Bee-success!

Being first time beekeepers on our local Bee Club's "swarm list", N and I have been a little tetchy lately. The phone rings and we'll suddenly tense, wishing, hoping, praying that it is someone calling to tell us that an unwanted swarm awaits capture. Ready to drop everything, put on our bee-suits and go catch a swarm of homeless bees to occupy our brand new sparkling hive. As the season dragged on with no swarms on offer we'd been harbouring the dark thought that maybe we'd just have to wait until next year to get our bees. Bees swarm from spring through to early summer but this year, after a hot and dry January, the bees have not been forthcoming. And you can only get bees during swarming season: it was going to be a long wait if we missed out!
But then on Saturday, at around noon, we got our call. We were told there was not one but three swarms at a property not far from our place at the home of an experienced beekeeper. Things were dropped, bee suits donned and we high-tailed it down to the swarms!
According to our bee guru Howard, captured swarms will "take" to a hive (ie. set up shop) around 70% of the time, and we were lucky enough to be in that percentile. It is a truly incredible thing to watch bees take to a hive - once they've made up their mind they literally march right in. And its not as scary as you might think - bees who have swarmed have filled their bellies with honey before swarming so they're in a total post-lunch stupor and its pretty unlikely they'll try to sting you.
 A week of perfect weather later and our bees are still happy and still home. Hurrah!

Broadly speaking

A dinner harvest

We have broad beans. So many broad beans. Can you ever have enough, we thought, way back in Autumn when we planted out four large beds of Vicia faba? Broad bean pasta, broad bean dip, broad bean salad, broad bean felafel... the possibilities were endless, or so we thought. But, used to crappy inner-city Melbourne soil we weren't quite prepared for what would happen to the seeds we've saved faithfully for the last 5 years when we planted them in South Gippsland.
In short: they went mental. Our garden is now home to huge, towering bean stalks of jack-and-the-giant proportions. And of course, now they're fruiting. But as well as providing a bountiful (if tiring) source of food for us humans, the beans are providing much needed nectar and pollen for our bees and shelter for our chooks who have created little hidey-holes amongst them (without, amazingly, totally destroying them). Not only that but I have found an ingenious way to trick people (N) into eating lots of broad beans, and this is: pick them early (when pods are no longer than 12cm) and use the tiny beans as "peas".


Our hen, Bean, investigates her namesakes, while I misbehave with a bean.

Maude's Broad Bean Pasta

200g wholemeal pasta, cooked until al dente

1kg small (>12cm) broad beans in their pods

1 small onion, diced finely

1 tbsp butter

Handful of fresh greens (silverbeet, sorrel, spinach)

Lemon juice

Parmesan

Salt to taste

Cracked pepper

Olive oil

Method: lightly sautee onion in butter. Shell the beans, and add to the pan cooking for a minute longer. Add greens and sautee a further minute. Turn off the heat, squeeze through lemon juice, drizzle over olive oil, cracked pepper and salt to taste. Toss through pasta and serve with grated parmesan.

Feel it hot, hot, hot

Compost king

We're still recovering from the fabulous weather last weekend, when we welcomed a bunch of Melbournian pals to Rumpty Doo for our inaugural Farm Bee. It was so great to have many extra pairs of hands on deck and we achieved many amazing things over the weekend including the enthusiastic scything of about an acres worth of grass! With all that fresh-cut greenery on hand we couldn't help ourselves but make a nice big hot compost pile that will hopefully give us plenty of gorgeous soil for summer planting in a couple months time.

Hot Compost Ingredients:

45% green (kitchen scraps, fresh cut grass/greens)
45% brown (hay or straw)
10% manure
Some sticks
A hose with running water

Method:

Start with sticks

Layering

One week later and the compost was hot to
touch and had sunk right down!

Loosen a square metre of soil and cover with a layer of thin sticks (we used wattle branches, largely because they were on hand). Amass a large pile of brown materials and another equal pile of green. They need to be big - your finished compost needs to be a minimum of 1 metre cubed. Have manure at the ready as well as your hose too. Start by putting a thick layer of hay over your sticks, keeping it nice and square. Water well. Follow with the same thickness of green, continuing to water as you go and still aiming to keep it as square as you humanly can. Keep adding alternate layers of green and brown with a couple of special manure layers thrown in along the way, and keep watering/squaring up the edges as you go. Once you've reached a metre high or run out of materials cap with a layer of brown. You're done! Over the next few days the compost pile will heat right up and sink right down. It may even steam!
Leave it for 6-8 weeks before using - the longer you leave it the better.
 

