We have reached our first year of blogging, self sufficient and sustainable learning and experimenting. Hooray!
It has been a great adventure and everything we have attempted has been good fun, relatively cost efficient and sometimes hard work. We have learnt how the generations before us would have made cheese, built and worked beehives, grown vegetables the old fashioned way and brewed cider, amongst other things. Its surprising how satisfying it can be when you put the effort into making life a little more simple and self sufficient (something I have never felt when buying from a store).
The most exciting thing now however, is that the road to Raelands is getting shorter. University graduation was the other day, work is finished, all our worldly possessions have been thrown into grannies shed and we are just about to jump on a plane for Bhutan and India. Hopefully after this the road to Raelands will come to an end and we will begin life on the farm.
Before we sign off for a little while though I would like to give a few notes about what was a success for us.
1. Dairy products – Butter and yoghurt were easy and relatively quick for us to make so they are in the weekly recipe book. Farmhouse cheddar is probably the only other dairy product we would consistently make and it would be made in large batches so we don’t have to make every week.
2. Brewing – I had mixed results with cider brewing. The first batch was good but the second was really bad so I think I will try some ginger beer and root beer recipes next year and maybe brew some cider from real apples one year. Alcohol isn’t that important to us though, so it’s not much of a priority. We did have success with grapefruit and lemon cordial however, which were simple to make and great throughout summer.
3. Honey and beekeeping – I really enjoyed building my own Warré hives because I had the time and had just attended a course so the info was still fresh in my mind. In the future I am considering building Kenyan Top Bar hives because they are cheaper and less time consuming to construct. More natural beekeeping methods don’t produce as much honey as conventional beekeeping but for us this is not important because bees are more crucial to our pasture pollination than for making money from honey.
4. Vegetable garden & orchard – The organic garden we established was more successful than I expected so we hope to establish a 4 bed 10×1.5m system on the farm to produce enough veg for our family and possibly a little extra to sell at local farmers markets. The main goal though is to provide most of our veg, year round, for our own consumption. Luckily over the years dad, his dad, his dads dad and I have sporadically planted various Peach, Lemon, Grapefruit, Orange, Fig, Mulberry and Pear trees and each year we aim to build on our orchard plants and hopefully get around to netting them.
5. Meat and protein – The aim for us in the short term is to purchase some laying chickens and to grow out a steer for meat as we eat a lot of eggs and quite a lot of red meat.
The above may all sound like a lot of work but if we are to produce enough food for our family from our farm we will greatly ease our reliance on income to feed ourselves. More funds can then be spent on the dairy business and family related expenses.
Merry Christmas to you all, thanks for your comments over the past year, watch this space and we will be back with fresh ideas in 2013. Cheers.