Planting seeds or seedlings?

Its taken me a little while to learn this, but I think I've now figured out which veges to sow directly in the soil as seeds and which to raise as seedlings and then plant in my garden, so I thought I'd share with you what has worked for me so far.

radish seedlings peeping through the mulch

At first I tried to plant everything as seeds directly in the garden, but I wasn’t happy with the results, too much work to thin the seedlings and some didn’t sprout at all.  So then I tried raising seedlings, it took me a while to realise that I needed to use a good seed-raising mix, and I prefer to use toilet rolls than the seedling trays that bought seedlings come in.  I wrote more about raising seedlings here.

starting veges in pots and toilet rolls (photo from last spring)

Then I decided that I wanted to grow root crops, and they don’t transplant well, so I had to think about how to do this.  I observed that tiny brassicas were popping up through the mulch, and they must have come from the ones that I’d left to go to seed.  Previously I had thought that seeds couldn't sprout through the mulch, but I was wrong.  This is the method that I use to plant carrots, swedes, turnips and radishes:

• Push mulch aside and dig a shallow trench
• Fill trench with seed-raising mix
• Sprinkle seed thinly as humanly possible so you don’t have too much thinning to do later
• Pat the seeds in the seed-raising mix and lightly cover with a little mulch
• The seeds will sprout through the mulch and then you just need to thin them a little
• I try to write down what I’ve planted where so I know which seeds didn’t sprout (and should be thrown out), and which were good.

For more about growing and using root vegetables, see my post here.

For brassicas, I throw a few seeds around the brassica area of the garden.  If I have new seeds that I want to try, I’ll plant them in a shallow tray of seed-raising mix first, to see how they sprout and then transplant them later.  If we are having a bad year for slugs, I start the brassicas outside the garden to give them a chance to get bigger.

The entire bed, planted with carrots, radishes, onions, turnip and swede

Plants like tomatoes, capsicum, beans, peas, basil and other herbs, I plant in the toilet rolls, and if there’s no room in the garden yet, or the weather isn’t quite right, I keep potting them into larger pots until I’m ready to plant them in the garden.

Do you plant seeds directly in your garden? 

Splitting up paddocks for intensive grazing

Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing (MIRG), also known as cell grazing, mob stocking, holistic managed planned grazing and possibly other terms as well.  There’s lots of different names for it and each method is slightly different, but whatever you call it, the idea is to split up your land into the smallest size paddocks you can manage and move your animals as frequently as possible.  The opposite is called continuous grazing, where the livestock have access to all the land all the time.  The disadvantage of continuous grazing is that cattle will tend to nibble at the green tips of the grass they prefer, so the roots have to continuously contract to produce more leaf.  Eventually the plant will die unless it is given a chance to recover and re-grow deeper roots.  

grass roots depending on grazing period and recovery time

Rotational grazing allows the grass to recover.  If its done properly, the cattle should eat most (but not all) of the available forage in the time they have in the area, and trample the rest.  They will spread their manure over the area and then be moved away from their manure (and the parasites that can breed in the manure), to a fresh pasture.

The greatest benefit is realised the more  frequently the animals are moved and the smaller the paddock size, but even splitting a property into a few large paddocks will make a difference to the ability of the pasture to regenerate.  This method can also be used to graze forage in sections rather than letting the cattle have all the forage all at once.  This ensures more even grazing and less wastage.

our forage sorghum after the rain

With electric fencing, the moving part is easy.  The thing we have struggled with is providing water to all these small paddocks.  The ideal would be to reticulate water all over the property and move and fill water troughs when the cattle are moved.  This is an expensive option, so if you need to set something up before you can afford the full system that you'd prefer, it is also possible to start with the cattle near a water source and gradually move a temporary fence away from the water, as shown in the first diagram.  The cattle will use the same water source for the entire time they are in that paddock, but they will spend less time in the area they have already grazed (light green in the diagram below) and more time in the new pasture (dark green) as the fence is moved to fresh pasture.

