guard the area in the vicinity of the tree and bring good fortune. In the Scandinavian areas she was known as the Hylde Moer (tree mother) and to cut down an elder was a sin that would bring bad fortune and death. Even today you might sight a lone elder growing in a field where all other trees have been cleared.

 

I milked Anna today for the first time since she has had her new calf. It has been a week since the little fellow was born (he has apparently been named Timmy) and Anna is very protective of her baby this time around. She did not show any signs of milk fever for the first time since her first calf five years ago. We are very happy as it means our feeding regimen with added calcium- dolomite, must be working. Anna's milk still looks a bit yellow, this is colostrum. Milk with all of the good antibodies in it that a new calf needs. It is fine to drink though and will turn white in a day or so.

The peaches are almost ready which means the local parrots are late. They have usually destroyed every peach by now. Big red and green Eclectus parrots that fly in from the rain forest. Beautiful birds but very shy. We will pick them all tomorrow (the peaches not the parrots, do try to keep up!) and hopefully get something for ourselves this year. I will try to get some bird netting one day.

New calf

Been a busy few days. We are still cleaning up in the orchard. Yesterday we felled the last large tree to go. I felt bad about it as it was a beautiful Sovereignwood and they are a favourite of mine. Nevertheless it was already too large and would have continued to grow until it completely dominated the entire orchard above and below ground so it had to come down. I reckon it already weighed around ten tonnes so it was a ticklish operation to fell it without doing too much damage. I had the child bride on the tractor with a tow line pulling it in the right direction as I carefully cut the base through with the chainsaw. We had cleared a section of fence where it was to come down, which it managed to miss by a couple of metres. Instead it landed on a section of the vegetable garden fence which had already been hit twice by trees in the last couple of cyclones, so I guess that fence is probably used to it by now. Still, we should be well set for firewood next winter.

In other news Anna, our Jersey cow, dropped a fine bobby calf this afternoon. He looks strong, healthy and was suckling well when I went to check on them at dusk. I have just brought Mum and calf down from the top paddock and penned them in the cow race to keep them near this evening. Anna tends to suffer from milk fever with each calf. A condition brought on where the new mothers body draws down too much calcium to supply milk and this in turn can paralyse and kill the cow if left untreated. A drip of calcium in solution, which we have, quickly gets the cow on her feet again. We have been trying to head off the fever this time with careful supplementary feeding during the pregnancy. We should know by tomorrow morning if it has worked.