A real true food forest

K+C have given the green light from Uganda – we’re establishing a food forest! All the elf in Cam is rejoicing…

An edible forest garden follows the pattern of a wild woodland, mimicking what works so well in nature, but in this case is all edible. So the canopy will be peach, apricot and plum trees, the understorey red, white and black currants and other berries, and the groundcovers a fragrant mix of culinary and medicinal herbs – o! the delight!

We’ve already planted in green manure crops to prepare and enrich the soil: 

Wheat, oats and broad beans growing amongst lots of horse poo, and a few weeks later:

.... and Cam’s staked out the spots for the trees and their support species – he’s valiantly holding himself back from blitzing the whole thing right now and waiting instead to do it as a workshop to give our students an opportunity to get their hands dirty beginning a real true food forest themselves. Then they can go home and plant their own… Oooo, imagine – ripe and delicious food forests, alight with birdsong and berries and a little bit of the wild, spreading home to home, jumping fences…

And so, to distract Cam’s attention in the meantime, we’re going to spend next week building a greenhouse attached to the chook house. Watch this space!

Meanwhile, just to mark what it looks like before becoming a food forest, viewed from the terraced vegie beds:

Ro sneaking into class

Here’s Ro making a break from cooking lunch in the kitchen with me to join all his friends in class doing their PDC! The sacks of oats and wheat are meant to be a Great Wall but now he can bowl right over the top in his barbarian woolly vest…

What will it be like teaching the courses at the end of the year when he’s even more mobile?! He'll probably be in teaching with Cam...

The good smell of warm bread

We made soda bread the other day, mainly to up our intake of bicarb soda! It binds well with phosphate which then flushes out of our bodies. Apparently with so much of our food grown these days using superphosphate we’ve usually got an overload of phosphate in our systems and it’s not great for you. Another great reason to enjoy home-grown organic food!

The bread came out smelling like scones, mmmmmm. Stayed fresh for the three days it took us to eat it, and was light and moist but dense enough to be filling. We used home-made yoghurt instead of buttermilk (not having a house cow – o! the bliss of having a house cow!):

2 2/3 cups wholemeal flour

2 1/2 cups plain flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp bicarb soda

2 ¾ cups buttermilk

Knead til smooth, roll into a ball 20cm in diameter, then place on a greased tray and cut 1cm deep slashes in the top. Brush with milk, and bake in moderate oven for 50 mins. Enjoy!

Not as wonderfully delicious as sourdough, but quick and easy and avoids commercial yeasts.

Brown life, brim full

Went for a wander this evening to enjoy the damp autumn with Yarrow and was amazed to find so many different fungi budding up through leaf litter and pine needles, even in the nooks and dark places of our own garden. Along the railway tracks and under our nasturtiums, soft nutbrown homes for wee folk. 

It feels utterly magic - thinking of the soil crept through and rich with fungi, trading sugars with the finest hair roots of trees and carrying it miles, literally! to trees further down the line... Fungi and tiny soil creatures and questing roots, crystals of water brimful with minerals, huge monsters of worms churning through, the whole thing heaving and boiling and bursting with life! 

The fungi budding up like periscopes, hiding in the dark, enjoying the damp and the fire colours of autumn. 

Surely this little one is waiting for its fairy to come home 

and light a candle in its window...

... while these wait for impish hobgoblins!

Rain can be a girl's best friend

Beautiful rain! A dripping garden and filling tank. Pearls of water fat and opalescent in the crease of round nasturtium leaves, chooks fluffed up and snuggled into each other, the orchard misty and the smell of wet earth. 

Rain like diamonds caught in the lace of fine leaf fronds.

 

Initially passionate

Weeks and weeks ago Cam scratched Yarrow's initials into one of the passionfuit that are growing higgeldy-piggeldy over the chook yard. It scarred up and kept growing...

And now they're ready, lovely and sweet and tangy,
and Yarrow has his very own one to play with.

Old fashioned Easter for newly-fashioned boy

Oooo, the joy of being a Mum and getting to make special things special! Ro's first Easter, and I found at the bottom of a drawer some dyes and stickers my Oma sent me two years ago to make German Easter eggs with him, like we used to when we were little... 

We used to make Easter nests 4 weeks before, and get one small chocolate egg each Sunday in the lead up... It being autumn in Oz at Easter time rather than spring, we used to make our nests out of curling, crunching leaves - and then on Easter morning - eggs! bunnies! and hard-boiled dyed eggs with the cutest little old-fashioned stickers. 

Dying our chickens' eggs, stickers at the ready...

So lovely!

We used to dye them, all four of us kids together with Mum, in margarine containers with paddle-pop sticks, heaps and heaps of them, and give cartons of Easter colours to friends.