Move the fence away from the water

If there is no water source in a particular area, you can leave a gate open to allow access to water (and even construct a laneway if you have the spare fencing).  The fence can be move gradually away from the gate, allowing the cattle access to more pasture or forage crop with each move.  This is how we grazed our forage sorghum crop recently.

Options for paddock with no water source, moving the fence around a gate

For more information about intensive grazing, see this booklet.  Fiona from Life at Arbordale Farm also wrote an excellent post on mob stocking recently (she is much better with Paint diagrams that I am too).

Have you tried intensive grazing?  How do you make it work at your place?  What is stopping you using it more intensively?  Any questions?

  

Sourdough biscuits - adapting a recipe for sourdough

Since I got my sourdough cake starter, I've been having fun experimenting with other uses for it.  I can be adapted to all sorts of sweet recipes, and as we don't eat a lot of cake, that is a good thing!

mixing up the dry ingredients, the butter and some starter

When I first received the starter it came with all these instructions about how to feed it and look after it.  This included feeding it every few days, not keeping it in the fridge, splitting it after a week and giving most of it away.  Needless to say I ignored these, otherwise I would ave no starter left!  Here's how to actually look after your starter:

• You can keep the starter in the fridge, in a glass jar - mine has been living there for several months.
• You just have to get it out every 2 weeks (or so), give it a good stir and tip out half (you can either give that half away, use it in baking or just tip it on the compost)
• Then top it up with a bit of flour, sugar and milk (or water), stir and leave it at room temp for a day to ferment a little.  Then put it back in the fridge.

Adapting a recipe is easy, some things turn out a little different, but they are all edible, and have a pleasant sourness.  All I do is mix up all the dry ingredients and the butter or coconut oil in the morning that I want to bake and I add a little sourdough starter and stir it up.  Its hard to say how much to add, as it depends on the consistency of the starter and the dough or batter that you're making, just add what looks right.  I leave that in a covered container at room temperature for most of the day.  Then I add the other ingredients, extra milk, eggs and rising agent usually.  If the recipe says to use baking powder, I just use baking soda, as the mix is already acidic and the soda will react just nicely.

So far I have made sourdough cake, sourdough pancakes and sourdough biscuits.  If you don't know anyone who has a "Herman" sourdough starter, there are instructions for making one here.  If anyone has Herman to share, please leave a comment with your location and others near you may be able to benefit from your starter too.  Please also share how you use your starter :)

What to do with eight acres

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog.  It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for.  Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”.  Today I will try to answer this question.

yarrow flower -  completely unrelated, just a pretty photo

Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money.  I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else.

If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for.  Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can find in your price range.  Look for clean water in dams, bores or wells, either on the property or at least on a neighbour’s (which means you are likely to have access to similar water).  Contour – some amount of slope is useful for moving water by gravity, and for growing, particularly if you have some slopes facing the sun (north in the Southern Hemisphere, south in the Northern Hemisphere), but steep slopes will be more difficult to work with.  Established trees, particular on the top of hills, are also desirable.  Its much easier to remove trees if there are too many than to try to grow them if you start with too few.  If you're hoping to sell a product, then make sure that you're reasonably close to a town or city that would be a suitable market for your product.

When you live in the city, eight acres probably sounds like a huge amount of land.  It is a nice manageable size.  Its big enough that you can keep a few animals and a garden, but small enough that you can walk from one end to the other in 10-15 minutes.  You can stand in the middle and see both ends of your property.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that you can keep too many animals though.  Maybe when the grass is green and overgrown when you first arrive it will seem like there is endless feed, but if you have too many animals, the grass will soon be eaten and you will be stuck buying hay or begging your neighbours to use their paddocks.

chickens picking through cow manure

When you have your block of land, this is where I think you should start if you’re completely new to living on “acerage” (as it is called in Queensland), it is just my opinion though, so do what is right for you and your family.  First get your house organised.  If you already have a house, or when its finished, then you can start working on the area around the house.  If your block is overgrown at first, you need to just work on a small area at first, or you will be overwhelmed.  Clear the area around the house and get that fenced and tidy before you start on the rest of the property.