Give me shelter

This is Beverley. We got her cheap in the local paper, due to a severe bout of leaky windows and teenage angst graffiti that had left her insides looking a little more than undesirable (see below left). "There's nothing a lick of paint and a dash of windex can't do," thought we, naively as we approached Beverley's insides with scrubbing brushes in rubber gloved hands. Six days, three tins of paint and four metres of vinyl flooring later we were licking our wounds and vowing NEVER again to entertain the fantasy of renovating anything - not even a goat shed - for it seems renovation often means just as much work as starting from scratch.

But with a few days distance and a candle-lit evening spent inside Beverley's freshly painted, water-proofed and cosy interior we're feeling the rewards of our pains. We've even given in and strung up a line of twee-as bunting in celebration (see below). 

Beverley 2.0

And it did feel a little bit celebratory as we worked, despite the effort, as each brushstroke obliterated the hate-speech and scrawlings of male genitalia that had been grafittied across poor Bev's fake-wood laminex interior. As each scraping of revolting 70s lino was peeled away, centimetre by centimetre. As each leaky bump and dent was patched and plastered. As we grew to love this hulking old dame we now call shelter.

We've still got quite a ways to go before Bev will be finished (she's still on candle-power, there's nowhere to sit, and her exterior still needs seeing to), but she's habitable for the moment, and somewhere on the way to being a place we *might* just call home.

That is, if we were really, really desperate.

Art of Bee-ing

As huge fans of both terrible puns and the TV comedy Community, N and I were *so* excited when we found out that there was an actual Community College in our area, and that they run a course on bees! Beekeeping seems to be one of those things that you just can't learn from books. I've read quite a few of them and decided that the secrets of the bee-world are best learned hands on (or bare-hands-on in the case of our brave teacher, Howard). With the last day of winter being a glorious sunny one we suited up today for our very first "prac".

I am bee man hear me roar!

Smokin' bees

As one of last year's graduates from Bee School described it, your first experience of beekeeping can be pretty life-transformative: being surrounded by all these bees, and feeling completely safe within your suit and with your smoker by your side. And it is a pretty incredible feeling, once you get over the fact that you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of little venomous creatures who may or may not want to sting you. After trawling through half a dozen hives though, not one student got stung and we all happily hoed in to some of Howard's honey harvest (not before admiring Howard's amazing bee-mobile... see below...)

Apis mellifera ligustica (Italian honey bee)

Howard (our teacher's) sweet ride

Wormholes

As bare-root season comes to a clattering halt we've be doing our darndest to get as many fruit trees as we can in the ground, which naturally has involved digging many, many holes. Digging holes, while exhausting work, is also kind of fun. You get to dig up all sorts of exciting things like the charred remains of bush fires from the 19th century or giant earthworms. Yes, giant earthworms are a bit of a South Gippsland "thing", or so we've discovered lately via Melita Rowston's new play which we saw last week at the Malthouse.  Melita's play "digs up" the zany and slightly unbelievable history of the Giant Earthworm Festival held in Korumburra during the 1970s and 80s (think hundreds of tiny school children carrying a giant pink plastic earthworm puppet ridden by Daryl Somers down Main St kind of zany and you're halfway there).
But I digress.
Back to fruit trees. So far we've popped in half a dozen varieties of heritage apples, a couple of figs and some lovely red mulberries which have been bursting to go into leaf. If you're new to planting fruit trees it can be somewhat of a daunting task. Here's how we do it, the way that was shown to us by Jo from Kahikatea Farm, and so far all fruit trees seem rather happy:

Step one
Dig a big square hole, twice as wide and deep as the diameter of the roots on your tree. You want to encourage the roots down and outwards, which is why a square is better than a circle. Keep your topsoil in a separate pile to your subsoil.

Step two
Pop most of the subsoil back in the bottom of the hole. Cover with a layer of topsoil and then shovel in a good few lashings of nice compost (we used well composted pig manure). Mix a little so that the compost integrates with the topsoil.

Step three
Add more topsoil, and build it into a conical mound - you don't want the roots touching any of that compost or they'll burn. Sit your fruit tree on top of the mound and see if its about the right height at ground level.

Step four
Spread out roots into the corners of the square gently. Remember, roots don't really like being handled that much.

