Independence Days Challenge round-up

I have to remind myself that the point of Independence Days is to celebrate what you have achieved, rather than feel bad about what you haven't.

With that in mind - I wont even bother to count up whether I actually have done one thing a day ... and I won't think about the boggy soil that has stopped me planting seeds I'm dying to plant ... and I won't think about that bag of figs that is sitting accusingly waiting for me to do something with it, and attracting fruit flies ...

Nope. I won't.

What I have done is -

Plant something: Peas and snow peas. (I think two shoots have come up, and so far they seem to have survived this morning's hail storm.)

Harvest something: Chamomile flowers, lettuce, overgrown mesclun salad, and our pride and joy - sugarbeets! (I can't find the camera, otherwise I'd post a pic.)

Preserve something: Dried chamomile flowers, started lacto-fermenting some sugarbeet and carrot, made quince jelly (although it turned out very runny - I was so sure I took it off the stove at the right time, but obviously not.)

Reduce waste: Changed our wheelibin collection to a tag system, so they only come pick it up when we ask them to, instead of regularly. Keen to see how long I can go before filling the bin, even while on another decluttering binge ...

Preparation and storage: Bought some more bulk rice for our supplies, and a few other bits and pieces.

Build Community Food Systems: Nothing really, but I did pop something into the food bank ...

Eat the food: Well, I suppose I have been trying to make sure all leftovers get eaten ... and there is this new fig ice cream recipe from the DomPost I have been meaning to try with those darn figs in the bag ...

Sharon Astyk has written more about the different Independence Days Challenge categories here. (They turn out to be a bit different from last year's, which I listed earlier.)

And a good Jim Salinger story link ...

This Nature article seems to lay out the situation quite well I think.

Curiouser and curiouser ...

Jim Salinger's sacking

There are many murmurings on the Wellington grapevine about managers on powertrips ... It seems to me right now that this may be the most likely reason for JS's sacking. (Although I remain open to changing my mind.)

Nonetheless, it's a very bad look for NIWA management politically. Given the current political context, they are going to have a hard job quelling talk of similarities between 'our Jim's' predicament and that of the other outspoken Jim in the United States.

The reasons for the sacking aside, perhaps an important question to ask at the moment is - will the net result of Jim Salinger's sacking be to reduce the quality or quantity of information on climate change that the general public receives?

If it does, then in some ways it doesn't matter
whether that's what the people who sacked him intended or not.

Swine flu corrections!

Okay, it seems that even once I thought I had sorted out the semantics of flu I still had it wrong!

H1N1 is a subtype, not a strain, and has been around for a while. This new one they are worried about is a strain of H1N1 - and seems currently to be just being referred to as 'swine flu' - even though there are many other swine flus ...

I think!

(Thanks Mum for the corrections. lol.)

Perturbed

This morning's news worried me.

First of all there's the sacking of climate expert Jim Salinger from crown research institute, NIWA. There's also another article about it here.

At a time when the new National government is doing away with all sorts of projects (and positions) that relate to environmental stewardship, this looks kinda bad.

I hope someone gets to the bottom of this.

Oh, and then there's the swine flu outbreak. What's really bugging me at this stage is the quality of a lot of NZ reporting on the subject. If you just skim-read the articles on Stuff this morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that we actually already have confirmed cases of the H1N1 strain of swine flu here in NZ - which of course we don't. (Although a few days will tell.)

Stuff even ran a headline on their front page screaming 'Swine Flu is Here!' - and the ensuing article was hopelessly disorganised, making little distinction between flu, swine flu, and the specific strain of swine flu that's causing concern at the moment - H1N1.

I noticed when I looked at Stuff an hour later that the headline had at least been changed to something like 'Swine Flu Fears Grow'.

The outbreak of a new and lethal strain of flu is obviously not to be taken lightly, but I hope the reporting gets more accurate and organised soon.

Independence Days Challenge update

Am keeping up with the challenge so far. On days 1 and 2, I preserved things - dehydrating apples from our tree and making chutney with figs from my mother-in-law's tree.

On day 3, I cooked something new - making a caffeine-free coffee substitute from dandelion roots. I had done it before as a teenager, but the result was disgusting. This time I followed Euell Gibbons' instructions - cooking them on a very low temperature (around 100 celsius), for almost 4 hours. It wasn't too bad this time!

(First I tried doing it in the popcorn maker like we roast coffee, but the dandelion roots were so light they kept flying out onto the bench and floor.)

Then on day 4 (today), I recorded another show on foraging for National Radio's This Way Up with Simon Morton. I'm thinking maybe that counts as 'work on community food security'?

As before, I got tongue tied and said silly things, but at least I now have faith that they will edit it so that I magically sound more coherent than I really am! I think it goes to air in a couple of weeks and it will be the first in a monthly series.

Independence Days Challenge

Right, I'm going to start doing this. (Nikki has been doing it already for quite a while.)

It's a challenge set by Sharon Astyk to spur people on to make greater positive progress towards preparedness for economic difficulties and peak oil issues.

So, my goal is each day to do at least one thing that fits into one of these categories:

* Plant Something
* Harvest Something
* Preserve Something
* Store Something
* Manage Reserves
* Cook Something New
* Prep Something
* Reduce Waste
* Learn a New Skill
* Work on Community Food Security
* Regenerate What Is Lost

An explanation of each of the categories is here. (I like 'Prep Something' - it's a good catch all for anything that doesn't fit into any other category!)

Who else is doing this challenge? Would love to hear from other NZers doing it.