Now you can start to figure out where to put your garden.  Somewhere close to the house for convenience, a sunny sheltered spot is best, so start to observe where the sun is, how the water flows over your land and where the wind comes from.  Before you start digging, make sure you’re going to have a source of water.  You can use greywater, tank water, dam water, bore water, just make sure its going to be the right quality and quantity, and that you’re not going to run out of drinking water for yourself!  Also consider the water needs of future livestock and plan for these.

Next you can start thinking about animals.  Chickens are the easiest animals to start with.  They are small and manageable, they produce eggs right from the start, and later you can kill them for meat.  If you put them in movable pens (chicken tractors) they can start immediately to improve the fertility of your soil.  We keep 20-30 chickens in four chicken tractors.  The fertility improvement in our paddocks as a result of these chickens is quite obvious.

chickens - in a tractor

You might want to look at getting some larger animals too.  You will probably never be entirely self-sufficient with large animals on a small property, especially not at first, and will have to buy in extra feed at some times of the year (you will learn to manage these times better as you get to know your land and your animals), but they will help you to clean up and add fertility to your land.  Our strategy was to fence an acre or two, clear any poisonous weeds using a mattock and then let the cattle (2 steers at first) eat the rest.  Then we could tidy up the dead wood and cut out the smaller trees.  Its important to clear out the vegetation that the cattle don’t eat, otherwise it will thrive after the cattle remove everything else.  You can use the same strategy with sheep or goats.  The thing to remember is that the carrying capacity (the number of animals that your land can support) is not fixed, it can be improved if you manage your land.  We now keep 1-2 steers and 2 dairy cows, with calves.  This is more than we can really support on our land and we use about 5 acres of our neighbour's paddock as well.  Each season we see the pasture improve through all the chicken and cattle manure going into the soil.

The worst thing you can do is to fill up your property with animals and let them eat everything to the ground, unless you plan to sell or eat them when they’ve run out of food.  We often see small property full of horses, with barely anything to eat.  You really need to have a system to rotate your animals through your property so that there is always grass for them to eat (or at least minimise the feed you have to buy).  We have split our property into a front paddock, the house yard, and three back paddocks, each about 1-2 acres.  We rotate the cattle through each paddock as they finish the grass.  When they have eaten nearly everything in one paddock, they go to the next paddock.  This gives the grass a chance to grow back, and the animals are moved away from their manure, which breaks the intestinal worm cycle.  You’re going to need fences, either permanent or electric, to help you divide your property.

Choose small livestock, like Dexters

If you want to make some money from your property, there are a few things you can do.  A good reference is Joel Salatin’s “You can farm”.  He discusses how to chose your main product, secondary product, how to market and pit-falls to avoid.  Eight acres is plenty of land for a market garden, if you have the soil and the water for it.  You could also plant an orchard of trees that are suitable for your climate and grow them organically and sell the fruit or nuts.  You can produce lots of eggs and poultry meat from chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks or other fowl (although you then need to either ignore or follow all the food-safety regulations for your area).  Or you can sell live poultry and let the new owner figure it out.  Depending what else you decide to use the land for, and how fertile your soil is at first, you can probably keep 4-6 goats, or 2-3 cattle and sell the meat or the progeny.  These animals always need a “herd”, even if it’s a different species, they hate to be alone, so don’t use all your land for something else and think you can get just the one cow in the space that’s left!

The most important thing is to make all your enterprises work together, a good tool for this is permaculture design.  A simple connection is: manure from the livestock feeds the garden, excess vegetables feed the livestock.  Chickens follow the cattle to scratch through their manure for fly larva.  Excess milk fed to pigs (I don't have any experience with pigs yet, so I haven't mentioned them, but they are another animal that you could keep).  There are infinitely more complicated connections that you may be able to use to produce more from your property.  If you keep working on improving the fertility by slashing your paddocks and spreading manure around, you will keep increasing your productivity.