Step five
Fill in your hole with remaining topsoil. Gently stamp down the soil around the tree - you want the soil to be compact around the roots so that they don't oxidise - this is what kills young roots more than anything else.

Bridge over troubled water...

It has been pissing down with rain in South Gippsland these last couple of days. Just our luck to have taken the week off work to spend at the paddock! The many gullies here, which are usually muddy troughs - home only to buttercup and bullrushes - began to transform before our very eyes into rushing creeks as the deluge continued on today.
So it was with this in mind that we decided to build a bridge, quick smart. And as it turned out, just in time too – over the course of its very rushed construction our muddy gully turned into a raging rapid that burbled and up to our knees as we nailed on the final slats!

Rumpty Loo - Finished!

Evolution of man

finished loo!

Roofin'

Well! Our brand new composting loo has been finished! After a good few weekends spent tinkering around with the design, our little dunny managed to survive the last week of storms and incredible winds to have the finishing touches bestowed upon it this afternoon. A very rumpty front door and wonky step ensured it now has the necessary dunny attributes of comfort and privacy. And that got us so excited it was only a short time before 'twas christened!

Turning over a new leaf...

Wombok party

This week we got our ferment back on in the kitchen when our bed of buxom womboks came into their own and practically begged to be picked and turned into delicious kimchi! Despite being sheltered by a layer of bird mesh the chooks managed to have a good nibble of the outer edges, so between them and the slugs we had quite a task cleaning up the aforementioned leafy greens. Once we did, though, this is what we did with em:

Freestyle Kimchi

Ingredients:

Wombok cabbage (organic)
Garlic
Ginger
Proper Korean chilli pepper flakes or paprika
Sesame seeds
Other nice accoutrements: grated carrot, sliced spring onion, radish etc.

soakin'

ta-da!

Method:
Soak cleaned wombok leaves in brine overnight. To make up brine use about 1 cup of salt to every 10 cups of water. Drain and rinse leaves and squeeze out the water and place in a large fermenting crock (if you don't have a crock a large glass jar will do). Add ginger, garlic, chilli flakes/paprika to taste and other accoutrements as you feel. Kimchi in Korea is delightfully seasonal, so take liberties and get experimental. Using the end of a rolling pin, pound cabbage and friends into the crock. As you do, water will leach out of the cabbage and start making a brine. Keep pounding for a few more minutes. The brine should now cover the cabbage leaves. If it doesn't, top up with brine premix (as for soaking) until the cabbage is covered. Leave your crock at room temperature for 2 days plus - the longer you leave it, the sourer it will get- then pack into sterilised jars (again ensuring the brine covers your leaves). Fridge it and enjoy!

Rumpty 'Doo' - Stage One

Hooray!

Today N & I decided to put the 'Doo' in Rumpty Doo for real and set off on the task of making our very own composting toilet! After reading an awesome zine entitled 'Composting Toilets & Radical Sustainability'* we have been converted to the cause of turning human waste into useful fertiliser. Granted, it is a subject that some people find icky, but compared to using potable drinking water to flush your crap into the ocean, it seems like no biggie to me. 

Test-run.

Add to that the fact that most fertiliser is pretty low in 'sustainable' credentials, whether it is made from oil or just trucked to you with it, and I'm pretty sure you'll be on the compostin' bandwagon soon!

We managed to source all the parts for our throne from our local junk yard, including an attractive pale pink toilet seat. Today we dug the foundations and got up a stick frame which we're going to clad in classic corrugated iron.
Stay tuned for the next instalment and see what we can do with just a wheelie bin, and some old bits of tin!


*Contact Theo at Doing it Ourselves if you'd like a copy.

Fine & dandy

We've been a-weeding all weekend, working hard to make room for new winter beds. But it hasn't all been give and no take - we've been rewarded with lots of good things to harvest from the soil. There have been delicious grass-grubs for the chooks to gorge on and for those of us without feathers, heaps and heaps of dandelion. Dandelion (from the French Dente-de-Leon, or lion's teeth) is such a fantastic plant. Its jaggedy leaves are good in salads and all other places you might like a fresh green, but its roots are very edible too and make a delicious "coffee". Of course calling a it a coffee substitute does no justice to the delicious sweet-and-earthy taste of a roasted dandelion root, so I prefer to think of it as a special evening-time beverage that can stand up on its own. And with the time it takes to prepare it actually was evening by the time we were supping on the stuff! But if you've got some dandy-roots and time spare, here's how you do it:

Step one: Identify your dandelions and dig them up. Dandelion is very often confused with cat's ear - a very similar looking plant which is also edible, so its not too much of a hoo-ha if you get them confused. Where dandelion has jaggedy leaves (lion's teeth remember), cat's ear has softer curved leaves with a pleasant furry feel. The flowers of both are almost identical, but dandelion's come up on a hollow russet coloured stem, while cat's ear flowers are on a thin, not-hollow, green one.

