Eggs are finally arriving, we’ve had 6 of them from one chook, the other chickens seem to be slow or younger.
We planned to have extra chickens join the current ones over the weekend, since they aren’t laying, that’s not going to happen. We’ll have to wait a couple more days / weeks and see.
Temperatures have really chilled down here too – and it’s more than just noticeable. We had a large patch of rain move through and have had nothing but cold since. Winter looks to be very cold.
Which brings me to the next item – Home Made foods. We’ve started looking at differing foods we could make from scratch – purely out of interest for what is supposed to be a sustainable future, where less reliance is placed on a retail store for the supply of foods.
Bread is one of the key products that fits in the ‘milk, bread, sugar’ types of foods – if you forget it, you’ll have to go get it. So, making our own will at least fit with the sustainable future goal, removing our dependence on oil, and retail to supply it.
We’ve tested a few recipes found on the internet – and they seem to vary greatly in what they require – so we took the simplest we could find: flour, salt, yeast, water and bread improver.
Bread Improver however contains something or other that isn’t ideal, so we replaced it after some research with Vitamin C tablets (ascorbic acid). This feeds the yeast to get the bread to rise.
So far results show it works good, and it warms the kitchen up too. The bread itself tastes alright – not the same as the store bread – but that might just be a good thing.
Next up won’t be milk (council laws prohibit cows on residential land), and it won’t be sugar – not enough land. So, pasta seems like something else worth trying from scratch.
The vegie gardens have slow progress – we’ve had a heap of beans but there isn’t a lot happening. We have a monster Cherry Tomato vine that is fruiting but taking a long time to ripen. Some seedlings which are slow progress. Shallots which we don’t use a lot of (and probably couldn’t kill em if we tried). Beans – which we’ve got maybe 3 handfuls off one plant. Some corn which is still growing.
The fruit trees are dormant at the moment. Apples are not moving much at all, Citrus are slow. Banana is moving but slowly and Paw Paw was just planted recently so is still too young.
If we give it a couple of weeks though, the seedlings should be more advanced and a few weeks after there fruiting, ready to be replaced yet again.