Backyard grains

Buckwheat and oats - yay - two experiments that worked, albeit on a miniature scale ... Now to see if I can grow them in slightly greater quantity this year!

Buckwheat was something I'd hankered to grow for ages. I love buckwheat pancakes and buckwheat noodles, and so do certain other members of the family. I can't get them to eat stuff made with wholemeal wheat flour very often, but buckwheat combined with white flour goes down a treat, and must be way more nutritious than the white flour on its own.

I scattered some buckwheat seeds amongst our zucchinis in spring, and they grew fantastically. (Better than the zucchinis, which suffered from various ailments this year.)

After the buckwheat had flowered, I picked the groats, and pummelled them up in our big mortar and pestle. The white starchy insides turned to powder, while the hulls stayed mostly in big pieces.

I shook it all through the sieve to remove the biggest bits of hull - and you can see the end result above. It looks just like the buckwheat in the shops! :)

Granted it's only a few spoonfuls, but it's MY few spoonfuls, and I bet those pancakes will taste really good.

I've kept the hulls too. Can you make buckwheat pillows out of those, does anyone know? I'm unsure whether buckwheat pillows are made from the whole groats, or from the empty, broken hulls. Any info gratefully received.

Now onto the oats. I just grew a few in our potato patch after most of the potatoes were dug. It was only a very small amount, but I wasn't really growing them as a grain, but as a herb.

The end result was this bag of dried oatstraw (for tea) ...

... and this tiny milky oats tincture. (There was more, but I've used some of it. It's supposed to be good when you are feeling stressed and depleted ... I feel like it's working, but I'm not ruling out a placebo effect.)

Taking apples for the food bank

I went along with my Mum to the City Mission today, to drop off some surplus apples from my Dad's orchard.

The woman at reception was very pleased and said that fresh produce was a 'luxury' that they don't often get. It made me think that when we have enough in our garden, I'll try and make regular trips down there to donate stuff myself.

If anyone's interested in donating their produce I've given some more details about the wheres and whens at the Slow Food website.

Our suburban honey adventure

This is the closest to from-scratch honey I will ever get I think! (I just don't have it in me to keep bees.)

At the end of last year we bought an entire frame of honeycomb from Windy Bottom Farm (through Naturefoods).

I think these frames are now selling for around $30, but I'm not completely sure. Hopefully Deb or Ian from Naturefoods will read this and correct me if I'm wrong.

Sadly I seem to have lost all my pics of my son and daughter having a glorious, sticky time processing the honey! Well, you'll just have to use your imagination ... :)

Lost picture 1: Shows the children carefully using knives to cut bits of honeycomb from the frame - to eat as is.

Lost picture 2: Shows the children cutting MORE bits of honey comb from the frame, to eat as is. (It really was particularly delicious honey.)

Lost picture 3: Shows me trying to get organised to extract the honey from the comb, while the children ditch knives and dig out blobs of honey comb with their fingers - to eat as is.

Lost picture 4: Shows the children squeezing cut-out bits of honeycomb in their fists, and collecting the drips in containers, to extract the honey from the wax. (This is how it's done in some places sometimes apparently.)

Lost picture 5: Shows us scoring one rather ravaged frame of honey all over with a knife.

Lost picture 6: Shows the scored frame left to drip over a bucket, to extract more honey from the comb. This method was suggested by Pip in Kerikeri.

Lost picture ... Oh! Actually somehow this picture managed to survive! This is how much honey we got. The honey collected in the bucket using the score-and-drip method is on the bottom. The honey collected by squeezing is on the top. It amounted to over 1 kg. Note that the honey collected by score-and-drip is clearer and purer looking!


I think we could have collected more in the bucket if we'd scored it a bit differently. Next time I would use a finer blade (probably a craft knife) - and make more scores, closer together.

Anyway, after the comb had stopped dripping into the bucket (the next day) there was still quite a bit of honey left in the comb, so ...

Lost picture 7: Shows my children at it again with the squeezing ... I tried to keep track of how much extra honey we got doing this but lost my scribbles. It might have been another 150g?

Lost picture 8: Shows the empty frame (good for kindling) and the crumbly looking remnants of wax after all the scoring and dripping and squeezing was done.

And then this was interesting to me ... I saved those remnants of wax for ages. They sat in a bowl on the kitchen bench for a good three weeks, frequently eliciting from visitors an, 'Ew, what's that?!'

Well, I told them - it's wax. And when I get around to it, I'm going to melt it down to separate the last bits of honey out from it, and then I'll use it to make balms or lotions.

Finally I did get round to melting it down, and lo and behold - it produced only the thinnest crust of wax on the top. The rest was actually still honey! I'd say around 300g of it!

So the lesson I learned from that is that there's a lot MORE honey and lot LESS wax in a honeycomb than I thought! (The wax was fun for the kids to play with, pouring it over ice-cubes, dipping things in it, and making a couple of wax stamps for envelopes, but there wasn't enough for more than that.)

I'd estimate that overall we got about 1.5kg of honey from the frame, plus all the comb my children ate! But the money we spent on the frame was worth it for the children's experience alone.

If I did this again, I'd probably be more methodical:

First cut out some tidy blocks of comb for the children, and also to give as gifts to people who like honeycomb.

Then do the score-and-drip thing, with a finer knife so as to get as much raw, unheated honey from the comb as possible

Then melt all the rest down at the gentlest heat I could manage.

I'd probably dispense with the squeezing altogether (although it was fun!)