Step two: scrub off dandelion roots with a scourer as best you can. You won't get all the dirt off - just think of it as adding to the flavour!

Step three: Slice roots thinly and place on a baking sheet. Put them in the oven for 60 minutes on 50 degrees with the fan on, or in a dehydrator of your choice (the sun is a good one) until they start to pucker up.

Step four: Roast on 200 degrees for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Step five: Grind roots in a coffee/grain mill - the aim is not for a powder, but for a fine chunky meal, about the consistency of cous cous.

Step six: Re-roast roots for 5 minutes in a hot oven.

Step seven: Place 1.5 dessert spoons of roasted root mixture with 2 cups of water and bring to a simmer. Turn down the heat and cook for another 5 minutes. Strain and serve. This stuff is so good it even gets a little golden 'crema' on top, just like espresso coffee! A little honey accentuates the natural sweetness of dandelion root, and you can also add milk to taste.

Enjoy!

Little houses, on the hillside...

Old Italian workers cottage

We've been doing a lot of thinking about creating some sort of habitable place on our block lately. Our needs are not many and our aspirations are not lofty. The top prerequisites will be that it is a) warm b) dry and c) tiny. Yes, that's right, we want a tiny, tiny, tiny house. After working on the foundations for a huge mud-brick house as WWOOFers in NZ last year we're well aware of the effort (and blisters) involved in executing a Grand Design. We've also recently devoured this fabulous book and other local histories that describe the rough and ready early building techniques in the Gippsland area where bushfire was a very real risk and investing too much in your abode simply didn't make sense if it might just go up in cinders come summertime.
So small, and simple is where we're heading, which does sound weird to many locals who think of their home in terms of square meterage, matching colour schemes and double car garages.
On a recent trip to a farm nearby we were lucky enough to happen a most remarkable building which has further fuelled our imaginations. "Is that your old chook house?" Neil asked Ray, our host as we wandered past the cute little shelter.
"No," said Ray. "That's where the Italian workers used to live when this place grew spuds and peas."
Ray managed to rattle the old door open and give us a look inside. A tiny fireplace was discernable beyond the rabble of Ray's junk stuffed into the little room for storage. Ray pointed out where the bed would have been, and explained that the workers would eat meals up at the "big house" together with the family, and return to the tiny cottage to sleep at night. They certainly didn't hang out in it during the day, because they were too busy outside working, he explained. The cottage is over 100 years old and the tin used to build the roof still has stamps of the Queen's head on it, meaning it was bought out to Australia on "the ships" as Ray called them.
"They had everything you could need in there," Ray continued, somewhat proudly. "A warm fire, somewhere to sleep, a place to share food up the road."
And we couldn't agree more with him.

Foraged feast

bad apples!

N picking apples

We were pleased to notice that the roadsides around South Gippsland are dotted with ripening spots of red and gold from December through March. Wild plums come first, just on Christmas, then sprays of apples - literally in their hundreds - light up the roadside as summer turns into autumn. Well, said we: we aren't going to let them go to waste! And, so, a few weeks ago we picked a few bags full of apples, from two different trees to test. The first lot were good eating, crisp and sweet and just so right. But the second lot were dry, floury and pucker-your-mouth-up sour. Even the chooks turned their beaks up! But all was not lost because there is one thing sour apples are good for, and that is something very good: apple cider! We used this classic NZ recipe, and found that in the unseasonable March heat we've had in Australia, the fermentation went right off.

Bubbly apples!