What did I miss?  What else can you do with eight acres (or so)?  What do you do with your small farm?  What would you like to do?

  

Three very different garden books

I have a backlog of books to review, and three of them are garden books, I thought they made an interesting contrast to each other, so I may as well review them all together.  I read a lot of books, most of them related to farming and gardening.  Even though many of them repeat the same themes I always learn at least one or two new things from each book, and these books were no different.

The first book was one of a few that I requested from Wakefield Press.  Its called "Clueless in the Garden - a guide of the horticulturally hopeless", by Yvonne Cunnington.  I usually only read about vegetable gardens, so I was surprised to find that most of this book was about all kinds of garden.  Its published in Canada, so you just have to remember to turn around the north and south references, but at least the temperatures are in celsius.  The references to deer and snow are not so relevant to my garden, but I kind of enjoy reading about them anyway.  The best thing about this book was the chapter on horticultural nomenclature, finally I now understand the difference between a species, a cultivar and a variety.  This book has some really useful general information on topics such as pruning, soil assessment and lots of chapters about non-edible trees, shrubs and lawns that don't interest me now, but will no doubt be useful in the future.  This is a good all-round garden book, that really does cover some basic information for very new gardeners, I think it lives up to its title.

So if the first book was a beginner's guide, the next book, "Gaia's Garden - a guide to home-scale permaculture", by Toby Hemenway, is more of an advanced gardening manual.  I bought this book as part of a kind of an internet book club permaculture discussion, which I really enjoyed, although not many of the group stayed to the end of the book.  This book focuses on edible gardens, with chapters on soil, water and design.  I got really excited when I got to the chapters on plant combinations.  In permaculture, these are known as guilds.  I've never quite understood guilds until I read this book.  It has three chapters on guilds, and that was enough for me to finally figure out what they are and how I might use them in our food forest.  If you're interested in permaculture for a garden or small property, this book is a good start and written in accessible language to make quite complex permaculture concepts easy to understand.  If you're curious about guilds now, this is also a good reference.


The third book is The Wilderness Garden, by Australian author Jackie French. The guilds described in Gaia's Garden were all north American and I wasn't exactly sure how to apply the concept in Australian conditions, so I thought that this book might give me an Australian perspective   Jackie French never mentions permaculture, but I think her gardening (and chicken) philosophy is very close to permaculture, even if she doesn't call it that.  She begins the book with the words "This is a book about ideas - about how to set up a garden that will look after itself", which is of course the aim of a permaculture design too.  This book doesn't actually talk about guilds as such, but it has so many other good ideas for choosing plants, it didn't really matter.  I particularly enjoyed the discussion on fire-resistant plants, given the amount of trees on our property, our house is rather vulnerable and Jackie gives plenty of ideas for fire-proofing the house yard.  Towards the end of the book she also lists vegetables that she grows in her garden and includes some unusual ones that you might not see elsewhere.

What's your most useful garden book?

Cheese-making interview

Gavin, from the Greening of Gavin and the Little Green Cheese blogs, interviewed me earlier in the week for his weekly cheese podcast.  We discussed cheese-making and milking, it was lots of fun.  Listen below and visit Gavin's blogs for more cheesy information :)  I'm going to write more about cheese and about Gavin's excellent cheese ebook very soon....

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Fermented fizzy drinks

I’ve never really enjoyed commercial fizzy drinks.  They are usually too sweet and too fizzy for my taste.  Apart from the fact that I don’t actually enjoy them, the artificial colours and flavours in just about every commercial fizzy drink also put me off.  Then I discovered fermented fizzy drinks, more from a desire to use the sour whey from making cream cheese, than wanting to create a fizzy drink.  But now I find that they are very refreshing, and creating new flavours is now part of the fun.

Rosella ale ready to drink

At first I just made the ginger ale, lemon barley and fruit punch recipes from Nourishing Traditions.  But then I couldn’t get all the ingredients that I needed, so I started to experiment.  I started just using any citrus that was available, and anything else that I had in excess, my latest flavour is rosella ale.  All my experiments are based on the this basic recipe.....

The basic recipe is about half to 1 cup of whey, the same of sugar, the same of citrus, add any other fruit, herbs or spices, and top up to 2 L with rainwater.  The amounts I use just depend on what ingredients are available at the time.  The whey can come from several sources, it can be drained from cream cheese (made without rennet), yoghurt or kefir.  The whey just needs to be rich in lactic acid bacteria, because this is what will consume the sugar in the mixture (added sugar and from the fruit) and convert it to carbon dioxide which will produce the bubbles.  Lactic acid bacteria also produce lactic acid which will produce a nice acidity in the drink.  While they do feed on the lactose in milk, they can also consume glucose if there is no lactose present (this is all explained in this Wikipedia article under “metabolism”). 

brewing rosella ale

For the sugar, I use rapadura , but any natural sweetener could be used, just experiment with the amount to get the taste you want..  The final drink is not sweet, as most of the sugar is consumed by the bacteria.  Lemon and lime are the citrus in the recipes, but if I see oranges or mandarins on special, I’ll use them instead and reduce the added sugar.  Ginger (and galangal) and rosella are the other flavours that I’ve added so far, but you can use a range of fruits, herbs and spices.  The fruit punch is just a mixture of lemon and orange.

To make the drink I mix up the whey, sugar, citrus and other ingredients and top up to 2 L of water in a jug with a lid.  I leave this on the kitchen bench at room temperature for several days.  Usually its 3 days, but if its cooler (or I forget), I leave it longer!  I then strain the liquid through a sieve and pour it into individual bottles.  I have a massive collection of stoppered Grolsch bottles that I reuse for my fermented fizzy drinks.  I think you can also buy stoppered bottles, but I didn’t mind drinking the beer either!  I leave the bottles of fizzy drink at room temperature for a day to let the bubbles develop and then they go into the fridge.

My only warning is that this process is variable, be very careful when you open the bottle!  Some of them will hardly fizz at all, and some will nearly take your eye out with the shot of fizzy liquid ejected from the bottle!  If you open one and its not fizzy enough, you can leave it on the bench for another day.

I hope I have inspired you to try making your own delicious fermented fizzy drinks.  It’s a great way to use up excess whey and citrus, and experimenting with new flavours is great fun as well.  I’d love to hear what you come up with.  I'm currently experimenting with adding dried seaweed, as fermenting seaweed is apparently a great way to make all the minerals available.

Have you tried making your own fermented fizzy drinks?  Are you tempted to try?  Any questions?

     

Colostrum - why calves need it and what to do with the excess

Since Molly had her calf, Monty, in early April, I've had plenty of opportunity to observe colostrum and I am finding it quite fascinating.  Like all mammals, when a cow first has her calf, she produces colostrum to feed her calf, rather than true milk.  Colostrum is more yellow/orange than milk (although Molly's had been slightly different to Bella's, so I assume every cow is different) and much thicker than milk.  It reminds me of a thin pouring custard.  Over the days following the birth, the colostrum gets gradually thinner and whiter, and eventually becomes milk, this is called transitional milk.

Why does a calf need colostrum?
It is essential that the calf has its dose of colostrum very soon after birth.  The calf is born with no antibodies in its blood, and colostrum is its first source of antibodies, as well as providing nutrients and stimulating the bowels to expel myconium.  The calf gets most benefit from the antibodies in the first 6 hours, as it is able to absorb the antibodies through its stomach wall and into its blood.  After the stomach wall tightens, the antibodies are digested instead, which can still stimulate the immune system, but is not as effective.  As the stomach wall is more open during this time, it is best that the calf receives colostrum to coat the stomach lining before it has the opportunity to accidentally eat anything else, like manure or soil, which could cause an infection to pass into the blood instead (see more here).  Many commercial dairy farmers stomach tube calves as soon as they are born, to ensure that they receive colostrum as early as possible.  They also milk colostrum from multiple cows, test for antibodies and use the best colostrum from their herd.