Kiwi Apple Cider:

- 1.5kg of sour, wild apples- 5 litres water- 750g raw sugar- juice & zest of 2 large lemons

Wash and chop apples (cores and all) and blend in a food processor until they're blitzed into tiny pieces. Place apple pulp and water in a large crock (we use a Harsch crock), and cover with a tea-towel. Stir with a sterile long-armed spoon (we use a brewers spoon). Leave the mixture for a week, stirring once in the morning and once a night with your sterilised implement. It will get bubbly and smell amazing. After a week, strain the apple pulp mix through a clean tea towel (squeeze out all the apple goodness!), and return the strained juice to the crock with sugar and lemon juice/zest. Stir well. Leave to ferment for another 48 hours (enough time to make a batch of rhubarb fizz if you're so inclined!) Using a funnel pour mixture into cleaned PET soft drink bottles. Don't do what we did and bottle them in glass bottles. That is a recipe for disaster, as we can tell you, after half of our first batch exploded in the kitchen last week (luckily we weren't in the kitchen at the time!)

Tastes so good it must be wrong...

nom nom nom

take that you blackguards!

Here at Rumpty D. we are in the midst of a sinful blackberry glut. All the tell-tale signs are there - pink stained fingers, scratches & tears in all the right places. While we were somewhat horrified to find that parts of the creek bed are home to thickets of Rubus Fruticosis (in part conjured by bad Wwoofing memories that include the plant in question and a goat) we have decided to stay positive and focus on the fact that blackberries are delicious. And in a way, what plant rewards you for so little work with so much yumminess? While it would be unpleasant if R. Fruticosis spread much further than the bounds of their current stronghold, would it be so bad if we spent a day each summer grubbing out the new shoots and taking our fill of berries, thought we? It seems blackberries hold a special dark cavern in the depths of every committed organic gardener's heart. They are the one plant it seems people are willing to do the S word for - that is - spray. The CSIRO's information page on blackberry makes for grim reading too - the plant infests approximately 8.8 million hectares of temperate Australia - an area larger than Tasmania. So it was with heavy hearts that we set to work with our grubbers today, taking a good chunk out of the blackberries, and a large hunk of berry goodness back in our bellies (and buckets). It will take us many years of vigilant grubbing (and perhaps even a goat or two) before we'll see the back of the blackberry, but the spoils in berry terms should at least make it worth it!

Summer time ... and fermenting is easy!

finally fermented fizz!

Our kitchen has been a veritable hot-bed of bubbling fermentation bliss the last few weeks. And that's because summer is the perfect time to start growing some serious bacteria! The weather, humidity and glut of public holidays are all very conducive to making ferments, so if you've never tried your hand at preserving food with the power of bacteria, there is no better time.
We've had milk kefir, water kefir, sourdough and (my favourite) rhubarb fizz on the go... and I have to admit I absolutely adore coming home to a warm house full of the heady scents of yeasty fermentation!
Rhubarb fizz has been particularly popular due to the warmer days - a not-too-sweet soda pop with a musky rhubarb flavour - and who could go past the fact that it turns out prettiest pink? We've been making it is small batches because it ferments quickly and if you leave it too long it will keep right on fermenting to the point where it has been known to explode!

fizz, ready to ferment!

Rhubarb Fizz

You will need...

2 fat stalks rhubarb
1 cup raw sugar
2.25 litres water
1 lemon
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
5 grolsch bottles

Method...

Chop rhubarb and lemon (peel and all!) into rough chunks. Place in a large, sterilised liddable pot or basin with all other ingredients. Stir a few times, cover with lid and leave to soak for 48 hours. Strain the mixture using a sieve, and fill sterilised bottles, leaving a 4cm gap at the top of each bottle.
Store bottles at room temperature for 4 days. Its now ready to drink - but don't wait too long to polish your batch off because this stuff gets fizzier daily and bottles have been known to explode.

Death & the Maiden

Valentines day is coming up soon and nothing quite says "I love you" like a giant scythe for cutting hay. I got one for N as an early valentines/late chrissy gift and just as well too because for the last month or so we've been stuck with a big paddock full of shoulder-high grass that has set our nerves on edge with thoughts of snakes and grassfires every time we set foot there.

N has set to work studying up on scything techniques on Youtube (I can highly recommend: braid-haired topless Austrian men cutting their way through fields of hay anyone?) In buying the implement it had been my great hope that the years N has devoted to perfecting his golf swing would mean he is quite the dab hand with the scyther, and after much cursing he did come good and "find" his technique. In fact he almost got through an acre of grass before the farmer next door thought he'd help us out and cut the grass for us with his tractor while we were away! Oh well - it'll have to be next year that our dreams of hand-cut hay are realised, and in the mean time there is plenty of blackberry to get our hands stuck into, rather literally.

If you'd like to buy a scythe your true love too then I can say that we bought ours from here.