Molly with her newborn Monty

What to do with excess colostrum
Dairy cows produce far more milk than their calves can use, so we needed to milk Molly after the first day, both to prevent her getting mastitis and to stimulate continued high milk flow, even though we don't have much use for the colostrum ourselves.  Several of my cheese-making books specifically state that colostrum should not be used for cheese-making, as if its is some kind of dangerous substance, however there are many traditional recipes using colostrum and it is sold as a supplement.  I'm not sure whether it has any special health properties or not!  We were not keen on drinking it anyway!  Apparently is has a salty, bitter taste.

We froze the first few days of colostrum, until we ran out of old milk bottles, and we tipped the excess down the sink (terrible waste, I know, we need pigs!!).  The frozen colostrum will be useful if we have an orphan calf that needs colostrum.  We gave Monty frozen colostrum when Molly wouldn't let him nurse at first, so it can be very useful to have some stored, to ensure that the calf receives colostrum as soon as possible.  The colostrum does not necessarily need to come from the calf's mother, colostrum from your own property or a nearby property is ideal, as the cow is likely to have the antibodies that the calf will need in the local environment.

Can't have a post about colostrum without a cute pic of Monty

How to get colostrum for a calf
If you ever need colostrum, you might be able to get it from a dairy farmer, they will usually have one or two cows producing some colostrum (definitely in spring, but in Australia dairy cows are calving all  year round), and if you ever have excess colostrum, its a good idea to freeze some, you never know when you will need it.  You can also buy dried colostrum powder.  The problem is that you will usually need it in a hurry, so it will pay to be prepared   If you have no acccess to real colostrum and need to make an artificial colostrum for a newborn calf, you can try the following recipe, but it will not have the antibodies that the calf needs and the calf will require extra attention until its old enough to form its own antibodies.

It is not true that a calf who doesn't receive colostrum will never thrive, all calves eventually make their own antibodies.  In fact, the antibodies received in colostrum are naturally diluted and metabolised as the calf grows (see here). The calf will just be more susceptible to infection in its first few weeks and months compared to calves that received colostrum.

Artificial colostrum substitute
1 egg beaten
300 ml water
2 ml (½ teaspoon) castor oil
600 ml whole milk

When does the real milk start?
In a commercial dairy, the farmer usually discards the first two days of colostrum (giving it to calves or pigs if they are smart), and after that the milk just goes in the vat with the rest of the herd.  But it took a week for Molly's milk to be white enough to be considered "normal".  It gradually changed from orange, to yellow, to white, and for several days, after the milk had settled in the fridge, there was a pink line between the milk and cream.  We assumed that this was blood (as the antibodies are transferred in blood).  The pink line became smaller and smaller each day until it disappeared from the milk altogether.  I couldn't find much on the internet about the pink line, apart from this forum discussion.

Monitoring for mastitis
When the cow first calves her udder is very swollen and she is full of colostrum and then transitional milk.  She is at high risk of developing mastitis due to all the stress of the new calf and new milking regime, so it is very important that she is milked twice a day and fed plenty of dolomite (for the calcium).  She will make more milk for the calf (who doesn't need much when its small), so don't worry about taking as much as you can.  When Bella had mastitis, we could tell because it took longer than normal for her milk to drain through our filter.  We also used a mastitis test kit.  Draining time is the main factor that we use to regularly monitor for mastitis, and then the test kit if we suspect a problem.

Colostrum references
Wikipedia
Solar Family Farm
The Family Cow Handbook: A Guide to Keeping a Milk Cow
Savacaf - Preserving the Value of Natural Maternal Colostrum
APHIS - A guide to colostrum and colostrum management for dairy calves
Agromedia - Colostrum and The Newborn Calf

Would you, or have you, eaten colostrum?  Why? Why not?  Did you realise how important it was for a newborn calf to consume colostrum?